point of uttering that “there is a thing called the human equation,” but he arrives at this point not through reason so much as because he has yielded to his lust for Amytis. Nevertheless, if the decision not to sack Rome is Hannibal’s, it is clear that the focus of the play is on Amytis, whose reason prevails.

The Meta-Varius subplot portrays the true and lasting love the two slaves have for each other. Because they are slaves, they are unable to marry. Their love stands in sharp contrast to the barren relationship that exists between Amytis and Fabius. Amytis persuades Hannibal to free these two lovers so that they can return to their native Sicily and marry.

The last two acts of The Road to Rome are weakened by heavy-handed pacifist diatribes, but the play’s general wittiness and the excellence of Sherwood’s characterizations are sufficient to overcome such shortcomings. It is ironic that Amytis’s relationship with her husband is based on her frivolousness, while her relationship with Hannibal succeeds because of her wit and intellect. The play attacks conformity and examines closely the difference between public and private morality. In Amytis, one can see shadows of the bright young Sherwood whose nonconformity led him to disaster on more than one occasion. Amytis is drawn delightfully and convincingly and is ever the recipient of the audience’s warm compassion.

As the play ends, Rome has been spared, Hannibal is in retreat, and Amytis returns to Fabius, who will undoubtedly receive the credit for saving Rome. The audience is also left with the strong impression that Amytis has been made pregnant by Hannibal, and it can savor the delicious irony that Hannibal’s child will be reared as Fabius’s and may himself eventually come to rule Rome. In the final scene of the play, Hannibal says to Fabius, “I wish happiness and prosperity to you, your wife, and your sons.” When Fabius responds that he has no sons, Hannibal replies, “You may.”

The Love Nest

Sherwood’s next play, The Love Nest, was based on a splendid Ring Lardner short story, but the adaptation failed utterly, both artistically and commercially, playing only twenty-three performances. Perhaps Sherwood was drawn to the story by his own domestic complications at the time. A secondary theme of the play is censorship, a subject in which Sherwood was becoming quite interested and on which he debated in 1927 with John Sumner, president of the Society for the Prevention of Vice.

The play revolves around Celia Gregg, the actress wife of a much disliked motion-picture director, Lou Gregg. Celia has risen to her present position not through her own talent but because she married a director whose reputation is shady, partly because of nudity in his film, Hell’s Paradise, and partly because of rumors about his own private life. Celia and the butler, Forbes, an unemployed actor, love each other, and before the play is over, they decide to leave and have a life together, though there is little to suggest that they have any real future. The Love Nest has some witty lines, and Celia’s dramatic drunk scene in act 2 is splendid, but the play fails because its psychological motivation is unconvincing and underdeveloped, and the dramatic tension is uneven.

The Queen’s Husband

Newspaper accounts of the official visit of Queen Marie of Romania to the United States in 1926 gave Sherwood the substance for his next play, The Queen’s Husband, a thin yet diverting comedy that ran for 125 performances on Broadway, making it moderately successful commercially. During Queen Marie’s visit, her consort was very much in the background. Sherwood’s play focuses on the consort, Ferdinand, who in the play becomes Eric VIII, consort of Queen Martha. The principality over which Eric and Martha rule is much in the hands of the military, led by General Northrup, who seeks to annihilate the opposition by executing them. Queen Martha goes along with this. The king, however, must sign the orders for the executions, and he subverts the plan simply by losing the orders. When his private secretary, Freddy Granton, finds the death warrants, Eric tells him to “take them out and lose them again.”

Eric is first presented as a doddering nonentity, but it soon becomes apparent that he knows what he is doing and that he ultimately gets his way. In a romantic subplot, Princess Anne is in love with Freddy Granton, but there are impediments to her marrying a commoner; indeed, a royal marriage is being arranged for her. On the day of the wedding, however, the king finally asserts himself, sees to it that Princess Anne marries the man she loves, sends them off on a trip to Panama, and clears the way for free elections by dissolving the Parliament. The play is filled with fairy-tale elements, and its resolution is improbable at best. It was received with some public enthusiasm as a diverting, witty entertainment, well-staged and competently acted, but it is not a play that contributes to Sherwood’s artistic stature in any way.

