Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
MacLeish needed "an ancient structure" on which to build a contemporary play, and the Book of Job was the only one that seemed to fit the modern situation. The drama of Job is his search for meaning behind his agony, and man today is searching for meaning behind...
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Book of Job, MacLeish notes, is that after it is over, Job accepts his life back again, to live over again with all the hazards of pain and injustice. "And why? Because his sufferings have been justified? They have not been justified . . . Job accepts to live his life again in spite of all he knows of life, in spite of all he knows now of himself, because...
...mountain country of eastern Kentucky, up along Defeated Creek or Betty's Troublesome or Caney, and if he'll just sit down and rest a minute, he's likely to hear a fine mort of olden tales. Schoolma'am Marie Campbell, who put together this book, was pleasured a heap to sit alistening to the olden tales and to write them down so they would keep...