Against Interpretation (20 page)

After the Fall
does not present an action, but ideas about action. Its psychological ideas owe more to Franzblau than to Freud. (Quentin’s mother wanted him to have beautiful penmanship, to take revenge through her son upon her successful but virtually illiterate businessman husband.) As for its political ideas, where politics has not yet been softened up by psychiatric charity, Miller still writes on the level of a left-wing newspaper cartoon. To pass muster at all, Quentin’s young German girl friend—this in the mid-1950s—has to turn out to have been a courier for the 20th of July officers’ plot; “they were all hanged.” Quentin’s political bravery is demonstrated by his triumphantly interrupting the harangue of the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to ask, “How many Negroes do you allow to vote in your patriotic district?” This intellectual weak-mindedness of
After the Fall
leads, as it always does, to moral dishonesty.
After the Fall
claims to be nothing less than modern man taking inventory of his humanity—asking where he is guilty, where innocent, where responsible. What I find objectionable is not the peculiar conjunction of issues, apparently the exemplary issues of the mid-20th century (Communism, Marilyn Monroe, the Nazi extermination camps), which Quentin, this writer
manqué
pretending throughout the play to be a lawyer, has recapitulated in his own person. I object to the fact that in
After the Fall
all these issues are on the same level—not unexpectedly, since they are all in the mind of Quentin. The shapely corpse of Maggie-Marilyn Monroe sprawls on the stage throughout long stretches of the play in which she has no part. In the same spirit a raggedy oblong made of plaster and barbed wire—it represents the concentration camps, I hasten to explain—remains suspended high at the back of the stage, occasionally lit by a spot when Quentin’s monologue swings back to Nazis, etc.
After the Fall’s
quasi-psychiatric approach to guilt and responsibility elevates personal tragedies, and demeans public ones—to the same dead level. Somehow—staggering impertinence!—it all seems pretty much the same: whether Quentin is responsible for the deterioration and suicide of Maggie, and whether he (modern man) is responsible for the unimaginable atrocities of the concentration camps.

Putting the story inside Quentin’s head has, in effect, allowed Miller to short-circuit any serious exploration of his material, though he obviously thought this device would “deepen” his story. Real events become the ornaments and intermittent fevers of consciousness. The play is peculiarly loose-jointed, repetitive, indirect. The “scenes” go on and off—jumping back and forth, to and from Quentin’s first marriage, his second marriage (to Maggie), his indecisive courtship of his German wife-to-be, his childhood, the quarrels of his hysterical, oppressive parents, his agonizing decision to defend an ex-Communist law-school teacher and friend against a friend who has “named names.” All “scenes” are fragments, pushed out of Quentin’s mind when they become too painful. Only deaths, inevitably offstage, seem to move Quentin’s life along: the Jews (the word “Jews” is never mentioned) died long ago; his mother dies; Maggie kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates; the law professor throws himself under a subway train. Throughout the play, Quentin seems much more a sufferer than an active agent in his own life—yet this is precisely what Miller never acknowledges, never lets Quentin see as his problem. Instead, he continually exonerates Quentin (and, by implication, the audience) in the most conventional way. For all troubling decisions, and all excruciating memories, Miller issues Quentin the same moral solvent, the same consolation. I (we) am (are)
both
guilty and innocent, both responsible and not responsible. Maggie was right when she denounced Quentin as cold and unforgiving; but Quentin was justified in giving up on the insatiable, deranged, self-destructive Maggie. The professor who refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee was right; but the colleague who did testify cooperatively had a certain nobility, too. And (choicest of all), as Quentin realizes while touring Dachau with his Good German girl friend, any one of us could have been a victim there; but we could as well have been one of the murderers, too.