Waterloo Bridge

Waterloo Bridge has little more to recommend it than does The Queen’s Husband, and its run of only sixty-four performances clearly indicated a lack of public acceptance. The play succeeded better as a film, for which S. N. Behrman wrote the major portion of a screenplay that fleshed out the plot and essentially discarded Sherwood’s original script. Universal Studios produced the film in 1931, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released other film versions of the play in 1940 and 1956.

Sherwood wrote the play from the memory of an experience in London in 1918 when he was recovering from war injuries. During the festivities celebrating the Armistice, Sherwood had met an American chorus girl who had been stranded in London, where she was in the cast of The Pink Lady. She invited Sherwood to come to her flat, but he lost the address so was unable to accept her invitation.

In the play, a remarkably innocent American soldier, Roy Cronin, meets Myra Deauville on Waterloo Bridge and is too inexperienced to realize that she is a prostitute out plying her trade. He goes to her apartment and, mistaking her for a symbol of purity, proposes marriage to her. She accepts, but then she has a change of heart, leaves Roy a note, and fades from the scene. They meet again by accident on Waterloo Bridge, where she confesses to being a whore, but Roy urges her to forget her past. He loves her and shows that he does by signing over his life insurance to her and arranging for her to receive part of his pay each month. As the second act of this two-act play ends, enemy bombers are flying overhead and Roy must return to his unit. Myra lights a match and holds it up for the German bombardiers to see. The play ends with a pacifist diatribe that Sherwood puts rather unconvincingly into Roy’s mouth. Waterloo Bridge was less successful than The Queen’s Husband because it lacked the wit of its predecessor and because it often wallowed in sentimentality.

This Is New York

Not to be daunted by the failure of Waterloo Bridge, Sherwood wrote This Is New York, which also failed, running for only fifty-nine performances on Broadway. He produced the play quickly after he had put aside a play about the Crusades entitled “Marching as to War.” This historical play was never completed, but much of the material Sherwood used in it found its way into his only novel, The Virtuous Knight.

This Is New York shows Sherwood as a loyal and patriotic New Yorker but not as a consummate playwright. Irked by the provincial attitudes that had helped to defeat Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election, Sherwood set out to write a play about the hypocrisy of the provinces. He partially succeeded by lining up Senator Harvey L. Krull of Iowa and his self-righteous wife against a group of New Yorkers, including racketeers, bootleggers, blackmailers, and other such marginal figures. In the end, the Krulls are shown up as the hypocrites Sherwood set out to create, while the socially marginal characters show a warmth and humanity that ingratiate them to audiences. The key figure in the play is the Krulls’ daughter Emma, who wants to marry a New Yorker, Joe Gresham. Emma is an appealing character, believably depicted and necessary to the development of the play’s theme. After a somewhat tedious and talky first act, the play moves to a dramatically tight second act with a strong climax. The play is significant only as a step in Sherwood’s development toward being able to create and control a believable microcosm, an ability that was to serve him well in plays such as The Petrified Forest and Idiot’s Delight.

Reunion in Vienna

Sherwood visited Vienna in 1929 to attend a performance of The Road to Rome, called Hannibal ante portes in the Austrian production. While in Vienna, he met Frau Sacher of the Hotel Sacher, who became the model for Frau Lucher in Reunion in Vienna, a sophisticated comedy that came to Broadway in 1931 for a highly successful run. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne played in the starring roles, with Helen Westley as Frau Lucher. Sherwood called the play an escape from reality. This witty play contained in its printed version a preface as pessimistic as anything Sherwood was ever to write. He warned, “Man may not have time to complete the process of his own doing before the unknown forces have combined to burst the bubble of his universe.”

Set in the Vienna of 1930, Reunion in Vienna shows a city from which the Habsburgs have been exiled and in which the bourgeoisie has taken command. Frau Lucher—like her prototype, Frau Sacher—works to keep the concept of the nobility alive. She has given clandestine parties for exiled leaders who have returned for visits, and she is now planning a party to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Franz Josef. Much to everyone’s surprise, Archduke Rudolf Maximilian von Habsburg, now a taxicab driver in Nice, returns for the occasion. Rudolf’s former mistress, Elena, is married to one of the bourgeoisie who has risen in power, Anton Krug. Anton was a surgeon until the Habsburgs, whom he had opposed, had him sent from his medical post in their army to do hard labor in a rock quarry, where he destroyed his hands. When he finally gained his release, Anton no longer had the manual sensitivity to perform surgery, so he entered the practice of psychiatry.

