Word: macleish
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...disappointed in your Dec. 22 articles on Archibald MacLeish's J.B. He is right in claiming that the God of Job is closer to this generation than any other. The world is not what we naively wish it were. Man should not have the feeling "that life owes him something . . ." When we begin to see that things no longer obey our wishes, we are matured. This is the answer of the Lord from the whirlwind...
...Crowds queued up last week along Manhattan's West 52nd Street in front of the ANTA Theater, which houses neither a fluffy comedy nor a roaring musical, but a somber, free-verse reworking of the Book of Job. Poet Archibald MacLeish's J.B. (TIME, Dec. 22) was booked onto Broadway with scant attention from theater-party givers and a skimpy advance sale of $46,000. On top of that it ran into the truly Jobian trial of New York's newspaper strike, which muffled the critics' unanimous raves. Yet when news about J.B. did spread...
Many writers have noted that MacLeish's hero (alias Job) gets his sobriquet from the present-day practice of calling American business executives by their initials. But no-one seems to have mentioned that he also gets it from the widespread ancient Hebrew custom of omitting vowels from the written language...
...MacLeish's writing runs the gamut from the loftiest poetic imagery to colloquial vulgarisms. And he makes use of an effective gimmick for underscoring certain crucial lines by employing a celestial prompter over a loudspeaker, whose words are then delivered by the actor on stage; it brings to mind the old French dictum, "Un beau vers on peut entendre deux fois...
...MacLeish set his play in "a traveling circus which has been on the roads of the world for a long time." Boris Aronson has complied by designing a circus maximus that is the finest set of the season. Doing away completely with a proscenium curtain, the set bulges out into the audience. A raked stage boasts a marvelously rhythmic series of ramps and stairs, culminating in a funambulist's platform that doubles as a modern counterpart of the old Greek drama's theologeion. There are ropes and pulleys, and part of the canvas tent...