Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story, J.B. is a rich, admired, modern American industrialist with a devoted wife and five fine children. Then disaster looms and mounts; J.B.'s children are senselessly killed or brutally murdered, his possessions are lost, his house is destroyed, his wife goes away, his body sickens. All this happens against a crossfire of commentary, Biblical and profane, between Zuss and Nickles, a crossfire that continues as the stricken J.B. wrestles with his soul, with his Comforters, with his God, until at length his health is restored and his wife returns...
Taken as a theater piece, J.B. has an often stunning theatricality, notably in the first half. The spoken verse is sometimes sharp and eloquent. The circus setting, in Boris Aronson's graphically somber set, enhances both the Biblical immensities and the modern-day horror. The bearers of ill tidings to J.B.-liquored-up soldiers, flashbulb photographers, raincoated police-are peculiarly scarifying. Moreover, J.B.'s story is varied, heightened, salted, glossed by the exchanges between the Zuss of Raymond Massey and-the play's top performance-the Nickles of Christopher Plummer...
...philosophic drama, as a Job for today, J.B. is an effort of a sort and size rare in today's U.S. theater. MacLeish has confessed that Job's awful ordeal alone matches, for him, the mass sufferings of modern life (see RELIGION). And J.B. becomes a far more relevant contemporary figure if seen, not as an individual, but as a symbol of persecuted multitudes...
...modern-day Comforters-a Communist shouting that the individual does not matter, a psychiatrist pontificating that guilt should impose no guiltiness, an old-school clergyman calling glibly for repentance-bring not light but added darkness. Emerging from the depths at last, J.B. finds justification for his sufferings not so much in the will of God as in the buffetings of life; not in God's wisdom but in human love. "What suffers, loves," says J.B.'s wife...
...certain ultimate beliefs, the God of Job seems closer to this generation than he has to any other in centuries." So says Poet Archibald MacLeish, 66, author of Broadway's latest hit (see THEATER). J.B. is an analogy between the Bible's searching sufferer and modern man. In the New York Times, MacLeish explains the necessities of heart and mind that led him to write the play; he also gives a moving view of his generation's despair-and hope...