Anton, who has every reason to hate the Habsburgs, is a rational man. Not only is he able to put past bitterness behind him, but also he is sure enough of his relationship with Elena to encourage her, when they learn that Rudolf is back in Vienna, to see her former lover and to attend Frau Lucher’s reunion. She does so and finds that Rudolf is still dashing and romantic. Anton leaves the two of them alone, and the inevitable occurs, much as it did between Amytis and Hannibal, to whom Elena and Rudolf can legitimately be compared.

Rudolf’s entry in act 2 is one of the best-prepared entries in any contemporary play. The deposed archduke is still every inch a Habsburg. The audience has been tantalized through act 1, wondering how Rudolf will appear after a decade away. Two minor characters give hints, but his entry is a breathtaking moment of pure theater. In act 3, the civilized interchange between Rudolf and Anton is well handled. Anton is the voice of reason and control, Rudolf that of emotion and soul. The night that Elena and Rudolf have together does not destroy the Krugs’s union but rather strengthens it. If their marriage is dull, it is at least secure; it provides each party with the dependable reference point that husbands and wives need.

Reunion in Vienna helped to reestablish Sherwood’s reputation after three plays that had been either outright failures or very limited successes. The play represented a turning point for Sherwood, who, after its production, was a much surer writer, even though he was to produce one more failure, Acropolis. Reunion in Vienna, dashed off in three weeks, was produced at a time when Sherwood’s marriage was foundering and when there was little reason for cheer on the world scene. Hitler and Benito Mussolini were on the rise in Europe, and the world was in the grips of the Depression. Broadway needed a drawing-room drama such as Reunion in Vienna to divert its attention from the social and political realitites that caused Sherwood to write such a gloomy preface to the play.

Acropolis

Acropolis was an important play for Sherwood. It deals with ideas concerning human freedom and dignity that Sherwood considered fundamental—ideas present in many of his works but frequently diminished in impact by his witty manner. Sherwood wrote Acropolis in 1932 while he was traveling in France with his wife and the Connellys. He had long been mulling over the ideas that were the substance of the play. He gave the script to the Theatre Guild, which turned it down because it was not sufficiently theatrical and because it had too much talk in it. The play was finally produced in London in the fall of 1933, financed largely by Paul Hyde Bonner, Sherwood’s neighbor at Grand Enton, Surrey. The play ran for only twelve performances, making it Sherwood’s worst commercial disaster.

Unlike Sherwood’s other plays, Acropolis went through many revisions. Indeed, the author was revising it up to the time he wrote There Shall Be No Night in 1940. The play, however, never seemed to coalesce into a dramatic whole, and with Sherwood’s shift away from his romantic liberalism of the early 1930’s, Acropolis in its various forms came to represent his thinking less and less each year. The play remained unpublished, although a number of manuscript versions of it exist.

The Petrified Forest

When he went to Reno for six weeks in 1935 to obtain his divorce from Mary Brandon, Sherwood rented an office and began to write. His attention turned to an Arizona tourist attraction, the Petrified Forest, which in his play by that name provides an almost eternal backdrop before which ephemeral men and women play out their small roles. The microcosm of The Petrified Forest is the Black Mesa Filling Station. The cast of characters includes Gramp Maple, an old pioneer, now senescent; his son Jason, a bit of a dolt; and his granddaughter, Jason’s daughter Gabrielle, nicknamed Gabby.

Gabby’s French mother married Jason when he was an American soldier fighting in World War I, and she returned to Arizona with him but could not tolerate the isolation. She returned to France, abandoning both husband and daughter. Boze Hertlinger is a former college football player who pursues Gabby. Into this scene enters Alan Squier, the ideological center of the play in many respects, who has recently come from France and is hitchhiking across the country. Although he is sophisticated, cultivated, and intelligent, Alan is almost bankrupt, and his future is bleak. The cast is rounded out by the Chisholms, a banker and his wife, and their chauffeur, who are all in the filling station when Duke Mantee, a desperado recently escaped from an Oklahoma prison, arrives and holds all of them hostage.

Gabby’s dream in life is to visit France, from which her mother came. Gabby, who has the vocabulary of a stevedore, quotes lines from François Villon and paints watercolors, which she will show only to Alan, who predictably begins to be attracted to her. He decides to help her realize her dream by signing over to her his five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy and then getting Duke Mantee to shoot him.

