Word: deviling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIFE FOR THE world's future," the devil's disciple cried from the gallows. It is a gesture of self-conscious heroism that would have done Nathan Hale proud, but in George Bernard Shaw's world of comic melodrama, it remains only a gesture. In The Devil's Disciple, Richard Dudgeon cannot die, for his life, as a newly-created American saint, and the world's future, symbolized by the birth of the United States, depend on each other...
...action in The Devil's Disciple revolves around the discovery of true identity by Dudgeon and his counterpart, Reverend Anthony Anderson, a discovery which takes place against the background of colonial rebellion against the British. Notorious for his blasphemous gusto for life, Dudgeon in the course of the play proves willing to follow his own peculiar religion to the death--even when that death is theoretically another man's. When the British mistake him for the minister, whom they plan to hang as an example to town rebels, Dudgeon declines to correct their mistake. Meanwhile, Anderson, realizing his own ministerial...
...American Shakespeare Theatre's decision this summer to fevive Artnur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials, The Crucible. This is, after all, a year in which special attention is being given to our country's history. The choice might well have fallen on Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, which dramatizes incidents in the American Revolution; but the AST gave us that play six years ago. Furthermore, would it not be better to offer a work not only about America but by an American...
Miller was not the first person to see the parallel between the late 17th century and the middle of the 20th, for Marion Starkey had in 1949 published a widely read book on the Salem episode, The Devil in Massachusetts. Nor was he the only one to dramatize the 1692 witch-hunt. A couple of months before The Crucible opened, both Florence Stevenson's Child's Play and Louis O. Coxe's The Witch-finders were staged in the Midwest. Still earlier, in May of 1952, the Poets' Theatre produced at Harvard the first version of The Gospel Witch...
...evil. In the Enlightenment tradition, evil is explained away as a curable flaw. But even in the puritan and evangelical tradition, the American sense of evil is curiously shallow and optimistic, more concerned with behavior (sex or drink, for example) than with the deeper states of sin. The devil can be banished, and evil can be fought; evil is seen almost as a mere "problem" to be solved. There is little sense that evil is a constant presence and inextricably mixed with good. That is why every new American generation seems to discover evil as if it had been invented...