THEATER cHRONICLE
77
there are even passages which explain and condone his cruelty-just as
the part of Montserrat is so written as to make
him
out an ineffectual
and rather tiresome victim of practical power. He has neither strength
nor dignity and his refusal to yield is quite out of character.
Actually the play would make much more sense in terms of its un–
acknowledged but unmistakable emotional drives if the masterful Izqui–
redo were a high official of the MVD and Montserrat an unwitting
"enemy of the state" who is being asked to tell a secret he doesn't know.
But that would be too much even for the fellow-travelers of so grand
an inquisitor as Vishinsky.
Maxwell Anderson has made a spectacle of Alan Paton's novel,
Cry, the Beloved Country,
and called it
Lost in the Stars.
Paton's book,
~hich
deals with the problem of colored people in South Africa, is a
tract rather than literature. It is sentimental, the plot is conventional
and pat, there is a happy ending; still, the story is basically authentic
because Paton knows his subject, feels strongly about it, and is too in–
telligent to falsify the issue or put forward any easy solution. Only when
he attempts to be literary, as he does in the prologue, does the false
note ring out-in a pseudo-simple eloquence reminiscent of the Stein–
beck-Hersey-Saroyan routine. It is easy to guess that this was the very
element, plus the social significance, that appealed to Mr. Anderson,
for though he has distorted the story, garbled the issue, revised the
main character, and in general removed all traces of authenticity, the
"singing prose" of the prologue, set
t~
music, has been preserved intact
and sets the tone of
Lost. in the Stars.
There is not much to choose between Robles' and Hellman's hard
"clarity" and Anderson's soft confusion, but, dramatically speaking, I
must say that
Montserrat
is easier to take than
Lost in the Stars.
The Little Foxes
by Miss Hellman was a great deal easier to take
than Marc Blitzstein's musical mish-mash of it called
Regina.
And
if
I were Miss Hellman, I'd consider suing Mr. Blitzstein for making the
little foxes ridiculous. They were always too bad to
be
true, but Miss
Hellman created an atmosphere in which they were, for the moment
at least, convincing. By taking the money-mad Regina Hubbard out of
the grim, dreary, airless house in which hers and her brothers' cruel
plotting seemed believable, and putting her in a southern mansion where
the, rambler roses climb and there is sun on the porch, by introducing
a jazz band, dancing, songs, and recitative, Blitzstein has completely
dispelled the original necessary atmosphere and turned the Hubbards
into caricatures. It's quite funny, this adaptation, when you think of
all the angles.
