Word: macleish
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Though Archibald MacLeish, currently Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, considers himself primarily a poet, he has on several occasions turned to the dramatic medium. In the years just before MacLeish came to Cambridge for a year's stint (1938-39) as Curator of the Nieman Collection, he wrote three verse plays especially for radio: Panic (1935), Fall of the City (1936), and Air Raid...
During his decade as Boylston Professor, MacLeish has written four more plays. In The Trojan Horse (1952) he turned Homer's tale into a tragic and powerful parable about McCarthyism and the destructive force of fear and unreason. He specifically authorized its production without scenery, or over the radio. This Music Crept By Me Upon the Waters (1953), a comedy about five couples who have withdrawn from the banalities of the business world to a "paradise" in the Antilles, does not succeed; its obscurities prevent it from working on the stage...
...Pulitzer Prize-winning J.B. (1958), five years in the writing, nothing more need be said: these pages have already carried four articles about it by three different people, including myself, and enough's enough. Few persons know, though, that J.B. was not the first time MacLeish dramatized part of the Old Testament: he wrote a play, Nobodaddy (1925), about the Garden of Eden, which was published the following year by, of all things, Dunster House...
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...