Word: gospeller
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...intricate perversions of self-deception, a writer of drama risks creating a vehicle so heavy that despite its real values of depth it is incapable of delivering its potential impact. To a certain extent, this is the error into which Lyon Phelps has fallen in his play The Gospel Witch. Even with cuts the production is too long, and in spite of the general excellence of the cast and the immediacy of a theatre-in-the-round presentation, the audience becomes almost numb during the last third of the play under an accumulated burden of moral complexity and hysteria...
This is not to say that The Gospel Witch is monotonous, but that it demands too much both of audience and actors. Set in the Salem of 1692, its theme is the release of the tensions of an introverted Puritanism in the creation and destruction of an unreal danger. Specifically, it deals with a young girl's accusations of witchcraft against a strong minded farmer's wife, and the implications of the case for the community and the individuals involved. The subject is temptingly rich, and Mr. Phelps has not been able to resist over-entanglement in the moral coils...
...technical quality of the production, however, is not an important factor in judging the worth of The Gospel Witch. The play, although fatiguing, is undeniably interesting; Mr. Phelps' verse and the thoughtful interpretations of the cast go far toward revealing the workings of a community gripped by irrational panic and its slow growth toward understanding. The effort which has gone into the production has been ably directed to bring out the merit of the play as it stands. An attentive audience will find it in many ways engrossing and revealing...
...social and political outrage but something even more repulsive-a lack of consideration." Nowadays, he wrote, Protestantism is not even a faith, "not a positive doctrine but a negative one. It is not an attempt at moral, spiritual or religious reform, nor an individualist explanation of the Gospel. Today Protestantism has lost all doctrinal basis and has argued itself into radical irrationalism...
...Reject." When the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1950, Abbé Dubois decided he could not accept it. "I believe about the Virgin Mary everything that is contained about her in the Gospel and I reject all that is apocryphal," he told his parishioners. "I believe more in the efficacy of the example of her faith than in the legends of the Middle Ages." Word of this heresy reached 84-year-old Cardinal Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse. The cardinal decided to give Father Dubois time to reconsider, but Dubois...