Great
Ideas Make Good Advertising
Never in this world can hatred be stilled
de Tocqueville j;t
on the progress of democracy
jhe
/
proaress
~rdemocracy seems irresistible,
because
is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most
permanent tendency which is to be found
in history.
only
be stilled by hatred;
by non¡hatred-this
is the
it will
Law Eternal.
CONSTANTINO
BRUMIDI
elegance and classical dignity which Brumidi deemed appropriate for the Chief Executive's office. Portraits of President Washington and five members of his first Cabinet decorate the walls. The frames of these portraits are painted with such consummate skill that to the casual visitor they give the illusion of being beautifully carved and the pictures hanging in the panels, although they are in fact flat surfaces. While Brumidi's art is scattered in rich abundance throughout the Capitol Building, it is in the decoration of the dome canopy, or eye of the dome, and the rotunda that his special talent found its most ambitious expression. His painting on the canopy, which is sixty-five feet in diameter, covers 4,664 square feet of fresco and is entitled The Apotheosis oj Washington. The central figure of this huge mural is the first American President, seated in majesty. He is attended by Liberty and Victory and surrounded by groups offemale figures representing the thirteen original
States of the Union. About the base of the canopy are six heroic groups in which may be distinguished Minerva, Goddess of Arts and Sciences; Ceres, Goddess of Agriculture, and the gods Mercury, Vulcan and Neptune. Each tableau has appropriate detail symbolizing the activity associated with the god or goddess. The grandeur of the whole imaginative design, with its brilliant, intense colours, moved critic S. D. Wyeth to say: "The fresco of Brumidi (on the canopy of the dome) arrests the gaze as though the sky had opened and it were permitted to look into the beyond .... Clouds of gold, azure and rose seem hanging there spanned by a rainbow, and, floating among them, forms of exquisite beauty." Brumidi was seventy-two years old when he started painting the frieze of the rotunda-a nine-foot-wide belt at a considerable height above the floor and three hundred feet in circumference. Unfortunately he did not live long enough to complete the panorama of fifteen historical
The panaramic sweep camera which taok the horizan-to-horizon aerial photograph at left of Manhattan Island, the heart of New York City, has been superseded by a lBO-degree scan camera which took the phota at far right showing a twelve-mile strip of Manhattan.
O'Neill's
Search
"the pursul °t
I
WAS SET free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails alldfl.ying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship alld the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild Joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Thus speaks Edmund Tyrone, Eugene O'Neill's dramatized portrait of himself in Long Day's Journey into Night. Only a few times has he had such an experience, says Edmund. "For a ~econd there is meaning. Then ... you are alone, lost ... again, and you stumble toward nowhere, for no good reason!" While Long Day's Journey into Night is a powerful play in its own right, the self-portrait of the artist as a young man constitutes a fascinating drama-within-the(kama. O'Neill stated frankly that he wrote the play about himself and his family in order "to face my dead"-to exorcise feelings that had haunted him since his youth. The four members of the Tyrone family correspond to O'Neill, his mother, father, and older brother. Set in 1912, the year when O'Neill was twenty-four, in the living room of a New England home like the home of his youth, the play reveals the emotional sources of the life and art of Eugene O'Neill. There is no "meaning" for Edmund Tyrone in the tortured place called home. His most intense feelings stem from his lost illusions about the mother he once adored and about the father he once idolized. For James Tyrone (like O'Neill's father James O'Neill), in becoming one of America's most famous and successful actors during the decades before and after 1900, had sacrificed potential greatness in his art in order to gain easy glory as the star of a popular melodrama. Year after year, stultifying his talent and blunting his spirit, he played the same role, unable to resist the lure of certain success and wealth. Edmund, in fact, harshly rejects everything his father stands for: the hollow career; the Catholic religion handed down from his Irish forebears; his parsimony; his philistine righteousness about "wicked" new ideas and literature. Transcending these autobiographical revelations, the play is a great domestic tragedy. The four members of the family, bound by twisted ties of affection, hatred, and guilt, enact before us one nightmarish day of their lives into which are compressed the accumulated passions of decades. As Mary Tyrone says, "the past is part of the present, isn't it? It's the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us." In an endless round of conflicting emotions, they torture each other and themselves. When son blames father for his own failures, the father lashes back, his outrage heightened by the feeling that he has
Long' Day's Journey
THE EXCERPT reprinted here is the final scene of the final act rif Long Day's Journey into Night. It takes place in the living room of the Tyrones' summer home at midnight on an August day in I9I2. The Tyrone brothers, Edmund, the younger, and Jamie, are seated at a table.
