The Critic as Playwright: A Study Of Stark Young's The Saint

THE CRITIC AS PLAYWRIGHT: A STUDY OF STARK YOUNG'S THE SAINT PLAYWRIGHTS HAVE OFTEN TAUNTED THEIR CRITICS by declaring that no man is fit to judge what he himself has never been able to create. The critics have either ignored the challenge or have defended themselves by arguing that criticism and playwriting are two quite distinct activities and that each has its own proper sphere of operation . But the late Stark Young believed that "it is a safe method in criticism to ask to see results, to see what are the fruits of any p0sition a critic may take himself."l And in The Saint, a four-act drama produced by the Provincetown Players in 1924, he boldly put this proposition to the test. He carefully built the play according to what he believed were the fundamental precepts of the theatrical art. As a critic Young was concerned, as John Mason Brown observed, with "first cause, relationships, style, abstractions, fundamentalsthe very things that are most difficult to write well of as well as the most perilous."2 But regardless of the difficulties involved Young insisted that any approach to the theater must begin with a definition of its essential nature. All poetry or art, he wrote, is a general name signifying that process by which something is where something was not before. We may say that the something that has arrived consists of a form and an idea; the idea was never born until it had a form to express it, the form never existed without the idea to determine it. An idea, whatever other form of existence it may have, does not exist in the theatre, until it achieves a theatrical body.3 The problem that the artist faces is how to establish the proper relation between the idea and his medium, or, as Young saw it, how to "translate" the idea into terms that would be suitable for the medium. In the theater, everything that is used in the production of a play must be divorced from its normal contexts and associations and be seen only as a part of the life created on the stage. If a building is represented on stage, it can no longer be thought as enclosing space, for it becomes only part of the scenic decor and must be made to conform to the mood of the play, to the presence 1 Stark Young, The Flower in Drama (New York, 1923), p. 78. 2 John Mason Brown, Upstage (New York, 1930), p. 245. 8 Stark Young, The Theatre (New York, 1958), pp. 48-9. 446 1965 A STUDY OF STARK YOUNG'S The Saint 441 of actors, to the lighting and so on. The literature of the play must also undergo a transmutation; it too must be "translated." A word, a sentence, spoken in the theatre has from that moment been re-created in new terms and must stand a new test. It is no longer a word on a page but is translated now into another medium, the theatre, where it may pass from poor literature to at least better theatre or shrink from very good literature to very poor theatre.· The incident which suggested the governing idea for The Saint is to be found in Three Fountains, a book of reflections on a trip to Italy which Young made in 1922. He recorded that one night, while staying in a small village, he heard the sound of bells and singing in the street, and when he looked out of his apartment window, he saw •.. in the deep and narrow streets below, a procession of people streaming past. They carried, everyone, some sort of lightlanterns made of paper on staffs, and candles and torches; and they chanted as they marched. The lights were not carried overhead or on their shoulders, as our processions do, but down at their waists ... casting incredible shadows on the deep walls and houses.1 This Good Friday procession conveyed to him a sense of the passionate continuity, of the unbroken relation to the old life of the earth, to the sail, to the light, to motion and things. It brought to mind the memory of these...