Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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POETRY AND EXPERIENCE (204 pp.)-. Archibald MacLeish-Houqhton Mifflin...
...speak in Harvard Hall last year will remember); it has the built-in advantage of immediately alienating a certain number of ineffectuals and of subtly flattering the educated majority; thus it is considered controversial. It also permits Mr. MacDonald to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures: insulting Archibald MacLeish...
This year MacLeish wrote another play, The Secret of Freedom, which was printed in the October issue of Esquire. Penned expressly for television, it will be broadcast later this season. This is his first prose play, and it is an avowedly propagandistic piece. It deals with folks-next-door-and-around-the-corner, like Wilder's Our Town but less artfully. Structurally, it flows well. One arresting feature: from time to time as a character speaks he will vanish from the screen and become merely an auditory commentator, while the screen shows film-clips from newsreels and documentaries...
...play presents a good many hackneyed ideas about foreign and domestic policy, but they are ideas that MacLeish obviously feels need to be restated. He hammers his main point too many times; but perhaps it is unfair to condemn him for this since the play is aimed at the mass TV audience with its celebrated mental age of 14. At any rate, the whole thing is handled with good taste, and hopefully it will achieve its proletarian purpose...
...every one of his plays, MacLeish is not wasting his time. He is always the statesman-teacher, dramatizing with serious intent the things he feels strongly about, which are the things he feels we should feel strongly about. He reminds us that the highest role of playwriting is to show and explain Man to himself...