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The New York Times,
May 7,
1939
ON AN ESCAPE INTO THE PRESENT
By S. N.
BEHRMAN
After tussling dramatically with the problems with which the
world is painfully struggling, the exhausted playwright (and
the exhausted audience!) both came to realize that in the
theatre it is no good presenting the insoluble. In the real
world—that is to say, in the ambiguous realms of politics
and business—mistakes are forgiven: Mr. Chamberlain may
travel with questionable results to Munich and Herr Hitler
to the Venusberg and every one is satisfied so long as the
results merely escape disaster. But in the theatre you
cannot be negative. You must end on a major note. You must,
before the final curtain, bring in a solution, all wrapped
up and tidy, or the audience will tell you that you are
inconclusive and will signify its discontent by staying
away.
Perhaps people are justified in expecting more from the
artist than from the statesman. In any ease they do not
allow him the same leeway. He is not permitted to muddle
through, he must get somewhere by curtain time, his budget
balanced. The playwright in a transition period like this
one, one of the swiftest in history, must nevertheless not
be carried away by the stream. And yet as an individual, as
a citizen, he is sensitive to the tendencies of the moment,
profoundly affected by them. The dilemma put by Chekhov into
the mouth of his novelist, Trigorin, in "The Sea Gull" is
more acute now than perhaps it has ever been:
I love this lake, these trees, the blue heaven; nature's
voice speaks to me and wakes a feeling of passion in my
heart, and I am overcome by an uncontrollable desire to
write. But I am not only a painter of landscapes, I am a man
of the city besides. I love my country, too, and her people;
I feel that, as a writer, it is my duty to speak of their
sorrows, of their future, also of science, of the rights of
man, and so forth. So I write on every subject, and the
public hounds me on all sides, sometimes in anger, and I
race and dodge like a fox with a pack of hounds on his trail
. . . and finally I come back to the conclusion that all I
am fit for is to describe landscapes.
* * *
But one cannot these days describe landscapes; they are
deeply sown with the leaflets of the propagandist! Robert
Sherwood recently got on a boat for a holiday in South
America. Forming in his mind, he says, was "an idea for a
romantic comedy about nothing at all important or relevant
to the times." When he reached Buenos Aires, however, he was
so assailed by stories of German penetration in that country
that the project of writing a romantic play seemed to him
about as remote as a revival of the Arthurian legends. What,
then, is a playwright to do? He can escape to the past. He
can write about Queen Elizabeth, Abe Lincoln, Oscar Wilde,
John Keats, Marie Antoinette, Benjamin Franklin. He may
choose either such periods as in their turmoil present some
analogy to present-day conditions, where the contest and the
adversaries, sealed by death and history, afford him a
conclusion, or such periods and characters where there is no
parallel at all, rendering the escape complete.
* * *
I was in this tight spot in the interval before I began to
write "No Time for Comedy." I had just about decided to join
the migration to the past and had settled myself to an
hibernation with the biographical dictionaries in order to
find a historical character whose career was at once
exciting and non-political. There were Don Juan and
Casanova, but they had been done. Abraham, Adam and
Alcibiades all seemed too remote. To absorb the A's alone
seemed a young man's job, too formidable to venture at 45.
Suddenly the obvious struck me; why not dramatize my own
dilemma, write a comedy on the impossibility of writing
comedy? Whether I have demonstrated the thesis or refuted it
remains for the audience to say. |
