'In Abraham's Bosom' and 'The Shadow of Wings'
As I ponder [the performance of In Abraham's Bosom] it seems moving and profound. Certainly the course of its struggle is full of tragic despair…. There is, too, a certain wise balance of parts in the dramatic elements; the white people mean to be kind, but they are as lost in the midst of a race situation as the Negro is; they are moved now by human or affectionate impulse and now by a blind racial instinct and an arbitrary, desperate sense of self-preservation. The climaxes in the play are strong and bold. I seem, as I think of it, to have been present at a full, passionate story, told by a poet. Certainly this material that Mr. Green attempts is ambitious of power and devastation and beauty; we are in very deep waters with such subject matter as he employs.
But what I remember last is that for three-fifths of the time I was dissatisfied and often more than bored. The first act, up to that really inventive moment at the very last when the three Negroes dance about at the sight of the love between Abe and Goldie, was very nearly unbearable. (p. 89)
The dialogue of this play, apart from some of the curtain climaxes, is flat and seems hastily written. Considering the bold, O'Neill sort of line that the treatment essays, the speeches are sometimes surprisingly false, borrowed, conventional. One of the best signs of promise in such a play as In Abraham's Bosom would lie in the ear; for nowhere in America is there better material for dialogue than in this world of Mr. Green's; nowhere is there a more special rhythm and flavor of speech than in the South, or more warmth and naïveté of words than in Negro speech. That Mr. Green made so little of this living stuff, that his lines have so little care and so little passion for the quivering beat of life that the words might carry, is a discouraging sign in what is obviously a marked theatre talent working with material that is wholly vibrant and freshly taken out of our American life.
The best places in this play of Negro life are those like that orgiastic end of the first act…. In these there is an essence that is racial, dramatic and moving. These moments take themselves out of the hands of the actors, the pulse quickens, the glow of strangeness and beauty comes over the scene; and for a little we have the sense of a soul working and of poetic truth.
But it is between these moments that the trouble lies with Mr. Green's play. Between these high moments we cannot ask an equal tension and imagination; but we can ask more pains, more reduction of the play's progress to firm outlines that would go better with its bold technical aim. The tenderness of feeling in this work, the love of the country and soil in which this history occurs, the courage of the character delineation and the range of sentiment, all deserve more care and choice on the author's part. The glow that is in these special passages could appear, though in smaller terms of course, in the speeches that lie between them. This play is of the kind that makes you wish it well; and you resent all the more the fact that the gloom that some of its spreads over you is not the gloom of tragedy, for that might be rich and stirring, but of casual form and bad writing. (p. 90)
..…
The characters in [The House of Connelly] are clearly defined; their words—all but the heroine's—are profoundly Southern and have been well heard by the dramatist out of his own life in the South. Sometimes a detail though tiny is so startlingly Southern that none but a Southerner could savor its exactness. (p. 128)
The weakness of The House of Connelly lies in the girl's motive. There is tied up in [the] tenant's daughter the theme of the new life blending with the old, the new conditions, the strengthened blood turning back to the land, and so on. But this, though it is so large a motive in the drama, never gets quite expressed. Throughout the play, time is lost in other talk and other scenes when what we need is to get the main theme established. What has seemed to us the old love story of a beggar maid and prince turns out eventually to be the deep-laid scheme of a young woman who, with her eye on possessing the land, has seduced a weak, intense young man, and at last grown to love him. All this crucial matter is poured out in an explanatory speech, delivered at the very crisis of their emotional relations, and written like some college girl's explanation, arid and without the engaging passion or reality that so many of the other characters' lines have had. And the upshot is that thereupon the play's back is broken. On the whole, obviously, the trouble is that at bottom no dramatic image is ever discovered, no action or moment that would create for us the girl's meaning and point in the play.
The uncle's rôle, rather too long for the sting and pathos intended by it, runs somewhat too far toward the Russian flavor; and his suicide seems to me unconvincing, as well as being both untrue to this Southern type or temperament and harmful to the play's total impression on the memory. The House of Connelly remains, notwithstanding, well worth a dozen more facile works. Uncle, girl, problem or not, it is at its source poetic, by which I mean the richness, quiver and dilation that it often gives to the material presented. (pp. 128-29)
Stark Young. "'In Abraham's Bosom'" and "The Shadow of Wings," in his Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (copyright 1948 Charles Scribner's Sons; copyright renewed 1976 Lewis M. Isaacs, Jr., Executor of the Estate of Stark Young; reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons), Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948. pp. 88-90, 127-31.
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