Drama for an Hour

The audience rating of Celanese Theater, which this week won a 1952 Peabody Award (see above), has suffered because the show (alternate Weds. 10 p.m., ABC) has played opposite such attractions as the fights between Jake LaMotta & Gene Hairston, Sugar Ray Robinson & Rocky

Graziano. This is particularly unfortunate because in its first year on TV, Celanese has put on more grownup drama than almost any of its rivals. There have been plays by Eugene O'Neill (Ah, Wilderness!, Anna Christie), Maxwell Anderson (Winterset, Saturday's Children), Elmer Rice (Street Scene) and Robert Sherwood (Reunion in Vienna, The Petrified Forest).

As in all TV drama, the scripts have to be boiled down to less than one hour. The job is given to adapters who work under the supervision of Script Editor Mab Anderson, in private life the wife of Playwright Maxwell Anderson. But scripts are shown to the original authors before going on the air, and no deletions, changes or shifts of emphasis may be made without the playwrights' consent. Says Editor Anderson: "I would never change a play basically, its intention or meaning."

The most significant changes have to do with shifts of public attitudes. Plays written in the depths of the 1930s depression sometimes have quite an odd sound to ears tuned to 1952's prosperity. In last week's TV version of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, there was no longer any mention of the fact that one of the leading characters was a confirmed Wobbly. Says Mab Anderson: "People today don't even know what Wobblies* are."

Celanese Theater will be on TV through June with such plays as Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack and Rachel Crothers' When Ladies Meet. Next season Editor Anderson hopes to have a better time position, free from competition with the major prizefights.

* Wobblies were members of the I.W.W. (International Workers of the World), a radical union that reached its peak in 1912, and was largely broken by vigilante action and a movement of many of its members to the Communist Party a few years after World War I.

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