Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (review)

War dominates political and popular discourses as it is being waged, but the topical plays written during wartime rarely have a long shelf life. Albert Wertheim writes in his introduction that most studies of drama in the Unites States jump from Clifford Odets's Group Theatre scripts to mid-1940s plays by Miller and Williams, omitting entirely American drama from the late 1930s and World War II era. Wertheim's book admirably surveys these neglected years and more, examining US drama from Elmer Rice's 1934 Judgment Day through Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (1955). His project is to examine drama's relationship to World War II, which he considers to be "the most central and significant historical, political, and social event of the twentieth century" (xv).

Wertheim acknowledges that his inclusion of one hundred fifty plays written over two decades will seem excessive to some readers. The breadth of his scope necessitates an uneven handling of the plays; for some scripts Wertheim is able to combine literary analysis, sociopolitical context, production history, and (occasionally) critical reception into a rich discussion, but other dramas receive little more than a plot synopsis. One positive aspect of this work's wide coverage is that it includes war-related plays by canonical writers like Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller, but is not limited to them. Some of the plays that Wertheim writes about most passionately are by lesser-known dramatists like Ben Hecht, Dan James, Elsa Shelley, and Maxine Woods.

Another benefit of Wertheim's broad compass is that he not only discusses traditional war plays about soldiers in battle, but also considers war's diverse impacts upon noncombatants, women, children, veterans, and social norms. He is especially interested in the "demographic dislocations" (x) World War II wrought as people moved into new places and occupations and subsequently came into contact with individuals and ideas they never would have encountered in their hometowns. This idea is particularly well-developed in chapter 5, "The Aftermath." Here, Wertheim examines postwar plays such as John Patrick's The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953)—a satire about a soldier sent to Americanize defeated Japanese citizens who finds himself adopting aspects of Asian culture—or several plays about returning African American veterans determined not to resume a servile second-class existence. Sometimes wartime changes were temporary, but Wertheim argues that the experiences of women entering the workplace and of men fighting alongside soldiers of different classes, faiths, and geographic backgrounds ultimately helped to create a more pluralistic United States.

Albert Wertheim's own existence was the result of diasporic dislocation. His parents fled from Nazi Germany in 1937, and he was born in New York in 1940. He writes movingly about his certitude that had he been born in Germany instead of in the United States, he and his parents would have perished in the Holocaust like so many of his relatives; he describes hauntingly his memory of watching his elderly great-aunt and other emaciated survivors of Theresienstadt disembark in New York. At times, Wertheim's writing is laced with an unabashed patriotism, but his devotion to the United States is rooted in his gratitude that he survived. Perhaps, too, Wertheim's identification of World War II as the defining event of the twentieth century is linked to the fact that it defined his life's beginning and end. The author's photograph on the book's dustjacket was taken during World War II when he was small boy in a sailor suit; writing about drama and World War II was his last scholarly project before he died of cancer in 2003.

Three chapters of Staging the War are concerned with drama before, during, and after the war. Most of these plays were written by professional playwrights and produced in New York, usually on Broadway. The other two chapters explore drama in less traditional...