Robert Anderson by Thomas P. Adler (review)

90 Comparative Drama strategies. Worth simplifies the cultural milieux down to the main antipositivistic strands. Although she quotes from plays, her chief ploy is to “translate” the play into glossed narrative prose like a Noh shite. Our only complaint is that production photographs are limited to the dustjacket . We hope that in a subsequent volume she will go more into her own stagecraft. It is easy to imagine that she makes plays come alive for her students. MARILYN GADDIS ROSE S U N Y -B in gh am ton Thomas P. Adler. R o b ert A n derson . Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1978. Pp. iii + 180. $8.95. Critical assessment of a writer who does not measure up to the best of his contemporaries, one who has written a dozen or so works but whose reputation rests essentially upon only one, is a difficult task, for the critic is obligated to account for—and perhaps defend—differ­ ences between a first rate talent and a less recognized one. Though endowed with good judgment, the critic tries, in an effort to be fair, to show his author in the best light, to present his literary merits to the reader clearly and without bias, to enhance his reputation if possible, and to interpret those works with which most readers are unfamiliar. There is the danger, however, that in his eagerness to do justice to his author the critic will fail to judge him with the same objectivity that he judges writers of assured prominence. Professor Adler has unquestionably done Robert Anderson a service in acquainting the interested reader (who may only be familiar with Anderson’s one really memorable play, Tea a n d S ym path y [1953]) with the vicissitudes of thirty years of the playwright’s career in the theatre— from 1945 to 1973. He first traces Anderson’s early psychological struggle in a home environment where the parents created “a microcosm of the archetypal conflict between the materialistic and the artistic sensibility. . . . and provided Anderson’s work with one of its recurring motifs.” The consequences of this upbringing are demonstrated in Anderson’s art by a chronological treatment of his more than a dozen plays, including filmscripts, and a novel. (A second novel, G ettin g U p an d G oin g H om e, was published just after Adler’s book went to press.) The author pinpoints Anderson’s central themes: the destructive poten­ tiality of youthful innocence and the compromise of dreams, middleage disillusionment and loneliness, loss of feeling and compassion, the plight of the nonconformist in a demanding society, adolescent idealiza­ tion of the role of sex in marriage, the redemptive power of sex either within marriage or outside it, the lack of open demonstration of feeling, and the need for parents to communicate with their children. Finally, Adler assesses the value of these plays as dramatic art in terms of their structured parallel plots, foil characters, genteelly realistic dialogue, Reviews 91 themes of penetrating psychological import, and the integration of all these ingredients into a form and style which are for the most part, and not unpredictably, those of the melodramatic thesis plays so popular at the turn of the century. Adler’s principal thesis is that, because he writes in a marriagecounselor vein and is tolerant and somewhat unorthodox in matters of sex, Anderson is very much a man of his time (the Fifties and early Sixties) in the American theatre, though structurally his plays are in the nineteenth-century tradition of the well-made play. In explicating the themes of the Anderson canon, Adler stresses one theme that pervades the plays: the consequences of immature notions of the basis for a successful marriage. This theme dominates one of the earliest plays, T he E den R ose (1948), and appears again in the latest to date, D ou b le S olitaire (1971). The platonic love of one couple is countered by the physical love of another couple to produce “a synthesis of the two. . . . one that, as in the Shakespearean ideal, does not discount the physical side of man but sees...