The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Feb. 14, 1944

Decision (by Edward Chodorov, produced by Edward Choate), if no great shakes as a play, is vigorous pamphleteering on a vital subject. Playwright Chodorov has highlighted the home-front struggle between the free-and the fascist-minded, pitting a fearless high-school principal against a viciously reactionary senator who has engineered a race riot in a war plant. Assailed, the senator strikes back, has the principal framed on a rape charge and then cleverly murdered—to give the impression that he hanged himself out of guilt. Thereafter Decision focuses on the principal’s wounded-soldier son who had returned from war confident that democracy faced no perils at home. Even when confronted by his father’s murder, he is slow to exchange personal rage for fighting awareness.

Decision is sometimes too preachy, often too lurid. It crams the son’s complex reorientation into a single scene. Moreover, if Decision gains in sharpness by keeping its drama human and local, it loses in stature: though representative, its characters do not have behind them quite enough sense of contending, irreconcilable forces.

But on its own terms Decision hits hard. And though melodramatic in plot, it is sober in tone. For all its earnestness, Decision makes lively theater. For all its unevenness, it is the season’s most thought-provoking play.

Less successful in the theater than his younger brother Jerome (My Sister Eileen, Junior Miss), stocky, swart, 39-year-old Edward Chodorov has been more adventurous. Besides landing solidly with his psychological thriller, Kind Lady, he wobbled about in farce (Wonder Boy) and a romance (Those Endearing Young Charms) before turning to polemic in Decision.

Like his brother, he has been stage-struck since childhood. Living in Manhattan, he chose to go to a high school in Brooklyn because Jane Cowl and other stagefolk had gone there. He dashed straight from Brown University to Broadway, sat around in automats dissecting the drama with an aspiring young friend named Moss Hart. Later he sat at the feet of “the master,” Jed Harris. Harris produced Wonder Boy, and Wonder Boy produced Hollywood offers. But Hollywood (Craig’s Wife, Yellow Jack), for Chodorov, is purely bread-&-butter.

Quiet and untemperamental, Chodorov is also stubborn, even cantankerous; he wears a hat in warm weather, goes without one in cold. He wrote Decision over all his friends’ protests. Says he: “Every other medium of intellectual dissemination has gone at the problem, and it was about time the theater did.” Now he wants to do “a wonderful play about the theater itself.”