The Tree Witch

I suppose that one of the functions of the Poets' Theatre is to produce bad plays by minor poets. There is no need, however, to produce them badly. Peter Viereck's The Tree Witch is mediocre poetry and abysmally bad drama. Last week's production at the Loeb Drama Center was as embarrassingly bad as the play itself.

Viereck only knows why he wrote this play, but I have a theory. Lying sleepless one night, I hypothesize, the poet was granted a line--

Hell hath no woman like a Fury scorned.

Like a man given a golden door knob, Viereck attempted to build a mansion to surround his toy. Unhappily, his intellectual, poetic, and dramatic resources sufficed only for a pasteboard imitation of a mansion, a flimsy substitute for a play. That line was one of only four Good Things about a wasted evening.

My theory is doubtless too fanciful: Viereck would perhaps claim that he wrote his play because he had something to say to modern man. That is what one charming and intelligent lady told me during an intermission--that here was a play of interesting ideas, about conformity and spontaneity and things like that. I challenged her to name one decent idea in the first two acts, and she hemmed and hawed and hemmed again. With good reason: Viereck has simply messed around with a handful of the last decade's intellectual cliches. He is against materialism, religiosity, and scientism. He is (and I concede the moderate originality of his symbol) for dryads, unifying "earthiness and airiness, mortality and sky, in concrete touchable simplicity." He is for "a natural magic, the marriage of earth and sky." He is, no doubt, also for motherhood, fatherhood, and nut-brown ale.

Viereck has chosen verse to express this conflict between black and white, because "its universal inarticulate emotions can be felt sensuously through conflicting rhythms or images." He must have had another and better poet in mind when he wrote that explanation of verse-drama's advantages. Here is a sample of his verse's inarticulate emotion:

Then why do I bring them water

And nurse each time their ache?

Because my only creed is

Warmth for its own crude sake.

For jingly sentimentality I award that the 1961 Archibald MacLeish prize, a brass loving cup inscribed "Blow on the coal of the heart."

And here is one of Viereck's images:

Look!--hooves are trampling the nipples of gross breasts...

That is bad enough in itself, but it is only one of his recurring (and invariably ill-chosen) breast images. I don't begrudge Viereck his two hundred years to adore each breast: I do ask that his adoring be appropriate and well-done.

But worse than bad thought and bad poetry, The Tree Witch is bad drama. Four men have captured a dryad. Frightened of this child of light, they ask the help of three women (known as the Aunts) in crushing the dryad. A series of attacks are made on the dryad, in the course of which it becomes drearily apparent that the Aunts and the dryad are struggling for the souls of the men. Finally, predictably, the Aunts are recognized as the Furies (surely, after Eliot and Sartre, the old ladies deserve a rest) and, forced to a choice, the men go the way of the Aunts. (A few moments in the choice scene are the second Good Thing; the Furies' masks are a third.)

In all this, incident simply follows incident: his story is just one damn thing after another. Causation, results, growth, change--none of these exist in Viereck's dramatic world. And his ideas, bad as they are, do not develop from his characters and situations: rather, his play is a series of expositions of ideas, never embodied in dramatic form. The greatest sin in theatre is to be dull, and Viereck is rarely anything else.

Happily, this production has closed, and I will not dwell at length on its particular faults. Under Christine Denny's direction actors assumed one awkward configuration and then, usually with no dramatic motivation, moved to another. Many of the actors were periodically inaudible (Viereck must share the blame for this: his verse is not suited to speaking under theatrical conditions), one, at least, did not know his lines. I have no objection to letting the audience know what is happening by means of large signs, but they need not have been carried on and off by an overweight female in slacks. Finally, Deborah Steinberg (the dryad) deserves some praise for her voice, but an attractive young girl cannot become a tree witch simply by taking off her shoes and putting on a green dress.

Oh yes--the fourth Good Thing. That was my date's splendidly fuzzy white stole.