The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 30, 1936

Johnny Johnson (words by Paul Green, music by Kurt Weill; Group Theatre, producer) is described by its authors as “a legend.” It is also a fable, a fantasy, a dream of peace and goodwill stated in terms so simple and childlike that, while it may irritate the sophisticated, it should please the pure in heart.

Johnny Johnson should also appeal to playgoers interested in seeing some of the theatre’s traditional dimensions torn out and enlarged. Playwright Green, who supplied the Group with its first play, The House of Connelly, and fugitive German composer Weill, who set The Beggars’ Opera to new music with notable success three years ago, have fashioned a show which does not hesitate to exploit any form of theatrical procedure necessary to attain its end. The production begins conventionally enough in April 1917 with Johnny Johnson (Russell Collins), a tombstone carver with an odd way of thinking things out straight, surrounded by his fellow townsmen who have come to see the mayor unveil Johnson’s statue to Peace. The ceremony is interrupted by President Wilson’s declaration of war against Imperial Germany and thereafter the narrative plunges into a succession of reveries and nightmares. Torn at first between his love for his patriotic sweetheart (Phoebe Brand) and his pacifism, Johnny does not volunteer for the War until President Wilson proclaims it a war to end war.

In a series of vaudeville blackouts, he is soon befuddling the Army psychological examiners while they are trying to catechize him; enraging the drill sergeant who will not realize that Johnny is lefthanded; unintentionally stealing the captain’s girl. From this rough & tumble, the show then leaps to exalted heights when Johnny apostrophizes the Statue of Liberty as he sails away to France. And from the revue stage and poetic drama, the play proceeds to a forceful sequence of impressionistic scenes. Johnny is found in a trench with his company and while they writhe their twisted limbs in troubled sleep, three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, ghoulishly croak a lament:

We might have served a better -will,

Ploughs for the ground,

Wheels for the mill.

Johnny almost stops the War by forming an alliance with the German ranks, dosing the Allied High Command with laughing gas. For his pains he is sent home, locked up for ten years in an insane asylum.

Johnny is let out by and by. His girl has married a Wartime malingerer who made a fortune from laxative water. Simple, defeated but undismayed, Johnny becomes a sidewalk hawker. “Toys,” he cries. “Toys. Toys for good little girls and boys.” He sings a melancholy little song about his faith in man’s ultimate goodness, walks away up a long street.

Credit for the Group’s finest and freshest show since Waiting for Lefty can be squarely split four ways: to Actor Collins for his good humor and dignity in a part which might easily have been confusingly eccentric; to Donald Oenslager for a series of arresting and imaginative sets; to Poet-Playwright Green for a profound and witty evangelical address to a world he at one point concedes to be “bass ackwards”; to Composer Weill for the weird, haunting little ballads and Europeanized fox trots which immensely help to articulate the play.

Two Hundred Were Chosen (by E.P. Conkle; Sidney Harmon and the Actors Repertory Company, producers) is a play about the colony of bankrupt Midwest farmers who with great fanfare were sent by the New Deal last year to get a new start in Southern Alaska’s Matanuska Valley (TIME, May 6, 1935 et seq.). On a set devised by Donald Oenslager which has a huge, improbable limb of some coniferous tree hanging from the proscenium, hopeful men, women & children arrive singing, yapping, gossiping, making acquaintances. Because a bullying, stupid army man named Hodges makes a blunder, the colonists put in three weeks’ labor building their cabins the wrong way, are ordered to tear them down and rebuild according to specifications. Ill-humor reaches a peak with a shortage of fruit, vegetables and salt; a raid on the commissary is nipped by Hodges who has turned one colonist into a spying stoolpigeon.

Straight out of James Oliver Curwood is the character of the sturdy civilian overseer who sympathizes with the newcomers but scorns them as failures, thinks them something of a blight on the rugged country he loves. Inspired by a blonde who acts like an amalgam of Joan of Arc and a visiting sociologist, the men “come to their senses” when their children fall sick by the dozen. They put up a hospital in 24 hours (offstage). The overseer changes his mind about having them sent back, sits down to talk over development plans. Near the final curtain, inevitably, a colonist rushes onstage to announce the first birth.

The cracks in Two Hundred Were Chosen are literally calked with cinematic hokum and bucolic humor of the “Hold ‘er, Newt, she’s a-r’arin’ ” school, but beneath all this there is plainly discernible a sincere and imaginative view of an unusual social experiment. A woman fed up with the childish bickering of the males shouts the play’s most astringent line: “There aren’t any men up here—only farmers.”