The Play's the Thing

Even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theater back then. . . . So--the people a thousand years from now'll know . . . this is the way we were . . . in our growing up, in our marrying, in our living and in our dying.

Our Town

How Americans were--that was a question not only for posterity. For in the vast and gloomy drama which is currently occupying the world's stage, Americans (whether they liked it or not) were playing the lead. How did the new stars appear to the worldwide audience? Part of the crucial answer could actually be found in the theater. American lives, loves, liberties and laughter were being exhibited everywhere on Europe's battered boards, from London's Globe to Rome's Quirino. European plays about Americans, and Europeans' reaction to the flood of imported U.S. plays, reflected--in the bizarre but revealing light of theatric truth--what other nations think Americans are like.

Kitty & the Dollar Princess. For years, Vienna's Typical American was a rich heiress who traveled about the Continent buying up lesser kingdoms. Trilled the Dollar Princess Waltz, in Vienna's golden age:

These are the dollar princesses,

Maidens made of pure gold.

With inestimable treasures,

They hold happiness in their pay. . .

Nowadays, the Dollar Princess has been supplanted by a set of far more complex characters, chief among them Kitty Duval, the poetic prostitute in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. Baffled Vienna listened to her megalophilic yearnings: "I like champagne, and . . . big houses with big porches, and big rooms with big windows, and big lawns, and big trees, and flowers . . . and big shepherd dogs sleeping in the shade." Wrote one critic: "What does he want, this Saroyan? If he did not live so far away, in San Francisco, I would go and ask him." But Viennese crowded in to see the play anyway; after all, few things made sense these days.

Clarence & the Qualunquists. Most Italians admired the U.S., but one of its best-loved characters, Clarence Day Sr., incited them to condescending contempt. Life with Father, declared Italian critics, was "superficial, infantile, naive . . . adequate for high-school children." First off,

Italians could not understand a grown man making such a fuss about being baptized; said one Rome theatergoer: "We get that taken care of the first week we're alive." Wrote Rome's independent Il Momento: "This is a prime example of American qualunquismo. . . .* It is naturally acclaimed by a people who like to see on their stage only a depiction of their own small lives." Wrote another: "Who knows but what [Premier] De Gasperi may have got mixed up in the theater and staged this? Like him, it praises all the simple virtues--but it is so very, very dull." Complained a hungry-sounding left-wing critic: "In every act someone is eating something. This kind of home-cooked comedy . . . represents the U.S."

Even less acceptable than Solid Citizen Day was Derelict Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road. Italians simply did not believe it. Even Communist L'Unita, usually eager for evidence that the U.S. is in a bad way, said: "Such ugly life cannot be in America." Said a theatergoer: "Why, things aren't even that bad in Sicily."

More real to Italians than all this U.S. realism was an Italian road-show fantasy, If Italy Had Won the War. It summed up the country's experiences with the U.S. occupation army in a somewhat wistful turnabout skit, involving the occupation of New York by Italians after the U.S.'s unconditional surrender to the Axis. Unhappy D.P.s from San Francisco wander across the stage,, while Italian-soldiers chat about dates with Ginger Rogers and have their shoes shined by Robert Taylor. A U.S. black-marketeer, when arrested by the Italian police, claims in his defense: "I was a member of the resistance group against that democrat, Roosevelt."

Lizzie & the Harvard Man. By far the most startling view of Americans is contained in Existentialist Prophet-Jean Paul Sartre's new play, La--Respectueuse; the blank in the title on Paris billboards, which watch their language more carefully than Parisian playwrights, stands for putain (whore). As a picture of how Americans live, The Respectful Whore contains a few hard chunks of truth, adrift in a sea of slanderous poppycock.

The play's heroine is Lizzie, a prostitute who has just moved into a small Southern town from New York. Lizzie, though supposedly an American, is every inch the zestful, sentimental Parisian poule. Says she, apologizing for making too much noise with a vacuum cleaner: "That's the way I am. The morning after, it's stronger than me; I just have to take a bath and use the vacuum cleaner." Her companion of the morning after is a Senator's son named Fred Clarke, with whom she is engaged in a tragic struggle.

Lizzie happens to have witnessed the shooting of a Negro by a white man. Fred Clarke, the white man's cousin, tries to get her to testify falsely that the Negro tried to attack her. She refuses. Later, Senator Clarke addresses her dramatically in the name of the American nation: "Lizzie . . . you must choose between two of my sons. . . . This Negro . . . what is he good for? He was born haphazardly. . . . The other ... is a 100% American, a descendant of our oldest families, who studied at Harvard. ..." Lizzie is swayed, and signs the false deposition.

Later, she regrets it. In the climactic scene, she threatens Fred with a gun. He has to talk fast to save his life: "The first Clarke cleared a forest all by himself. . . . His son built almost this entire town; he was on familiar terms with George Washington, died at Yorktown. We have made this country and it is ours. . . ." Lizzie surrenders the gun and Fred takes her in his arms, promising to install her as his mistress in a house on a hill. Frenchmen snickered at the last big speech, because, said one: "It contains a non sequitur: in France, the more important the man, the more eagerly people would want to shoot him."

When the play opened, a Paris city councilor denounced it as "a gross defamation of the great American democracy." Author Sartre's reply summed up the attitude of most Europeans about these strange semi-villains and semi-heroes, the Americans: "I am not at all anti-American. . . . One can come to an absolute and simple opinion about totalitarian countries . . . but the U.S. is not a single unit. . . . One finds over there institutions, ways of thinking and ways of living which are excellent, and some which are not so good."

What the European theatergoer was getting was a heavy emphasis on the not so good.

*A new "ism" drawn from Italy's rightist Uomo Qualunque (Common Man) Party.

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