The circumstances and production of the play are marked by certain perverse strokes of realism that underscore the bad faith, the have-it-both-ways temper of the play. That vast sloping stage painted slate gray and empty of props, the mind of contemporary man, is so pointedly bare that one can’t help jumping when Quentin, sitting much of the time stage-front on a box-like form and chain smoking, suddenly deposits the ashes in some mysterious pocket ashtray in the abutment. One is jarred again at the sight of Barbara Loden made up like Marilyn Monroe, displaying the mannerisms of Monroe and bearing a certain physical resemblance to Monroe (though lacking the fullness of figure needed to complete the illusion). But perhaps the most appalling combination of reality and play lies in the fact that
After the Fall
is directed by Elia Kazan, well known to be the model for the colleague who named names before the Committee. As I recalled the story of the turbulent relations between Miller and Kazan, I felt the same queasiness as when I first saw
Sunset Boulevard,
with its dizzying parody of and daring references to the real career and former relationships of Gloria Swanson, the old movie queen making a comeback, and Erich Von Stroheim, the forgotten great director. Whatever bravery
After the Fall
possesses is neither intellectual nor moral; it is the bravery of a species of personal perversity. But it is far inferior to
Sunset Boulevard:
it does not acknowledge its morbidity, its qualities of personal exorcism.
After the Fall
insists, as it were, to the bitter end, on being serious, on dealing with big social and moral themes; and as such, it must be judged sadly wanting, in both intelligence and moral honesty.

Since it insists on being serious, I suspect that
After the Fall
will seem just as belabored, trite, and dated in a few years as O’Neill’s
Marco Millions,
the second play in the Lincoln Center Repertory, does now. Both plays are disfigured by a distressing (though, one imagines, unconscious) complicity with what they profess to attack. The attack which
Marco Millions
launched upon the philistine values of American business civilization itself reeks of philistinism;
After the Fall
is a long sermon in favor of being tough with oneself, but the argument is soft as mush. It is indeed difficult to choose between the two plays, or their productions. I don’t know which is more heavy-handed: Marco Polo’s Babbittish exuberance over the wonders of Cathay (“Sure is a nice little palace you got here, Khan”—Americans are crude and materialistic, see?) or the weird declamations, at times archly poetic and stilted, at times WEVD soap opera, of Miller’s hero Quentin (Americans are tormented and complex, see?). I don’t know which I found more monotonous, less ingratiating as an acting performance—Jason Robard Jr.’s depleted, gauche Quentin or Hal Holbrook’s hysterically boyish Marco Polo. I could hardly tell Zohra Lampert when she was the Bronxy chick who keeps running into Quentin’s head to slobber all over him for giving her the courage to have a nose job from Zohra Lampert when she was supposed to be that elegant lovelorn flower of the Orient, Princess Kukachin, in
Marco Millions.
True, Elia Kazan’s staging of
After the Fall
was stark and moderne and repetitive, while José Quintero’s staging of
Marco Millions
was tricky and pretty and had the advantage of Beni Montresor’s lovely costumes, though the stage was so badly lit you couldn’t be sure of what you saw. But the differences in the productions seemed trivial, when you consider that Kazan had toiled over a bad play, and Quintero over a play so juvenile that no production, however good, could redeem it. The Lincoln Center Repertory group (our National Theater?) is a stunning disappointment. It’s hard to believe that all its vaunted freedom from Broadway commercialism has begotten are passably acted productions of this wretched play by Miller, a play by O’Neill so bad it isn’t even of historical interest, and a fatuous comedy by S. N. Behrman that makes
After the Fall
and
Marco Millions
look like works of genius.

*   *   *

If
After the Fall
fails as a serious play because of its intellectual softness, Rolf Hochhuth’s
The Deputy
fails because of its intellectual simplicity and artistic naïveté. But this is failure of another order.
The Deputy
has been put into awkward English and, clearly, Hochhuth couldn’t care less about the truth of Aristotle’s observation that poetry is more philosophical than historical; Hochhuth’s characters are little more than mouthpieces for the exposition of historical facts, exhibits of the collision of moral principles. But after the way in which Miller turns all events into their subjective reverberations, the artistic weakness of
The Deputy
seems almost condonable.
The Deputy
has all the directness toward its subject that Arthur Miller’s play lacks. Its virtue is precisely that it refuses to be subtle about the murder of the six million Jews.

