the chain-gang drama, is set on an ironic date, the Fourth of July. All the action takes place between dawn’s first light and sunrise of another hot Southern day, the nearest thing to Hell in the life of the chain-gang members (black and white here are treated equally). The state legislature and judges have decreed “hard labor” for the convicts, and Captain, the head guard, is there to see that the decree is carried out. A stereotype of the Southern sheriff or “boss” (fat, sombrero-crowned, wearing a whip curled up in one boot), Captain obviously takes pleasure in his work, although he denies it. His easygoing humor loaded with sinister threats, Captain rules by intimidation and sadism. To celebrate the holiday, Captain has the guards blast off their shotguns, makes a speech to the convicts on his concept of democracy (law is of, by, and for the Establishment), and forces the convicts to sing a verse of “America.” He then proceeds to routine matters: whipping Bright Boy for talking too much and releasing Runt from eleven days in the sweatbox (unfortunately, the man is dead).

Both White Dresses and Hymn to the Rising Sun have social implications beyond their immediate themes of race and penal servitude, although Green does not push these wider implications to the fore. White Dresses shows the paternalistic economic system by which the few control the many, and Hymn to the Rising Sun shows what happens to those who step out of line: They are given a few basic civics “lessons.” The chain gang, hired out by the governor to build the railroad, is a microcosm of the whole system, and Captain, with his Mussolini-style harangue on “democracy,” in particular suggests the system’s totalitarian nature.

In Abraham’s Bosom

Like Mary McLean in White Dresses, Abraham McCranie of In Abraham’s Bosom is a mulatto who hopes to break out of the cycle of Southern degradation. Unlike Mary, Abe aspires to lift his whole race with him. He is, therefore, a much more dangerous character than Mary; Mary only wanted to go to New York, but Abe wants to teach blacks to read and write. A heroic figure who first struggles to teach himself, Abe is feared by both blacks and whites, with the exception of Goldie, a mulatto who becomes his devoted wife, and Colonel McCranie, a white landowner and Abe’s father. Although the stereotypical old Colonel whips Abe onstage (because Abe throws the Colonel’s mean white son, Lonnie, into a brier patch), he genuinely likes Abe, encourages him, and eventually helps him to open a school for black children. Unfortunately, when the Colonel dies, the children stop coming, and Abe is run out of town. Eighteen years later, Abe returns and tries to open his school again, but he is beaten by a white mob and, after he kills the abusive Lonnie, he is gunned down in the doorway of his home.

One of the many depressing aspects of In Abraham’s Bosom is the way other African Americans oppose Abe’s aspirations. His sarcastic old aunt, Muh Mack, constantly derides him, and his fellow turpentine workers consider him uppity; they are convinced that blacks are hewers of pine trees and pickers of cotton, and they resent any effort to prove otherwise. Such is the heavy weight of oppression on the blacks that they have internalized white attitudes toward them. Another psychological inversion is represented by Douglass, Abe and Goldie’s son, who, though named after a great black leader, turns out no-good and stirs up the white mob against his father. He embodies Abe’s self-defeating anger and frustration, which boil forth occasionally (although too abruptly and awkwardly) and lead to Abe’s killing of Lonnie, his white half-brother. To complete the Cain-Abel parallel, Abe sometimes thinks, in this cycle of waste and defeat, that even God is against him. In the sense that God has abandoned Abe, the play’s multifaceted title seems sardonic, a theological mockery.

Johnny Johnson

Although some of Green’s plays might be considered dated, such is not the case with Johnny Johnson, an outstanding antiwar satiric comedy. The play is as timely now as when it was written, and audiences have grown more receptive to antiwar themes. In addition, Green’s technique in Johnny Johnson caught American audiences and critics by surprise in the 1930’s; now they should be more prepared. The early critics thought they should pan Johnny Johnson for its rambling plot and mix of harsher material with comedy; nevertheless, they felt a strange affinity for the play. The play is in the epic theater style of Brecht (whose work Green had admired on his German theatrical tour, 1928-1929), complete with music by Brecht’s partner, Kurt Weill, who had fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Besides songs, other Brechtian features include emblematic settings and scenes, folk sayings, signs, vaudeville tricks, and stereotypical characters (here Green’s penchant for stereotypes served him well).

