The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Nov. 4, 1957

Compulsion (dramatized from Meyer Levin’s novel) re-enacts, exhaustively and explicitly, one of the grisliest horror stories of the century—the Loeb-Leopold murder case. Told in 20 scenes and lasting some three and a half hours, Compulsion begins just after two young homosexuals have, with long-calculated wantonness, killed a 14-year-old boy. There follow revelations of self-styled supermen who had dreamed of committing a perfect crime; of gay, violent, vicious Artie Straus (Richard Loeb) and his “superior slave,” Judd Steiner (Nathan Leopold); of how imperfect a crime the two had actually committed; of their dissension as danger looms, their behavior as detection narrows; of the fantasy worlds in which both had lived. There is finally the trial, with the prosecution flaunting the atrocious nature of the crime, and the defense the compulsive pathology of the criminals.

The jagged, episodic structure of Compulsion constantly stresses the factual, historical, documentary nature of the narrative. It no less constantly’ proclaims the strength of the subject matter—its ability to vibrate and electrify as theater—and the weakness, its inability to widen and deepen as drama. The cause is less the usual documentary one, that truth tends to be formless, than that in Compulsion truth lacks a spacious enough frame of reference.

Friedrich Hebbel, 19th century German dramatist, perhaps put his finger on why Compulsion fails to be large and liberating drama when he said that in a good play everyone must seem in the right. For the two killers this is impossible, less because of how hideous their crime is than how gratuitous: it lacks an understandably human motive. Clinically, the crime can be explained: given a lawless Jazz Age, two badly spoiled, rich men’s sons, a homosexual neurosis and a Nietzschean intellectual arrogance, and such a chemical mixture may explode into murder-for-a-thrill. But the case—and its causes —remain too special to expand into identifiable bedevilment in man’s fate. It is Grand Guignol in real life.

An impact of real-life truthfulness Compulsion does have, often very impressively. It recapitulates just what happened, and how, and why; it impales conscious and unconscious, willing and unwilling behavior. There are dozens of moments in the play with a power to inform, or shock, or dismay, that wholly shrivel mere theatrical make-believe; and as Artie and Judd, Roddy McDowall and, even more, Dean Stockwell, give brilliant performances. But the dozens of moments are not cumulative. Except as a history of a master-and-slave relationship, of an Artie who, devoid of normal feeling, must subsist on diseased sensation, and a Judd slowly driven by sexual feeling into becoming Artie’s companion in evil—except, in other words, for what has happened before Compulsion begins—its materials permit no inner development. Balked of psychological progression, or even moral catharsis. Compulsion can only—during its very protracted trial scene—fall back on sociological debate. For a Clarence Darrow, defending Leopold and Loeb, such debate was a lawyer’s only weapon; in Compulsion, with everything already stated, it becomes a weapon for hitting the audience about three times too often over the head. So long as it is front-page stuff (with occasional editorializing). Compulsion on its own terms scores. But the full-page editorial at the end is a real mistake.

Monique (by Dorothy and Michael Blankfort) is a child of the same French novel—The Woman Who Was No More —as the film Diabolique. The two are by no means twins, however. In the stage chiller, when Fernand Ravinel’s wife refuses to dissolve their unhappy marriage through divorce, his doctor-mistress Monique suggests dissolving it through murder. As the efficient Monique drowns the wife in a bathtub and then makes her appear to drown in a stream—a Lady Macbeth superintending an Ophelia’s fale —a scared Fernand quivers like jelly and wobbles like a tenpin. And then, when he can hardly stay on his feet, he suddenly discovers that . . .

But from there on, not even the cat’s-paw should be let out of the bag. There is enough more plot, however, to see Monique comfortably—and the audience fairly apprehensively—through a full evening; enough for the villainy to be double-dyed and the victim never surely dead.

Not for quite a while has there been a Broadway thriller with so much plot—which is fortunate, since there has not been one either with such strenuous overacting. Under Shepard Traube’s direction, a largely English cast headed by Denholm Elliott (Ring Round the Moon) and Patricia Jessel (Witness for the Prosecution) exhibit all the subtlety of a burglar alarm. But however heavy-footed in style, Monique—at least for anyone unacquainted with the book or the film—moves with considerable suspense from one plot to twist to another, and offers a passable surprise at the final curtain.