Paul Green: Five Plays by Paul Green (review)

1963 BOOK REVIEWS 327 For Shuman this is evidence of "Odets as a mature and well-developed artist rather than as a radical playwright who wishes to use the stage as a soapbox_" (p. 144) As a compilation of critical opinion about Odets' plays, Mr. Shuman's book serves a useful purpose. But to call it, as the author does, a full-length study, would seem to be promising more than is actually delivered. As the author himself says, in the Preface, "This book has done little to trace the literary and philosophical influences which motivated Odets in his writing, because speculation on such points would necessarily be based upon spurious assumptions." Yet a study of an author's works must, if it is to be more than superficial, consider "literary and philosophical influences." JOHN H. KELsON Eastern Montana College PAUL GREEN: FIVE PLAYS, Paul Green, Hill and Wang, Inc., New York, 1963, 320 pp. Price $4.50. These five plays, two of them one acts, are the work of a minor playwright who takes his cues from social conditions "somewhere in the southern part of the United States." Predictably, they treat such issues as Negro illiteracy and blind groping (In Abraham's Bosom), miscegenation ("White Dresses"), perversion of justice ("Hymn to the Rising Sun"), and decay of the cotton aristocracy (The House of Connelly). The fifth play, Johnny Johnson, falls somewhat outside this local perimeter, but it is nevertheless an assault play, an attack on the shibboleths of war and the stupidities of war lords. Like most playwrights who draw inspiration from social problems, Green has to feel his material intensely, as he obviously does the plight of the convicts in "Hymn to the Rising Sun," before his dialogue becomes charged and vibrant. When intensity of feeling deserts him, the dialogue is labored and flat, even dull, a marked defect of his exposition which is just so much trudging ahead. The most successful characterizations in these plays are the poor whites and the Negroes. Unlike Faulkner, for example, Green does not see the southern Negro as an "obverse reflection" of his white master. He gives him a separate identity. But like the greater writer, Green's white aristocrats, descendants of planters, are anemic and proud but ineffectual because of legendizing and guilt heritage. This theme informs The House Of Connelly, the best of the plays, and gives the playwright's vision some depth. Throughout his career, and in these selections especially, Green shows a wholesome contempt for the conventions of the realistic stage. Though he employs literal details, he prefers to take the action out-of-doors into the fresh air, out of the box set which Mary McCarthy has called a coffin with corpses inside. He makes liberal use of music, song, and dance-pageantry-resources of the theater which literal realism discourages. The use of folksongs to establish mood and underscore sentiment is a characteristic mannerism and relieves the monotony of ordinary talk. Such experiments are commendable and undoubtedly led Green in the direction of symphonic outdoor historical drama, his current interest. And the value of his collection, to my way of thinking, is not what the plays achieve but the direction they point: toward a theater of the people, not of a metropolitan few; toward a lyrical, imaginative stage and a poetic rendering of experience. 328 MODERN DRAMA December Unfortunately, Green himself is no poet, as these five plays demonstrate, and he is only a middling dramatist. But I suspect he may be an important pathfinder. ARTHUR WILLS University of Alaska THORNTON WILDER, by Rex Burbank, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1961, 156 pp. Price $3-50. In this study of Thornton Wilder's development as a writer, the author proposes "to clear away some of the critical platitudes that have obscured him, to measure his achievements against his total artistic intent, and to place him in the American tradition." Of the three aims, the first one could have been fulfilled only with firmer critical interpretations than Mr. Burbank has been able to provide. Nevertheless, one appreciates the sympathetic portrait of a mature American writer who is equally at home in the drama and the novel, whose...