Word: error
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Margin for Error (by Clare Boothe; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) breaks the jinx on anti-Nazi plays (five in a row flopped last season) by breaking the mold. Playwright Boothe makes everything Nazi-totsy by shifting her scene to the U. S., turning her tale into a lively mystery melodrama, and peppering it with wisecracks like those in The Women and Kiss the Boys Goodbye...
Laid in the German consulate of "an American city," Margin for Error dishes up a consul (admirably played by Otto L. Preminger) who-to go easy on him-steals, lies, blackmails, double-crosses and is all ready for murder. It requires, indeed, a whole act to take inventory of his villainies and when, at the end of the act, he is found dead, practically everybody in the cast has a dozen splendid reasons for being glad...
When Margin for Error was having its pre-Broadway tryout in Washington, the German Embassy obligingly gave it free publicity by protesting to Secretary Hull that the play was "derogatory" to the Reich. But, though the Nazi Consul is hardly a Chevalier Bayard, and Hitlerism is scarcely recommended to U. S. audiences, Margin for Error is much less propaganda than entertainment. At its best it is both: somebody asks, "What would Hitler say if he found out that his mother was Jewish?", is answered, "He would say he's Jesus...
Psychologists tell us that war, depression, crime, labor troubles, and race prejudice have their roots in mental processes. But they have been loath to apply their convictions to the correction of social error. Rather they have chosen to measure intelligence, the speed with which rats learn how to thread a maze in order to reach food and the like...
...great appeal and the great value of Marxism lay in its passion for social justice, and this Parkes excepts from autopsy. Marx was right, Parkes believes, in encouraging a militant trade unionism. Industrial democracy is essential. But the crucial error of Marxism, as Parkes sees it, was the theory that freedom could be attained only in a collectivized society. On this point the evidence is mountain-high. Says Henry Bamford Parkes: "Capitalist society is half free and half slave; instead of extending freedom to all, the Marxists propose to abolish the freedom...