Word: macleish
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Ever since Poet Archibald MacLeish's version of the Biblical Book of Job, the verse-play J.B., opened on Broadway last December (TIME, Dec. 22), viewers and reviewers have been choosing up sides to attack and defend MacLeish's Biblicism or lack of it, his humanism or his sentimentality...
...Incredible" Job. The Christian Century's drama critic, the Rev. Tom F. Driver, who also teaches Practical Theology at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, criticized MacLeish for making his play a non sequitur by jumping down from the theological discussion between God and Satan to dwell upon J.B.'s purely human sufferings...
...later issue of the Century, Samuel Terrien, professor of Old Testament at Union, maintained that MacLeish's J.B. is an entirely different character from Job. The Bible's Job "shouts his pride, shrieks his blasphemy, and fights with a God who eludes his attacks." By comparison, Terrien finds MacLeish's J.B. "emasculated." He is merely "the diseased victim of fate, who hardly, if ever at all, rises above the level of intellectual stupor and spiritual impassivity...
...introduction and conclusion on a much lower level. Since the picture of Job is not consistent in the first place, says Van Dusen, Dr. Terrien's complaint that J.B. is not faithful to the Book of Job is irrelevant. Instead of "slavish imitation" of the Biblical Job, "Mr. MacLeish authentically sets forth the response of a very modern man to substantially parallel adversities. And again, his J.B. is far more convincing, as he is certainly vastly more moving, than the incredible...
...design" in its widest sense; and consequently the students play with three dimensional wire models, geometric patterns, and metal masks. The presence of a first rate artist directing the courses is note-worthy; it is comparable in kind, if perhaps not in degree, to the writing courses of MacLeish and the composition courses of Piston...