The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Jan. 16, 1950

The Member of the Wedding (adapted by Carson McCullers from her novel; produced by Robert Whitehead, Oliver Rea & Stanley Martineau) has much the value of a bit of garden amid asphalt and city smoke. Its virtues are refreshing and uncommon on Broadway, and its writing largely excuses its playwriting. For Carson McCullers’ novel suffers from haying been made into a play—or, rather, from not having been.

Laid in a Southern town, The Member portrays the intimate relationship of three essentially lonely people: a motherless twelve-year-old girl, a middle-aged Negro servant and a small boy. Gawky, bewildered, self-dramatizing Frankie Addams, full of emotions a size too large for childhood, a size too small for adolescence, yearns to be somebody, to count with people, to belong. Life-tempered, mellow Berenice Sadie Brown, the Addams’ cook, who has loved one man and married four, is as resigned as Frankie is agitated; little John Henry, though forever asking questions, has asked none yet of life.

In desperation, Frankie fastens on her brother and his fiancee, feels that they can share their love with her and take her along on their honeymoon. Foiled, she runs away for a night—a night of melodrama when Berenice’s foster brother is fleeing from a mob and little John Henry is stricken with meningitis. At the end, the boy and the brother are dead, and Berenice is genuinely bereft. But Frankie, having turned the corner into adolescence, is wonderfully and callously lighthearted.

The Member of the Wedding sensitively creates a small and special world, and for a while beautifully sustains it. It can be notably funny in a Tarkington-like way, yet it remembers and records the balked, anarchic feelings, the tremulous tragicomedy of ending childhood. Unfortunately, it suffers after a while from being so much less a play than a mere picture of people. It would make an ideal long one-acter. As it stands, the second act repeats the mood of the first with somewhat diminished success, and the choppy third act resorts to melodrama with no success at all.

The production helps considerably. Harold Clurman’s staging is lively, yet never sacrifices tone to trickiness. As Berenice, Ethel Waters plays with sure and simple dignity; as John Henry, seven-year-old Brandon De Wilde is thoroughly captivating. In the much more difficult role of Frankie, Julie Harris is very effective up to a point. Yet she is never really moving, never conveys something inward that cannot be put into words.