Theater: Day at the End of Night

Corruption in the Palace of Justice, by Ugo Betti, is about that debased fallen being called Man, who, in some unassailable corner of his tarnished soul, yearns for, reflects, and presupposes a radiant otherness called God. Compared to Justice’s rigorous goading of the individual conscience, such religiously oriented plays as Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Greene’s The Potting Shed, MacLeish’s J.B. and Chayevsky’s Gideon seem like Communion services for the morally complacent.

The progress of the play is like the scrubbing away of a painting to reveal an underpainting. On the surface, a court of justices in a nameless city and country is being investigated for harboring a “pustule of leprosy.” One of the justices has made himself an accomplice of an underworld moneybags, and this leper-judge has infected and diseased the whole process of justice. One clever judge, Cust, steers suspicion toward Vanan, the aging chief of the court. Vanan is innocent; yet he is shattered and acts guilty. As the investigation goes on, Cust analyzes the inner torment and Luciferian guile of the truly guilty party, and does it with such brilliant intuitiveness that the playgoer realizes that it must be Cust.

Vanan’s daughter Elena confronts him with a document that clears her father and implicates Cust. She is a girl of inviolable innocence and unearthly faith in her father. In a scene of demonic intensity, Cust destroys and degrades her image of her father. He tells her, in effect, that to live in this world is to be hopelessly corrrupted. Elena commits suicide by throwing herself down the elevator shaft. “I’ve not touched her,” mutters Cust, wiping imaginary blood from his hands. But she has touched his anesthetized conscience. Ironically, Cust is appointed to Vanan’s post, but the final scene finds him climbing wearily, agonizingly up the stage-rear steps to confess his guilt to the supreme justice of the land.

Betti’s underpainting enriches his narrative line with spiritual significance. Just as the man who journeys to the end of the night finds day, so Cust in his single-minded pursuit of evil finds his soul, and in that soul a damning consciousness of his own sin. Just as the world, symbolized by the court, cannot cleanse itself, being innately corrupt, so Cust the sinner cannot save himself. He needs to be redeemed by innocent blood and forgiven through the gratuitous gift of love to the totally unworthy. Elena, the symbol of this grace, performs the dual function of awakening in Cust a conviction of sin and the possibility of salvation.

The late Italian Playwright Betti was obsessed by what he called “the bewildering incongruity that we see between our existence and what it ought to be according to the aspirations of our soul.” Kafka was similarly obsessed, but he found the distance between God and Man unbridgeable, while Betti bridged it by daring to revert to orthodox Christian doctrine. Not a play to stir the passions or warm the heart but to disturb the mind and chill the soul, this exceptional off-Broadway production is an intellectual and spiritual jewel in the theater’s cardboard crown.