Well-Made Dramas

Enumerating Shakespeare’s supposed defects, Dr. Johnson wrote:

His first ... is that ... [h]e sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance.

Johnson’s diagnosis is both spot-on and, to modern ears, preposterous. He has called Shakespeare out for relying on a key part of the formula for the well-made contemporary drama. To the audiences thronging recent New York productions of The Common Pursuit and Clybourne Park, any effort by the playwrights to make a “just distribution of good [and] evil” would surely have seemed both unpalatable and dishonest. And the revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man [sic] shows the dangers of labeling choices and characters too confidently.

In most modern drama, everyone gets some good karma and some bad. Every character, “be he ne’er so vile,” exhibits some virtue and some insight, and every character’s moral armor has a chink or two, accompanied by blind spots of one sort or another in his or her vision of the world. The action thus becomes a collective one, a picture of a community as a whole moving, through the clash of personalities and outlooks, from one point to another.

The community in The Common Pursuit is a brace of Cambridge graduates, whom we first meet in the 1960s, embarking on publication of a journal fittingly to be called The Common Pursuit. Playwright Simon Gray assumes that his audiences will recognize the allusion, which is to the title of a 1952 collection of essays on British writers, mostly poets, by F.R. Leavis. Leavis in turn borrowed the phrase from T.S. Eliot, feeling that it encapsulated the business of the critic: “the common pursuit of true judgment.” That the phrase—and Leavis its proponent—could have plausibly electrified a group of 1960s undergraduates is an index to how much things have changed—and indeed how much they change in the play.

The students’ own pursuit, to maintain a journal of new poetry plus criticism along Leavisite lines, which is to say along the lines of the critical review Scrutiny, that Leavis published from 1932 to 1953, becomes neither common nor even a pursuit as the play progresses.

Instead, it emerges, as we follow the group deep into middle age (in one instance to the grave, and in another to its vicinity), that the actual object of their common pursuit is lives as literati of varying stripes. Humphry (Tim McGeever) continues in the academy as historian and dean, Stuart (Josh Cooke) the would-be editor, ends up as a literary commentator, his friend Martin (Jacob Fishel) becomes a publisher, Peter (Kieran Campion) an author of high-end potboiler non-fiction and wangler of foundation grants, and Nick (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) a TV theater critic. Marigold (Kristen Bush), first the wife of one of them, then of another, leaves the purlieus of criticism to pursue a solid career as a teacher and administrator at girls’ schools. If there is a theme to their lives, it is not the rigorous scrutiny of received texts, but rather the quotidian drama of getting on with careers, marriages, betrayals, infidelities, and loss. In other words, we are not in F.R. Leavis territory, but rather that of Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

What these characters come to exemplify has little to do with the Leavisite moral seriousness they started with. In fact, in some instances the characters are revealed to lack any sense of seriousness; most notably a couple of them displaying the callous...