The focus of the play is badly distorted. Alan represents what is good in the world, yet he enters into a suicide pact to help Gabby. One can only conclude that Sherwood is implying that the dark forces will prevail over the bright forces in society, for with Alan’s death, which ultimately occurs onstage, the world—or at least Sherwood’s microcosm—is left to the Boze Hertlingers and the Jason Maples, people who have ceased to have a discernible purpose in society.

One important theme in The Petrified Forest is that the pioneer, who led to the development of the United States, is fading from the scene. Gramp was a pioneer, but now he is too old to qualify as one. If Alan has the potential to be a sort of ideological pioneer, his death precludes that possibility. Duke Mantee comes across as the man of action, suggestive of Harry Glassman, the racketeer in This Is New York; Mantee is, despite his criminal record, infinitely more decent and promising than the senator and his wife.

Although The Petrified Forest is flawed structurally and thematically, as John Howard Lawson has demonstrated quite brilliantly in his Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936), it was theatrical in the highest sense, and Broadway received it well. It played for nearly two hundred performances. Adapted for the screen in 1936, The Petrified Forest featured Leslie Howard as Alan Squier, Bette Davis as Gabby, and Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee. It is in its film version that the work is best remembered.

Idiot’s Delight

In Idiot’s Delight, Sherwood again employed the device of placing a diverse group of people in a confined microcosm and putting them under considerable tension. Idiot’s Delight could not have been more appropriate for its time: Its New York opening followed Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia by two days; its London opening came a week after Hitler had invaded Austria. The world was tense, and Sherwood’s play captured and exploited this tension.

As the play opens, the audience is presented with a cast that includes a weapons manufacturer and his mistress; a French Marxist labor leader who is executed before the play is over; two British honeymooners; a German scientist who is about to develop a cure for cancer but must now rush home to the Vaterland to work on developing poison gases; and Harry Van, a “hoofer” who is the guardian of a group of traveling showgirls. This mismatched group is stranded at the Hotel Monte Gabriele, just over the Italian border from Austria and Switzerland. All of them are being held by the Italian government because of the international tensions that have developed. They are essentially unable to control their own destinies, much as the people being held by Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest were unable to control their own destinies, save for Alan Squier, who willed his own execution.

Lynn Fontanne, who played the role of Irene, the munitions manufacturer’s mistress, urged on Sherwood the revision from which the title is drawn. Sherwood expanded Fontanne’s part and wrote into it the speech about God as a “poor, lonely old soul. Sitting up there in heaven, with nothing to do but play solitaire. Poor, dear God. Playing Idiot’s Delight.”

The play, although it is a delightful comedy, reflects the same sort of futility that was evidenced in The Petrified Forest. In it, Sherwood clearly expresses the conviction that intelligent people do not run things but rather are pawns in a system controlled by those of evil intent. In Sherwood’s own eyes, the play missed its mark as a seriously intended comedy. Although it ran for more than three hundred performances and won for its author his first Pulitzer Prize in drama, Sherwood was forced to admit that “the trouble with me is that I start off with a big message and end with nothing but good entertainment.” The play is best understood if it is viewed essentially as a moral rather than a political statement. Sherwood also wrote the film scenario for Idiot’s Delight, for which he was paid $135,000 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The play represented an important step in Sherwood’s development and in his public recognition.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois

It was two years before Sherwood was to have another opening on Broadway. During this time, he was much occupied with setting up the Playwrights’ Producing Company, whose first production was to be Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Six feet, seven inches tall himself, Sherwood knew something of the isolation of being very tall, and in significant ways, he identified personally with Lincoln. The play, in three acts, is divided into twelve scenes and covers a thirty-year time span. It begins in New Salem, where the young Lincoln was postmaster, moving in the second act to Springfield, where Lincoln practices law and meets Mary Todd, whom he marries after once refusing to marry her on their appointed wedding day. In the last act, Lincoln is seen debating Stephen Douglas, becoming a presidential candidate, and winning the election. The play ends just as Lincoln is to leave for Washington to assume the presidency.

