Body and Soul on Broadway

BODY AND SOUL ON BROADWAY MOST ATTEMPTS TO ACCOUNT FOR THE POPULARITY of American psychological drama include a claim that audiences look to it for a comforting release from the deep troubles of the age. This observation, though now almost too familiar to command attention, is reasonably accurate. The age is troubled. It carries a weight of worry over international unrest at least as great as burdened the decade immediately preceding World War II, and the affluence amid which the American population worries has created other anxieties no less keen than those born of poverty in that not-so-distant decade. It is also true that most of the new plays give comfort, and that audiences are grateful for it. But on this point we must pause for speculation, if ever we are to make a sensible appraisal of the notions our popular playwrights bring to us. It is time to give thought to what lies under the skillful plot construction, character development, and turns of phrase in the work of a Tennessee Williams, a William Inge, a Paddy Chaye£sky-to look at the heart of their mystery. Much too seldom does the public for new plays or the corps of critics who speak for it question these playwrights' casual procedure for offering encouragement, or recognize that the comfort they offer is only temporary. No "healing" process undergone by any of the disturbed protagonists of Broadway could take effect outside the theater, and it is both dangerous and unintelligent to think otherwise, as unfortunately many persons who observe them do think. Our new playwrights, like the most popular playwrights before the war, are propagandists of a sort who would have us believe that we can allay our most serious troubles by not much more than will power alone. Though we may admire qualities of their work to the same degree that we admire certain qualities of such propaganda plays as, say, Shakespeare's Henry V or Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, we should be wary of their propensity for evasiveness, question-begging, and special pleading. It would have been just as dangerous, of course, for the audiences of the Depression dramatists to be moved to action by the easy solutions of the favorite writers of that unhappy time. But it is simpler, somehow, to detect propaganda when its end is social rather than personal action. The theater's dalliance with Marxism during the Depression propagated next to nothing, for we know of not a single figure on the left who has ever risen to attribute his social 411 412 MODERN DRAMA February or political convictions to the impact upon him of a Marxist play. How resistable has been the appeal of the propagandists for what I should call, faute de mieux, the snap-out-of-it school of therapy, it is still too early to tell. But the possibility that they will do harm is great enough to call for an examination of the deficiencies of their plays, and, as a necessary step in the process, to call also for some words on the links between them and the major pre-war writers. Williams, Inge, and the others who dramatize psychic confusion have written some good plays, but they have also written many bad ones, and their honesty has diminished as their audience has grown. Though rarely political, they are in a direct line of descent from the popular playwrights of the Thirties: they write, like the Marxists, for a kind of "People's Theater." The people are richer, the tickets are more expensive, but the unsubtle appeal to the troubled mass remains. It is not difficult to see how the new drama has grown out of the old. From the beginning of the Depression-we must go back at least that far-through the first months of 1935 the most admired of the social playwrights took as their sole subject man's infinite capacity to do harm to others. They expressed this theme in violent, class-conscious terms; if the evildoers of their plays had not yet acquired wealth, they aspired to it, and the persons whom they vic· timized on the way were too ingenuous by...