More on 'J.B.'

It is not often that a Broadway play elicits raves from all the New York daily newspaper critics. But this is what happened to Archibald MacLeish's J.B. when the strike-bound reviewers were finally able to make their verdicts known after the December 11 opening at the ANTA Theatre.

Brooks Atkinson '17 of the Times called it "one of the memorable works of the century as verse, as drama and as spiritual inquiry." He termed the production "magnificent," and said, "In every respect, J.B. is theatre on its highest level." More recently he called the play "a stark portrait of ourselves composed by a man of intellect, faith and literary virtuosity."

Walter Kerr (Herald Tribune) thought it "a sober and handsome monument... enormously impressive." Richard Watts (Post) called it "a fine drama" with "stunning performances," and John Chapman (Daily News) wrote, "A magnificent production of a truly splendid play." John McLain (Journal-American) went so far as to say, "The best play of this or many seasons... reaches heights of poetry and performance seldom attempted in the recent history of the American stage." John Mason Brown '23 did this one better by exclaiming, "Never such greatness in the theatre--not since Mourning Becomes Electra, Green Pastures or Our Town!"

The critics in the weeklies did not present such a solid front. Life referred to J.B. as "a great play" and "a Broadway triumph." Newsweek found it "a burst of magnificent, enthralling theatre.... a newborn classic." Hobe Morrison, writing in Variety, the entertainment trade weekly, spoke of "this exalted drama" and lauded the performers, but hedged, "Whether the show is eloquent and inspiring, or just fairly impressive and remote obviously depends on the individual."

Time, conceding it to be "an effort of a sort and size rare in today's U.S. theatre," opined that it "has an often stunning theatricality, notably in the first half," but that the second half "rather lacks a strong pulse" and ends on a note that is "unsatisfying... because it lacks dramatic truth."

Marya Mannes, in The Reporter, took a position strongly favorable to the play but just as strongly unfavorable to the production. Kenneth Tynan, the London Observer's notoriously excoriating critic currently on loan to The New Yorker, took the opposite tack: "In every department the presentation is flawless. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the thing presented." Whereupon he let fly with a long barrage of his famed artillery at the play's content.

Tynan's indictment of the play itself was forcefully seconded in The Village Voice by Jerry Tallmer, who added a few salvos of his own. Said he, "It is, in the kindest of all possible considerations, a big windy non-drama about God, Satan, and Job retold rather in the manner of such movies as Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Lives," and "written in what is also a sort of Hollywood verse." His reaction to the production, furthermore, was only lukewarm. Henry Hewes (Saturday Review) dismissed J.B. as "just an inconclusive effort."

On the sidelines, the Modern Language Association listed only four Broadway shows as "highly recommended" for the 5,000 college teachers attending the organization's annual convention during the vacation. J.B. shared this endorsement with Touch of the Poet, Two for the Seesaw, and West Side Story.

I have no intention of adding to the extensive verbiage that the book reviewers and drama critics have already piled up about the meaning and the ideas offered in MacLeish's play. I shall only say that I left my front-row seat three or so weeks ago with the feeling that the entire history of the theatre had existed solely to make possible this production of this play. Which is arrant nonsense, of course. Yet the statement is true at least to the extent that MacLeish has here adapted many diverse literary traditions covering a span of close to 2,500 years.

J.B. draws on the ancient Greek use of the chorus and of masks. It draws on the medieval morality play. And it would have been impossible without Wilder's Our Town and, more especially, The Skin of Our Teeth. This will please Wilder, who said not long ago, "I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel... indebted to any work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs."

Many writers have noted that MacLeish's hero (alias Job) gets his sobriquet from the present-day practice of calling American business executives by their initials. But no-one seems to have mentioned that he also gets it from the widespread ancient Hebrew custom of omitting vowels from the written language.

MacLeish's writing runs the gamut from the loftiest poetic imagery to colloquial vulgarisms. And he makes use of an effective gimmick for underscoring certain crucial lines by employing a celestial prompter over a loudspeaker, whose words are then delivered by the actor on stage; it brings to mind the old French dictum, "Un beau vers on peut entendre deux fois."

The wonderful thing is that everything works. There is no feeling of an inharmonious, disparate potpourri.

The roles of God and Satan are currently taken by Raymond Massey and Christopher Plummer, respectively. Each of them has one of the most glorious voices of his generation, and each uses it with optimum effect. They are both on stage from beginning to end, though they remain silent for long periods of time. But they know how to project their presence even then, for they are both masters of what Ethel Barrymore has called "perhaps the highest art of an actor--the art of beautiful listening."

Pat Hingle is somewhat uneven in the title role. But the second half, particularly, forces him to tap depths of which few suspected him even capable. Here, sorely afflicted and afflicted with sores, he stays hunched over on his knees for half an hour. And here he touches greatness; to find a just comparison, one must go all the way back to Lon Chaney Sr.'s title-role performance in the 1922 film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

MacLeish set his play in "a traveling circus which has been on the roads of the world for a long time." Boris Aronson has complied by designing a circus maximus that is the finest set of the season. Doing away completely with a proscenium curtain, the set bulges out into the audience. A raked stage boasts a marvelously rhythmic series of ramps and stairs, culminating in a funambulist's platform that doubles as a modern counterpart of the old Greek drama's theologeion. There are ropes and pulleys, and part of the canvas tent.

And Aronson has added to the play's cosmic atmosphere by suspending in the air a sort of armillary sphere fitted with small spotlights, which Tharon Musser has exploited ingeniously in her extraordinary lighting. The set, furthermore, has to be able to undergo drastic physical upheaval in mid-scene, in the tradition of Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth.

David Amram's musical score is fairly good--easily his best writing to date. And even the playbill covers and posters are tastefully artistic.

There remains only to report that J.B. last week received an award as "the best American play of 1958" from Boston station WGBH-TV and Elliot Norton '26, the dean of the local critical fraternity. It is a safe bet that J.B. will have garnered further honors by the end of the theatre season.