CONTEMPORARY DRAMA, ELEVEN PLAYS, AMERICAN, ENGLISH, EUROPEAN.
PEAN. Selected and Edited by E. Brad leeWatson '02 and Benfield Pressey. New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956. $2.
This collection of eleven contemporary plays, designed for classroom use, is as fine a collection for its purpose as you are likely to find in a long time - probably until Messrs. Watson and Pressey produce their next anthology.
With two exceptions - Shaw and Giraudoux - all of the playwrights represented are, as the editors state, "still alive and potently influential in the world theatre of today - and perhaps of tomorrow." All but one of the plays come from the last quarter-century. The score by nationalities is six American, three English, and two French.
One of the best things about this book is that it doesn't carry on too much like a "textbook." It has a fresh look and feel to it. Biographies of the playwrights are reduced to a skeleton. The introductions to the various plays are short and extremely readable, and, taken together, tell you a great deal about the theatre. The appendix contains ample bibliographies.
In their excellent, brief Foreword the editors make the point that the playwrights of today express fewer certainties than their immediate predecessors but instead have brought to the stage "an intense and microscopic penetration into life as it is, and a free, almost nonchalant display of fantasy and satire." Their gifts to the theatre are a "forthright sincerity" and a fresh and varied poetic imagination.
The choice of plays is admirable. Three of the plays in the collection have already been frequently anthologized - The Green Pastures, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of aSalesman. But the quality and importance of these plays is ample reason for their inclusion. The remaining selections in the volume are comparatively fresh and new to anthologies.
Ways and Means, Noel Coward's account of an acute financial crisis in the lives of a young married couple who have run out their welcome as guests at a wealthy house on the French Riviera, is in Mr. Coward's most characteristic vein. William Saroyan's Hello, OutThere is one of the finest short plays in the American theatre. The Happy Journey toTrenton and Camden is an excellent introduction to Thornton Wilder's unconventional way with stage conventions. The two French plays, Jean Anouilh's Antigone, exciting in itself and exciting in its history, and Jean Giraudoux's Madwoman of Chaillot, could hardly be improved on as representative selections. And Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman's revelation of how the Little Foxes got that way, has for some time deserved to be better known than it is.
To my own shame I have to admit that parts of Christopher Fry's Venus Observed bored me when I saw the play in the theatre, and continued to bore me when I read it, but that is, of course, no reason why it shouldn't be in the anthology.
As for Pygmalion, which, as the editors point out, is from an earlier period than the other plays in the volume and is included partly because in their previous collections they were barred from using anything by Shaw - that play, owing to fate, circumstance, Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, and Messrs. Lerner and Loewe, is likely to prove, for sev- eral years to come, the most timely and con- temporary play of the lot.
A particularly valuable feature of the book is the List of Illustrations in the appendix that refers the reader to books and magazines where may be found reproductions of scenes from the various plays. In an age when many young persons enter college without ever having seen a professional performance of living theatre in their lives, and therefore have little power to visualize, such pictorial aids can do much to help bring the plays to life.