Although Johnny Johnson is a Southern bumpkin, he has enough sense to know that peace is better than war. He would rather stay home and marry his girl than fight in the war. His girl, Minny Belle, has other ideas: Swept up by patriotic fervor, she demands his complete sacrifice. Persuaded by President Woodrow Wilson’s words that this is the war to end all wars, Johnny finally enlists. Wounded on the Western Front (actually, shot in the behind), he steals a cylinder of laughing gas from the hospital and reduces the Allied High Command to silly ninnies. Having elicited from them orders to stop the fighting, he dons the American commander’s cap and coat and, with the spontaneous assistance of like-minded German soldiers, halts World War I. Soon, however, the ruse is discovered, Johnny is arrested, and the war resumes. Johnny is confined in an insane asylum for ten years, during which time Minny Belle marries his rival, the prospering owner of Crystal Mineral Springs, Anguish Howington, whom the army rejected on medical grounds.

An early example of black humor , Johnny Johnson mixes farce and horror, but its main components are irony and satire. War is announced at a small-town ceremony to unveil a peace monument, and the populace instantly switches gears. Recruits are enticed by a phonograph blaring “Democracy March,” and they are immediately introduced to military dehumanization by a brutal physical examination. The insane asylum’s debating society, solving problems and prescribing world order, sounds like Congress or the United Nations. The overriding irony is that the common man, Johnny Johnson, has better sense than his leaders but is declared insane.

As Howington’s prosperity shows, war is good for some people’s business. As the war hysteria shows, war also encompasses the nature of bloody ritual. War’s cyclic nature is suggested by the play’s ending, set in the 1930’s, that shows the pacified Johnny Johnson selling homemade toys in front of a crowded stadium from which martial noises (music and shouted slogans) are issuing. Along comes Minny Belle, fat and fur-swathed, accompanied by her son, Anguish Jr., who wants to buy a toy soldier. Johnny, however, whom Minny Belle fails to recognize, does not make toy soldiers.

Wilderness Road

The theme of war as insane ritual and the Cain-Abel theme of brother against brother continue in Wilderness Road, Green’s symphonic outdoor drama of the Civil War. Named after the road carved into Kentucky by struggling early settlers, Wilderness Road was commissioned by Berea College, a distinguished Kentucky college established in 1855 for poor people, black and white. The founding of Berea College (by abolitionists) is closely linked to the action of the play, set in the Kentucky hills nearby. Influenced by Berea’s founders, John Freeman struggles to establish a school for mountain children. At first the community supports him, but some of his slave-owning neighbors do not like his radical notion that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Berea’s motto). To these fearful neighbors, led by the politician Jed Willis, education itself is a subversive idea. Against such forces, in the midst of brewing civil war, Berea’s founders and John Freeman have to travel a “wilderness road,” like Abraham McCranie of In Abraham’s Bosom or like Jesus walking “that lonesome valley” (in the Appalachian hymn so prominent in the play). Eventually, the school board withdraws its support from John. He is beaten and the school vandalized by the hooded Knights of the White Star, also led by Jed Willis.

When the war comes, the divided community, like neutral Kentucky as a whole, sends men off to both sides. Both sides whoop it up, but, as the dead and wounded come home, the whoops change to lamentations. Performed on three adjacent stages and summarized by the play’s narrator, the Civil War panorama unfolds in swift, emblematic scenes like movie montages, but the audience gets a taste of stunning realism from the fireworks going off all around and the sound effects of shells whizzing overhead. Altogether, Green leaves little doubt that war is hell.

A pacifist, John Freeman stays out of the action until the community is overrun by Southern forces, again led by Jed Willis, who gloats that the new social order will reflect his ideas. Willis’s temporary triumph provides a shocking glimpse of the totalitarian society that might have emerged if the South had won the Civil War. Faced with this possibility, John Freeman joins the Union forces, leads a raid to destroy a key railroad bridge near his home, and is killed in action. On the railroad bridge, which supplies Southern forces, hangs the fate of Kentucky and, to some extent, the Union; thus, by his death John Freeman strikes a decisive blow for freedom. He leaves behind Elsie Sims, a girlfriend who will now marry his brother and rival, Davie (on the vast outdoor stage, the initial love interest in the play can hardly compete with the cannon fire). Also surviving, minus a leg, is Neill Sims, Elsie’s brother and John’s best student, who will carry on the school.

To a great extent, Wilderness Road, the best example of Green’s work in his most successful form, represents the culmination of his development as a playwright. Here his interests in the folk, in music, and in history are integrated; so also are the influences of Brecht and the movies. Wilderness Road, in addition, shows the coming together of Green’s various themes. Through his portrayal of civil war, of brother against brother, Green comments on the nature of all war: If God has made of one blood all nations of human beings, then all war is civil war. For purposes of persuasion, Green much preferred education to warfare, yet, as John Freeman illustrates, there are some things worth fighting for: One such thing was whether, as Lincoln said, the United States would be defined as free or slave—a very close call in American history. Green, in his life and work, was still struggling to establish the definition of freedom in the United States. A man of the South and of the folk, Green contributed more than his share to the cause.