The character of Lincoln is psychologically well drawn, particularly in regard to his early association with and ultimate marriage to Mary Todd. She represents what the young Lincoln most fears—duty. Had he not married her, one must wonder whether he would ever have become president. Certainly, he is brought to the brink of leaving Illinois and going out to Nebraska with Seth Gale, in which case he could never have become president. Mary is persistent, however, and Lincoln marries her, thus beginning on the course that she has carefully plotted.

The themes of Abe Lincoln in Illinois were timely for the late 1930’s. The problems that Lincoln faced and the moral dilemmas with which he wrestled were not unlike those that perplexed the pacifist Sherwood, who was being forced to question his moral stand as Hitler threatened the whole of Europe.

Parts of the play are sketchy. The first-act curtain falls on a young Lincoln, immature and uncertain, only to rise years later on a Lincoln who has matured between the acts. Sherwood does not demonstrate the maturing process but rather presents it for the audience to accept, which it can easily do because the Lincoln story is so well known. Similarly, the play ends before the crucial events of Lincoln’s term of office, but this is quite immaterial to audiences who are fully aware of the tragic story of the Lincoln presidency. The play, an initial Broadway success that ran longer than any other Sherwood production, has probably been performed more often and been seen by more people that any other Sherwood play, and it is the play with which he is most readily identified today.

There Shall Be No Night

Sherwood’s pacifism had been severely put to the test as the 1930’s drew to a close. On the last Christmas Day of the decade, Sherwood heard William Lindsay White’s broadcast from Finland called “Christmas in the Mannerheim Line,” and it convinced him more than had anything else previously that the United States could not isolate itself from the rest of the world but must intervene to stop the spread of totalitarianism. His patriotism reached new heights, but this was no narrow patriotism. Rather, it had to do with the survival of the highest ideals that Sherwood held. Within six months, he was to make his stand clear, first by writing There Shall Be No Night, which he began on January 15, 1940, and which he delivered to the Lunts three weeks later, and then, in May, 1940, by spending $24,000 of his own money to run a full-page advertisement in more than one hundred American newspapers, calling on his compatriots, and particularly on writers, to stop Hitler. It was this advertisement that attracted President Roosevelt’s attention and drew Sherwood into government service.

There Shall Be No Night was based on the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939; before the play ran in London, however, by which time Finland had fallen, Sherwood rewrote it, changing the locale from Finland to Greece and making the aggressors German rather than Russian. The play revolves around the Valkonen family and their trials as their country moves into a state of war. Valkonen is an eminent neurologist, a winner of the Nobel Prize. He, his wife Miranda, and his son Erik are gentle people who live lives of great civility in Helsinki, until the war comes and their lives crumble. Before the play is over, they are all dead or about to die except for Erik’s fiancé, Kaatri. Pregnant with Erik’s child; she escapes to the safety of America, where her delivery will give the Valkonens “one little link with the future.” “It gives us the illusion of survival,” says Miranda as the play ends, “and perhaps it isn’t just an illusion.” The play is filled with ironies, the chief one being that the most worthwhile people are defeated and destroyed. Dr. Ziemssen, the German consul in Helsinki, is by training an anthropologist, yet he is supporting a plan of genocide, clearly stating that the plan outlined in Hitler’s Mein Kampf is now operative.

An immensely moving play, There Shall Be No Night probably did more to mold the consciences of American audiences of its day than any play on the New York stage. It offers no strong ray of hope; rather, Sherwood brings audiences right into the vortex of a cosmic problem and leaves them there to struggle against the forces into which he has plunged them. There Shall Be No Night, Sherwood’s first full-fledged tragedy, was unrelenting in its pessimistic realism and in its call to action.

Later Plays

Sherwood was never again to write a notably successful play, although he continued to score successes in his screenplays, and his Roosevelt and Hopkins was one of the great books to come out of the war period. Of his final plays, Miss Liberty was a popular light musical that ran for 308 performances, while The Rugged Path and Small War on Murray Hill were both artistic and commercial failures. Morey Vinion, the protagonist in The Rugged Path, speaks toward the end of the play for Sherwood and helps to explain his inability to write with the verve and wit that he achieved so easily in the 1930’s: “I am no longer impressed by the power of the pen. For years I wrote about what was coming. I tried to tell what I had seen and heard and felt. I wrote my heart out. But it did no good.” By the time the United States had entered and fought in a world conflict, Sherwood was too dispirited to be able to write with the conviction that earlier drove him.