New Play in Manhattan

The Eve of St. Mark (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by The Playwrights' Company) is the first successful U.S. war play. Its artistic qualities are debatable, but it is vivid theater, beautifully staged by Director Lem Ward (Uncle Harry, Brooklyn, U.S.A.), and the story it tells, unvarnished in its simplicity, is unbeatable in its appeal. Of late years the flossiest of playwrights, Maxwell Anderson in The Eve of St. Mark has contrived no elaborate plot, essayed no vaulting rhetoric, embraced no queer philosophy. He does not have to. While other playwrights have floundered or gone too far afield to dramatize the war, he has been the first to realize that its most compelling--and most communicable--story lies right under every one's nose. He has simply set down the ubiquitous story of the U.S. today--a kind of Everyman in khaki. He has told of young Quizz West (William Prince), a farm boy who leaves his girl (Mary Rolfe) and his family to become a soldier. Quizz goes to training camp and then to war, and, on a tiny island in the Pacific, is part of a gallant, malaria-ridden remnant that face war's horror, enact its heroism and succumb to its fate.

The play--which takes its rather farfetched title from a legend that on St. Mark's Eve (April 24) a young girl standing at a church door may see the ghosts of all those who will die within the year--is dedicated to the author's nephew, Sergeant Lee Chambers, "one of the first to go, one of the first to die that we may keep this earth for free men." It is the thought of some other or possible Sergeant Chambers in every spectator's mind that accentuates the poignancy of Maxwell Anderson's drama. Its moment in history transfigures it, restoring to subjects like young love, maternal pride, the sense of home, the heroism of war some of the luster that oceans of hokum have washed away. All the same Playwright Anderson has frequently brought to his story something as warm with life as a heart beat, yet kept it masculine with the kind of tough Army humor he once put into What Price Glory?. There are swearing, ribald sergeants in The Eve of St. Mark as well as young-eyed privates. There is jocular cynicism as well as burning faith. There are roadhouse floozies as well as the girl back home.

Though the play recaptures Anderson's old simple virtues, it reveals some of his ingrained faults. He has resisted for the nonce his usual high-flown poetizing, or at any rate put it to half-comic use by letting an absurd Southern private spout Byron, Keats, Arnold, T. S. Eliot. But Anderson is sometimes wordy even in prose. Now and then he overworks his pathos. He throws in a jarring dream sequence. "His taste sometimes falters. Fortunately his theme, like a horse more astute than its rider, saves him from ever getting too far off the road.

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