JAMIE Miserably.
Thanks, Kid. I certainly had that coming. Don't know what made me-booze talking-You know me, Kid. EDMUND His anger ebbing.
I know you'd never say that unless-But God, Jamie, no matter how drunk you are, it's no excuse! He pauses-miserably.
I'm sorry I hit you. You and I never scrap-that
bad.
He sinks back on his chair.
JAMIE Huskily.
It's all right. Glad you did. My dirty tongue. Like to cut it out. He hides his face in his hands-dully.
I suppose it's because I feel so damned sunk. Because this time Mama had me fooled. I really believed she had it licked. She thinks I alwavs believe the worst, but this time I believed the best. . His voiceflutters.
I suppose I can't forgive her-yet. It meant so much. I'd begun to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too. He begins to sob, and the horrible part of his weeping is that it appears sober, not the maudlin tears of drunkenness.
EDMUND Blinking back tears himself.
God, don't I know how you feel! Stop it, Jamie! JAMIE Trying to control his sobs.
I've known about Mama so much longer than you. I ever forget the first time I got wise. Caught her in the act with a hypo. Christ, I'd never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope! He pauses.
And then this stuff of you getting consumption. It's got me licked. We've been more than brothers. You're the only pal I've ever had. I love your guts. I'd do anything for you. EDMUND Reaches out and pats his arm.
I know that, Jamie. JAMIE His crying over-drops a strange bitterness.
his hands from his face-with
Yet I'll bet you've heard Mama and old Gaspard spill so much bunk about my hoping for the worst, you suspect right now I'm thinking to myself that Papa is old and can't last much longer, and if you were to die, Mama and I would get all he's got, and so I'm probably hoping-
shames and fears, and we want the plays about us to say 'I understand you. You and I are brothers, the deal is rugged but let's face and fight it together.' " In the plays of Arthur Miller also is the same enlarged awareness of conscious and subconscious realities, though the expression of that awareness here takes a somewhat different form. Even in the purely external matter of stage production, the techniques employed by Miller frequently call upon the subconscious responses of the audience. His various introductions to the plays, his detailed instructions relating to the setting of each particular scene, show clearly how conscious and deliberate an artist Miller is. The strong awareness of objectives and the great selfawareness with which he always proceeds have made his work distinguished in the theatre world. One other notable characteristic which Miller and Williams have in common is their poetic sensibility. For Miller his poetic embellishments are not a matter of accident, they fulfil a carefully planned, pre-designed purpose. Miller's career as a playwright has followed a distinct pattern of evolution: first came the well-made-play technique of All My Sons, followed by the imaginative dramatic construction of Death of a Salesman; last was the directly poetic historical writing of The Crucible and A View from the Bridge. Meanwhile, Miller had also written a poetic tragedy on the conquest of Mexico, which was not produced. But of all his works none deserves as much mention as the justly famous Death of a Salesman, a monumentally tragic story of the superannuated travelling salesman, Willy Loman. Shortly after the play's production, an eminent neuropsychiatrist, who at the instance of Theatre Arts magazine analysed the play, said: "Death of a Salesman will be performed over and over for many years because of its author's masterful exposition of the unconscious motivations in our lives. It is one of the most concentrated expressions of aggression and pity ever to be put on the stage." Salesmanship is the profession of approximately 8,000,000 persons in the United States. The salesman-hero in Death of a Salesman symbolizes, in his tragic intensity and agony, the plight of the American middle class.¡ Willy's passionate, self-chosen and inevitable defeat gives him a tragic stature of great dimension. An important characteristic of Miller is that not only in Death qf a Salesman but throughout his writing career this playwright has shown an intellectual consciousness of the tensions of his time and place; and, what is more, he has tried to give those felt tensions a creative expression in his work. In other words, his plays have a marked social content. Though William Inge has often been referred to in connection with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and is sometimes called, along with them, Broadway's "ruling triumvirate," his attainments are not of the same height and depth as theirs. This is not to say that Inge's success has been of an inferior