New Plays on Broadway

J.B. is Archibald MacLeish's re-enactment in a contemporary setting of the Book of Job. It is also a restatement of it, and, in a double sense, it is a theater piece. The action takes place inside a night-lit circus tent where a sideshow Job has been performing. Two out-of-work actors, Mr. Zuss and Nickles, toy with the Biblical masks of God and Satan they find lying around, and try speaking the roles. Suddenly they are aware of a voice from outside them, are caught up in a story near at hand.

In the story, J.B. is a rich, admired, modern American industrialist with a devoted wife and five fine children. Then disaster looms and mounts; J.B.'s children are senselessly killed or brutally murdered, his possessions are lost, his house is destroyed, his wife goes away, his body sickens. All this happens against a crossfire of commentary, Biblical and profane, between Zuss and Nickles, a crossfire that continues as the stricken J.B. wrestles with his soul, with his Comforters, with his God, until at length his health is restored and his wife returns.

Taken as a theater piece, J.B. has an often stunning theatricality, notably in the first half. The spoken verse is sometimes sharp and eloquent. The circus setting, in Boris Aronson's graphically somber set, enhances both the Biblical immensities and the modern-day horror. The bearers of ill tidings to J.B.--liquored-up soldiers, flashbulb photographers, raincoated police--are peculiarly scarifying. Moreover, J.B.'s story is varied, heightened, salted, glossed by the exchanges between the Zuss of Raymond Massey and--the play's top performance--the Nickles of Christopher Plummer.

As philosophic drama, as a Job for today, J.B. is an effort of a sort and size rare in today's U.S. theater. MacLeish has confessed that Job's awful ordeal alone matches, for him, the mass sufferings of modern life (see RELIGION). And J.B. becomes a far more relevant contemporary figure if seen, not as an individual, but as a symbol of persecuted multitudes.

His modern-day Comforters--a Communist shouting that the individual does not matter, a psychiatrist pontificating that guilt should impose no guiltiness, an old-school clergyman calling glibly for repentance--bring not light but added darkness. Emerging from the depths at last, J.B. finds justification for his sufferings not so much in the will of God as in the buffetings of life; not in God's wisdom but in human love. "What suffers, loves," says J.B.'s wife.

This final note of affirmation seems somewhat unsatisfying, less on philosophical grounds than because it lacks dramatic truth; it does not have the strong pulse of the play behind it. For that matter, the second half of J.B. rather lacks a strong pulse. So long as J.B. is being struck down, J.B. is theatrically vibrant. But once he lies on the ground crying out why, the problem arises of giving utterance the effect of action. J.B.'s plight smacks, in dramatic terms, of the kind of situation--"in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done"--that Matthew Arnold held ill-fitted for poetic narrative.

Helped by MacLeish's dramatic use of Zuss and Nickles, Director Elia Kazan has to a certain degree given utterance the effect of action, though at a certain cost. He endows the second act with a kind of life, but on rhetorical, loud-speakered, high-pressured terms that avoid flatness by forfeiting severity. Moreover, the acting is uneven. Pat Hingle's J.B. has a homely appeal but has no inwardness; J.B.'s wife and J.B.'s comforters lack the proper skill. Despite its ingenuity and authority, J.B. cannot overcome certain difficulties that philosophic drama is heir to. But in a theater with scant desire even to challenge them, Playwright MacLeish's aims, quite as much as his abilities, have a tonic force.

The Cold Wind and the Warm transfers to the stage S. N. Behrman's memories of Jewish neighborhood life in Worcester, Mass. The author of many urbane comedies of ideas, Behrman here wives farce with feeling. If his characters in earlier plays (Biography, Rain from Heaven) seemed not so much human beings as assorted points of view, in The Cold Wind they are often not so much human beings as pieces on a racial chessboard. And in the many places where Behrman commemorates traditional Jewish characters enacting standard roles his play is both warm and entertaining.

In serious vein, there is the calm, careworn father, his hand in groceries, his mind with God. There is the blunt, slangy, kindly matron who wants to marry everyone off; the professional matchmaker, with his human goldbricks and his spiel; the absurdly natty, paunchy, rich upstart. As they cluck, strut, brag, fib, fence, they have no great personal identity; they spill over indeed into caricature. But they boast a sort of tribal flesh; their pretenses and deprecations and denials are bequests from a world of hard competition to a world of fun.

While these older folk (well played by Maureen Stapleton, Sig Arno, Sanford Meisner) hold Behrman's loose-leaf memory book together, younger ones are falling in love and inquiring of life. Chief of these is Willie (Eli Wallach), an unstable college student who goes in for long words and large thoughts, is forever losing himself trying to find himself, unavailingly loves one girl, is unavailingly loved by another. For all his lostness, he seems an essentially comic type till suddenly--out of Winesburg, Ohio more than Worcester, Mass.--he kills himself. Earlier, Behrman nowhere sounds the few right notes that might anticipate such dark final chords; from the beginning, in fact, Willie is all flat surface. The flatness is really general; that Willie is joltingly tragic matters less than that all the young people seem hand-me-downs.

The audience's final memories of the play, like the playwright's of what went into it, are friendly and touching. But its Boy-Meets-Girl and its Youth-Faces-Life episodes do more than blow a cold wind upon it; then throw cold water.

The Gazebo (by Alec Coppel) is a murder comedy that is at its best as a comedy murder, with Walter Slezak brightly ticking off plans to kill a blackmailer with all the zestful efficiency of a hostess ticking off items for a dinner party. But, for a good murder yarn, the play has not enough twists. What is more damaging--since The Gazebo goes rather for the funnybone than the spine--the play has not enough laughs. Everything about it except Actor Slezak seems too thin. With a bustling or furtive or triumphant movement, a mendacious or frightened or jubilant look, Slezak can do a lot; but a lot is still not enough.

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