Word: viereck
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...Viereck only knows why he wrote this play, but I have a theory. Lying sleepless one night, I hypothesize, the poet was granted a line...
...suppose that one of the functions of the Poets' Theatre is to produce bad plays by minor poets. There is no need, however, to produce them badly. Peter Viereck's The Tree Witch is mediocre poetry and abysmally bad drama. Last week's production at the Loeb Drama Center was as embarrassingly bad as the play itself...
Like a man given a golden door knob, Viereck attempted to build a mansion to surround his toy. Unhappily, his intellectual, poetic, and dramatic resources sufficed only for a pasteboard imitation of a mansion, a flimsy substitute for a play. That line was one of only four Good Things about a wasted evening...
...theory is doubtless too fanciful: Viereck would perhaps claim that he wrote his play because he had something to say to modern man. That is what one charming and intelligent lady told me during an intermission--that here was a play of interesting ideas, about conformity and spontaneity and things like that. I challenged her to name one decent idea in the first two acts, and she hemmed and hawed and hemmed again. With good reason: Viereck has simply messed around with a handful of the last decade's intellectual cliches. He is against materialism, religiosity, and scientism...
...Viereck has chosen verse to express this conflict between black and white, because "its universal inarticulate emotions can be felt sensuously through conflicting rhythms or images." He must have had another and better poet in mind when he wrote that explanation of verse-drama's advantages. Here is a sample of his verse's inarticulate emotion...