New Play on Broadway

The Andersonville Trial (by Saul Levitt) took place before a U.S. military court in August 1865. The defendant, Henry Wirz (Herbert Berghof), had been superintendent of the notorious Andersonville, Ga. prison, where some 40,000 Union soldiers lived in unutterable filth and want, and where 14,000 of them died.

The first half of the play, based on the actual trial, consists of witnesses' accounts of the unspeakable conditions and unthinkable treatment. But in the pile-up of testimony, it emerges that Wirz was rather the brutal agent than the inhuman author of what went on. He was merely carrying out orders from above.

A conscience-pricked judge advocate keeps suggesting that Wirz had a moral obligation to disobey such monstrous military orders--a ticklish thesis to propound before a military court. But after Wirz insists on taking the stand, the judge advocate wrests permission to raise the moral issue. The trial thereupon erupts into something beyond cross-examination or even debate. It becomes an indictment, on the judge advocate's part, that bypasses the law, and a hysterical mine-not-to-reason-why defense on Wirz's part that circumvents morality. Wirz, most likely a preordained scapegoat, was convicted and hanged.

Playwright Levitt has made good use of two strong natural assets: a stormy trial, always a virtual synonym for lively theater, and one of the great mass-horror stories of history. Upon these he has raised, with frequently discernible modern overtones, a large moral problem of guilt. Well acted under Jose Ferrer's uninhibited staging, the play offers an evening that has much in its favor in both theme and treatment. It has both bursts of eloquence and bouts of theater.

Yet it lacks a certain cleanness of impact, a certain soundness of effect. It pounds too hard at times, and stretches things out too long. And for all its speeches and screams, it does not deeply plumb its moral issue or its chief actors, particularly the key figure of the judge advocate (for which George C. Scott, however brilliant, seems miscast). And by mixing dialectics with histrionics to pose a moral inquiry, The Andersonville Trial disconcertingly forfeits much of the realistic and psychological fascination of a trial. About it all there is too much sense of external pressure, of the author as both preacher and showman.

How far all this follows the actual trial is for the official records to say. But there is a sense of forcing the high notes and of holding them too long. That trials are proverbially good theater is no accident: theater minds and legal minds equally highlight and soft-pedal to a purpose, equally employ shock and diversionary tactics. And they can equally breed doubts while scoring points: often vivid, Levitt's play does not really satisfy as a whole.

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