Minority Report by Elmer Rice (review)

1965 BOOK REVIEWS 471 this book supplies much important information: the number of acting parts in a play, set and costume descriptions, particular difficulties in staging and directing. and royalty fees. Although, strictly speaking, play plots are discussed rather than outlined, the result is effective in the condensed form required. The 'book, however, is not intended for the student of drama as literature, and the editor's liberal use of terms (Sidney Howard's Detective Story is called a tragedy) is sometimes disturbing. As the editor wisely notes, the choice of plays for such a collection is never completely satisfying to all readers. Among the numerous sections which deal with the drama from the Greeks to the present in the major countries of the world, the weakest section seems to be the "American" where, for example, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Wolfe are represented while more significant dramatists are omitted. The book remains, however, in its ambitious scope a valuable reference work for the person interested in theater production. WALTER J. MESERVliI University of Kansas MINORITY REPORT, by Elmer Rice, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963, 474 pp. Price $6.50. In Minority Report, Elmer Rice has detailed his long career in the American theater. With its wealth of anecdotal material, growing from Rice's career of more than forty years in the theater, this autobiography makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American drama. We would be culturally richer if every writer of comparable importance would provide a similar autobiographical reminiscence. The picture which emerges from this :book is one of a crusading liberal who has never swerved from his dedication to human dignity. Caught between the humorless Communists, who loathed him 'because he refused to accept their doctrinaire solutions, and the ugly McCarthyites, who damned him for his alliance with such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, Rice attempted to hold his middle ground. The most intriguing parts of the 'book recount such episodes as Rice's angry withdrawal from the Federal Theatre Project because of government censorship and his parallel angry withdrawal from the Celanese Theatre television series because of Madison Avenue-Red Channels censorship. The single deficiency is the lack of an index; as Minority Report contains a cast of hundreds, such an index would have 'been a laborious task but a very helpful one. This defect, however, is more than overcome by the strong picture that Rice presents of a witty, versatile, tolerant, and extremely intelligent human being. Pensively looking back over a very full career from the vantage point of seventy years, Rice puts into words his personal credo: It is better to live than to die; to love than to hate; to create than to destroy; to do something than to do nothing; to be truthful than to lie; to question than to accept; to be strong than to be weak; to hope than to despair; to venture than to fear; to be free than to be bound. 472 MODERN DRAMA February A distinguished playwright has offered his tenets; they provide a fitting cap for this excellent book. MICHAEL J. MENDEI1IOHN United States Air Force Academy MICHAEL CHEKHOTl'S TO THE DIRECTOR AND PLAYWRIGHT, compiled and written by Charles Leonard, Harper and Row, New York and Evanston, 1963, 329 pp. Price $6.50. Preparation of this work, an extension of the useful To the Actor (1953), was interrupted by Michael Chekhov's death in 1955. In gathering materials, Charles Leonard has relied primarily on tapes of lectures Chekhov delivered to his actorstudents during his last years. Over half of this book consists of Charles Appleton 's version of Gogol's Revisor and Chekhov's production-notes, in themselves illuminating records of Chekhov's critical imagination. Not the least of this charm· ing tribute's merits is a copious set of handsome photographs illustrating a long and influential career in both theater and films_ Such was Chekhov's almost Romantic commitment to theater as a way of life that the reader is not surprised to find distinctions between actor, playwright, and director always converging into a single unity to be identified as Man of the Theater. Thus, the production notes on Revisor...