A Lively Theater of Lives: Portraiture Versus Art

A LIVELY THEATER OF LIVES: PORTRAITURE VERSUS ART RECEN'ILY the American theater has been afflicted with earthbound dramas on the lives of contemporaries. Last season's samplings range from an unsuccessful pair, Winkelberg and Winesburg, Ohio (the lives of Maxwell Bodenheim and Sherwood Anderson respectively), the short-lived Compulsion (an account of the pathological lives of Loeb and Leopold), to the more interesting Sunrise at Campobello (F.D.R.'s life) and the acclaimed Look Homeward, Angel! (based on Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel). This season brought to life The Disenchanted. Its authors claim that the hero is a composite of contemporary writers, but the transparent fact is that it is predominantly based on the tragic life ofF. Scott Fitzgerald. We were then presented with the short-lived drama, Edwin Booth. This play, written in the popular style of "This Is Your Life" biography, transforms a nineteenth-century figure into the mold of a contemporary. Edwin Booth's life has been technically restored but not spiritually recreated. The Cold Wind and the Warm, an autobiographical play of S. N. Behrman, avoids the limitations which characterize the current dramas on the lives of contemporaries. Here the personal life of the author is subordinated to the creative theme. He explores the inner nature of his own adolescence and the people around him rather than exploiting the dramatic episodes of his life. Soon to appear is the play called Dear Liars, a dramatization of George Bernard Shaw's relationship to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and we have heard the announcement of a possible new dramatization of the Shaw and Ellen Terry exchanges. These dramatizations on lives of our times are not automatically useless for the stage. The critical question is whether or not such plays add to the stature of the American theater. The answer is a definite "no." The inferiority of biographical dramas, such as Sunrise at Campobello, Compulsion, Disenchanted, etc., is attributable to the limitation created by the very choice of such themes. The motivations of such themes are self-confining; the author has settled for artistic imitation. He has the misconception that creative drama can be served via an artistic representational portraiture of famous lives which have been filled with dramatic and tragic content. This makes for a colorful but a one-dimensional portrayal in contrast to a more dynamic 263 264 MODERN DRAMA December and aesthetic communication between the audience and author in which the latter has used his native tools of fantasy and reality. Sunrise at Campobello is a well-documented dramatization of a period in the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The play opens in midsummer of 1921, at the time he was struck with infantile paralysis, and ends in the early summer of 1924, when he had recovered sufficiently to stand on his feet barely long enough to deliver the nominating oration for Alfred E. Smith. Intended as a symbolic portrayal of an heroic figure, the play mainly tells a vivid medical and psychological tale of a healthy-minded man's desperate struggle to recover his physical powers so that he might continue to live and work. Do not look here for an aesthetically recreated image of a great American who deserves the dramatic portrayal of a legendary hero. At best you will find a well-constructed, thoroughgoing facsimile of the living man to which you can easily bring your own stirring memories of his endearing personality and great achievements. It is then the audience and not the author who recreates the image of the four-time President who courageously led the American people through a devastating economic depression and a horrendous global war. Writing on the subject of characters on the stage in 1904, Sigmund Freud stated:1 All varieties of suffering are the theme of drama which promises to create out of them pleasure for the spectator. . . . When the spectator puts himself in the place of the sufferer from physical illness, he finds nothing within himself of enjoyment or a psychological give and take.... He who is ill has but one desire; to get well, to get over his condition; the doctor must come with the medicine; ... the play of fantasy must cease. ... It...