But the production by Herman Shumlin is as far from Hochhuth’s play (as written) as that play (as written) is from being a great play. Hochhuth’s crude but powerful six to eight hour documentary in play form has been put through Shumlin’s Broadway Blendor and emerges as a two hour and fifteen minute comic strip, and a dull one to boot—the story of a handsome, well-born hero, a couple of villains, and a few fence-sitters, titled The Story of Father Fontana, or Will the Pope Speak?

I’m not of course insisting that the whole six to eight hours must be played. The play as written
is
repetitive. But a theater public that is willing to sit through four or five hours of O’Neill could surely be persuaded to sit through—say—four hours of Hochhuth’s play. And it is not hard to imagine a four-hour version that would do justice to the narrative. From the present Broadway version, one would never guess that the noble SS Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein (a true person) is as important a character and as much the hero of
The Deputy
as the Jesuit Father Fontana (a composite figure based on two heroic priests of the period). Neither Eichmann, nor the notorious Professor Hirt, nor the Krupp industrialist—all important characters in Hochhuth’s play as he wrote it—appears at all in the Broadway version. (Among the dropped scenes, one particularly misses Act I, Scene 2, the party given by Eichmann.) By concentrating exclusively on the story of Fontana’s vain appeals to the Pope, Shumlin has gone far toward burying the historical memories which Hochhuth’s play aims to keep alive. But this drastic simplification of Hochhuth’s historical argument is not even the worst offense of Shumlin’s version. The worst offense is the refusal to dramatize anything really painful to watch. Certain scenes in
The Deputy
are excruciating to read. None of this—the terror and torture, the gruesome boasts and banter, even the recitals of unimaginable statistics—has been retained. The entire horror of the murder of the six million has been reduced to one scene of police interrogation of some Jewish converts to Catholicism, plus a single image repeated three times in the course of the play: a line of bent, ragged figures shuffles across the dark rear of the stage; midstage stands an SS man, his back to the audience, yelling something that sounds like “Move along now!” A conventional image; an entirely palatable image; an image which neither stirs, nor disgusts, nor terrifies. Even Fontana’s long monologue, the speechifying scene on the freightcar headed for Auschwitz—the seventh of the eight scenes in Shumlin’s emasculated version—was cut just before opening night. Now the play moves directly from the confrontation between the Pope and Father Fontana at the Vatican to the final scene in Auschwitz, of which all that’s left is the amateurish philosophical debate between the demonic SS doctor and Fontana, who has donned the yellow star and elected martyrdom in the gas chambers. The reunion of Gerstein and Fontana, their appalling discovery that Jacobson has been captured, the torture of Carlotta, the death of Fontana—all are omitted.

Although the decisive damage is already done by the version which Shumlin has carved from the play, it should be noted that the production is in most ways inadequate as well. Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s slim allusive sets belong to another director; they are lost on a production utterly lacking in the slightest subtlety or stylization. The actors are no more but no less inept and unskillful than the average Broadway cast. As usual, there is the same over-statement of emotions, the same monotony of movement, the same mélange of accents, the same flatness of style that makes for the low level of American acting. The leads, who are English, seem more gifted—though their performances are thin. Emlyn Williams plays Pope Pius XII with a hesitant stiffness of movement and speech, presumably designed to indicate Papal solemnity, which aroused my suspicion that he was indeed the late Pope, exhumed for the occasion, and in an understandably fragile condition. At the least, he looked suspiciously like the life-size statue of Pius XII behind glass near the entrance of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Jeremy Brett, who plays Father Fontana, has an agreeable presence and lovely diction, though he floundered badly when he had to convey real despair or terror.

These recent plays—and some others, like
Dylan,
which it would be a mercy to pass over in silence—illustrate once again that the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reducible to a cliché, and the function of a cliché is to castrate an idea. Now, intellectual simplification has its uses, its value. It is, for example, absolutely indispensable to comedy. But it is inimical to the serious. At present, the seriousness of the American theater is worse than frivolity.