The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 30, 1950

Burning Bright (by John Steinbeck; produced by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein 2nd) suggests that misused talent can be more distressing than none at all. In this reversible raincoat of a “play-novelette,”* Steinbeck tells of a sterile husband (Kent Smith) with a fierce yearning for parenthood. His wife (Barbara Bel Geddes), out of love for him, conspires to have a child by another man. At first crushed and incensed when he learns the truth, he is at length comforted with a transcendental sense of being the father not of one child but of all children.

Steinbeck has chosen for this theme the sort of treatment that must succeed splendidly or not at all. In an effort to universalize his characters, he has made them successively circus folk, farmers, seafarers. To exalt them further, he has made them as full of mysticism as philosophers, as lavish with metaphor as poets.

The result is a jumble of the interstellar and the folksy. Characters who are neither living people nor vivid symbols traffic in blown-up emotions and rouged-up words. Besides being high-pitched and mawkish, Burning Bright is frequently dull. Steinbeck might have done far better with a few people talking simple prose in a suburb, might have remembered that writers best achieve the universal through the particular. Blake, who gave him his title (Tyger, tyger, burning bright) could also have given him a good cue: To see the world in a grain of sand.

* Also published last week in book form. Steinbeck’s theory: a short, meaty novel (e.g., Of Mice and Men) can be transformed into a play by simply treating descriptive passages as stage directions and dialogue as actors’ lines.