Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This final note of affirmation seems somewhat unsatisfying, less on philosophical grounds than because it lacks dramatic truth; it does not have the strong pulse of the play behind it. For that matter, the second half of J.B. rather lacks a strong pulse. So long as J.B. is being struck down, J.B. is theatrically vibrant. But once he lies on the ground crying out why, the problem arises of giving utterance the effect of action. J.B.'s plight smacks, in dramatic terms, of the kind of situation-"in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done...
...Cold Wind and the Warm transfers to the stage S. N. Behrman's memories of Jewish neighborhood life in Worcester, Mass. The author of many urbane comedies of ideas, Behrman here wives farce with feeling. If his characters in earlier plays (Biography, Rain from Heaven) seemed not so much human beings as assorted points of view, in The Cold Wind they are often not so much human beings as pieces on a racial chessboard. And in the many places where Behrman commemorates traditional Jewish characters enacting standard roles his play is both warm and entertaining...
...audience's final memories of the play, like the playwright's of what went into it, are friendly and touching. But its Boy-Meets-Girl and its Youth-Faces-Life episodes do more than blow a cold wind upon it; then throw cold water...
...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...
MacLeish needed "an ancient structure" on which to build a contemporary play, and the Book of Job was the only one that seemed to fit the modern situation. The drama of Job is his search for meaning behind his agony, and man today is searching for meaning behind...