quality or that his influence on the American stage as a whole has been comparatively insignificant. Like Williams, Inge also is concerned with the pathos of the woman's suffering. But unlike Williams, he prefers to supply happy endings in his plays. According to his own estimation, Inge's success is due to some extent to his ability to write of identifiable people and situations. His four well-known plays are: Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Picnic won him some major playwriting awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. These playwrights, deeply inspired by O'Neill, have built up a dramatic tradition which is being ably projected by quite a few impressive newcomers in the field. Among the latter are Edward Albee, Herb Gardner, Frank D. Gilroy, Arthur Kopit and Wallace Hamilton. Albee, already well-known for the successful off-Broadway produc-
tions of his Zoo St01Y and The American Dream, started last year on his Broadway career with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This brilliantly original four-character play, greatly acclaimed by critics, deals with man's incapacity to arrange his private life threatened by his own self-destructive compulsions. The others mentioned above have all been praised as highly promising new playwrights. A Thousand Clowns, a first play by twenty-eight-year-old Herb Gardner, was one of last year's biggest hits on Broadway. Among the off-Broadway successes of last year were Who'll Save the Plowboy, a new study of disillusionment by Frank D. Gilroy, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Bad by Arthur Kopit. Outside New York, last year also saw the world premiere of The Burning of the Lepers, an exceptional first play by the young American playwright Wallace Hamilton. Among the older playwrights who have successfully adapted themselves to the current trends and have contributed to the new theatre is Lillian Hellman, one of the major American playwrights of the pre-World War II era. Her latest play, Toys in the Attic, won the Drama Critics Circle Award in 1960 and is a powerful dramatization of a man trapped not by society, but by his family. Thornton Wilder, another well-known playwright and author of an older generation, has also recently returned to the theatre after a six-y.ear absence. His latest suite of three one-act plays entitled Playsfor Bleecker Street was one of last year's off-Broadway attractions and thematically in tune with the new theatre. The professional theatre in the United States, of course, is not all serious new plays. It is enriched every year also by a large selection of sparkling musical comedies and revivals of classics. New plays staged might be either American or foreign: among the numerous foreign plays that had successful runs on Broadway last year was A Passage to India by the Indian novelist Santha Rama Rau, based on a novel by England's E. M. Forster. Besides, there are extensive visits of foreign troupes and companies to the United States which become added attractions of each vear's dramatic season. The Kabuki dancers of Japan, the Kolo of Yugoslavia, the Moiseyev dance company of Moscow, the Royal Ballet of London, the Comedie Francaise of Paris, Swedish, Austrian, Swiss, Scottish and Italian vocal and instrumental groups, great artists of the Indian and Spanish music and dance-all and many others have performed before American audiences in the past several years. One special mention must be made here of the offBroadway playhouses, which have been in the vanguard of the new dramatic evolution in America. The term offBroadway does not describe any specific geographical location, just as some of the Broadway theatres are not situated on Broadway itself. Nor is the term off-Broadway associated in any sense with relative degrees of professionalism or amateurism. Two principal characteristics of the ofl.... Broadway theatre are, first, its economical production budgets and, secondly, its bold and idealistic' experiments with theatrical production. An off-Broadway producer, for instance, will always be willing to present any kind of play--old or new, American or foreignprovided he is satisfied that the play in question is, aesthetically, "good theatre." Naturally, Broadway cannot think of taking such risks. A Broadway production is an expensive affair, so that box-office survival necessarily becomes a matter of vital importance. Theatrical experiment is a doubtful commodity which Broadway can ill afford. Off-Broadway, for the same reason, has not only been able to contribute in the past to the very foundation of contemporary American theatre, but its pioneering efforts in presenting constantly new dramatic content and forms continue to influence the evolution of drama in America .•
In Paddy Chaye(sky's GIDEON Frederic March, top, plays God.