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164 EPILOGUE If Philip Barry is to be remembered as the purveyor of “high” comedies, or “light” comedies, or “sophisticated” comedies, that is certainly not the worst of legacies. If he is to be associated with evening wear, cocktail glasses, and lilting banter—like a Thin Man film or a caricature of Noël Coward—he will be pleasantly positioned within a pleasant sector of a time period it would be difficult to argue was all that pleasant. The implication, of course, if one leaves it at that, is that Barry was disengaged, that he was a lightweight lacking seriousness about the business of living and creating . When I teach comedy—She Stoops to Conquer or The Importance of Being Earnest or Private Lives—my first task is to convince students that these are not “unimportant” works. In a sense, that is part of what I have tried to do here, in this examination of Barry—to convince students of theatre history that Philip Barry is undeserving of relegation to a feathery corner of that history. There are, of course, the “serious” plays, many of which deserve a second look and, ideally, revival: In a Garden, Hotel Universe, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Here Come the Clowns, and Second Threshold would be at the head of the list. They would possibly play and say more to the twenty-first century than they did to their own time, perhaps because we have had to become more attuned to how constructed reality operates and because they are dramatically solid: with thematic richness, nuanced characters, and the aural feast of Barry’s dialogue. At the same time, many of the “high” comedies (with the exception of The Philadelphia Story) have lain dormant for nearly a century while the works of writers like Coward, Somerset Maugham, and George S. Kaufman enjoy successful and compelling revivals . Again, it is easy enough to compile a list of candidates from Barry: You $QGHUVRQ(SLORJXHLQGG $0 Epilogue 165 and I, Paris Bound, Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, and (possibly) Without Love could speak to questions of commitment and passion that remain elusive for generations of today. Lists like these are part of what drew me to this project. Barry was not a one-hit wonder: he was a compelling artist whose neglect seems to have resulted more from historical accident and laws of cultural inertia than a lack of worthy material that would hold up over time. The history of theatre, like literary history in general, tends to build upon what already seems assuredly fixed, making things outside the canon difficult to introduce or reintroduce. Nevertheless, as I hope I have demonstrated to anyone who has read to this point, it is not all that difficult to imagine a kind of renewed Barry momentum asserting itself sometime in the future. Furthermore, as much as I can imagine the value of seeing Barry performed once again, I have come, through my examination of his plays, to be happily convinced that Barry is worth reading—whether one is a student of theatre history, a student of American and Western culture, or a student of the uses of language. Barry was a major player in one of the golden periods of American theatre. A new Barry play was an “event” for more than two decades, and those works that did not succeed at the time seemed not to dampen a hunger for those that would. Clearly, he was well positioned and predisposed to be experimental—to league himself (sometimes clandestinely if one reads his plays as carefully as I have tried to do) with the artistic rule-breakers of his era, and one feels he might have done so even if he had not known Gerald Murphy and Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway and Elmer Rice. He was a questioner, in the manner of his finest contemporaries. He was devoid of class-bound or success-bound complacencies. He questioned through his writing and as he prepared to write. Archival materials show Barry probing, pondering, testing—often seeking the knowledge and perspectives of others as he was preparing to write a play. There would be the religious questions about marriage posed to his sister Agnes as he thought about the bases of invalidating wedding vows in the eyes of the church, perspectives central to the working out of The Joyous Season. Or, for the same play, in August 1933, we see him trying to understand the validity of what would...

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