The Theatre: Washington, by Anderson

(See front cover)

His contemporaries have left behind a rich and varied gallery of George Washington’s portraits. To John Singleton Copley is attributed a likeness of Washington as an elegant young Colonial of 25, an 18th Century dandy in a tightly curled peruke and lace ruff. Charles Willson Peale first pictured him as a strapping colonel of Virginia militia, utterly self-confident from hard years of surveying Lord Fairfax’s estates and fighting Indians in the wilderness. Again, Peale caught him flushed with victory after the Battle of Princeton. In Gilbert Stuart’s famed, unfinished Athenaeum (“dollar bill”) portrait, Washington is the First President, matured with the cares of Government, his military dash gone with his teeth. To William Williams, who painted him in full Masonic regalia for the Alexandria, Va. lodge, he was a ruddy-nosed old aristocrat full of honors and years, the owner of property worth more than $5,000,000.

Successive generations of historians, poets and playwrights have expanded the Washington legend, tried to figure out for themselves what manner of man this liberator was. In Manhattan this week a fine dramatic society, a fine playwright and a fine actor combine to render a new portrait of the Father of His Country. The Theatre Guild presents Maxwell Anderson’s Valley Forge, with Philip Merivale as Washington.

The Play. Historically, the Continental Army had its Golgotha in the winter of 1780 at Morristown, N. J. But the hardships endured at Valley Forge, two winters before, are popularly supposed to have enveloped the new nation’s darkest hour. Equipment and supplies there were in plenty. But transport had completely broken down. Technically, General William Howe and his Red Coats were bottled up in Philadelphia, but Washington’s little army of freedom was depleted by more than seasonal desertions. There were no victories. Trenton, Princeton and Saratoga were many months behind. Chased from one meeting place to another, a harried and disappointed Congress was thinking of replacing Washington with Gates.

In this historic situation, Playwright Anderson, with a free exercise of dramatic license, presents General Washington and his men for five sombre days in January, 1778. Scene I is a bunk house at Valley Forge. A squad of Virginians, starved, half-naked scarecrows with rags on their feet and bits of coonskin on their heads, have been issued their evening meal. It is so crawling vile the wretches spew it out. A pair of long-hunters are about ready to go home when General Washington and his staff stride by, looking for men with whole shoes to go on a foraging expedition.

There are deep lines on the General’s face. His boots are cracked and exposure has faded the shoulders of his blue shad-belly uniform to a fine green, like the patina on weathered bronze. The blunt backwoodsmen blurt out their resentment at not being allowed to go home, kill some wild meat for their families and return to fight in the spring. A silent man, Washington is somehow moved to unwonted eloquence. He asks his men why they are fighting at all. “Because,” they maintain, “we don’t like kings!” Washington points out that their Congress is full of knaves. Well, say the soldiers, they don’t like tax collectors. Just give their own Government a chance and see what it will do about taxes, warns the General. He then puts the cause of their revolution in a nutshell: for better or for worse, they want direct responsibility for the kind of government they live under. If they go home now, there will be no revolution to come back to next spring. The men stay.

Scene II crosses the battle lines to a ballroom in General Howe’s house at Philadelphia. Watching a humiliating burlesque of the Continental Army are the General, his staff and the Colonial ladies who have attached themselves to British headquarters. The gallant General is particularly attentive to a Mrs. Morris, mildly interested to learn that the lady is none other than Mary Philipse Morris, the New York belle whom Washington went a-courting years before only to be turned out by the ambitious Philipses. But when General Howe hears that Mary Philipse still loves Washington, is determined to go to him at Valley Forge, he cogitates a stratagem. He convinces her that Washington has lost his revolt, persuades her to carry Howe’s peace terms to him.

Mary Philipse does not find her old lover in a romantic mood. He has just had a conference with his officers. Fusty Varnum, a little country schoolmaster of a man, hard-drinking Stirling and a buckskinned bravo named Lieutenant Colonel Lucifer Tench all agree that their cause is lost. Only dark-haired Lafayette, with a girl’s face and a zealot’s voice, will not believe it so. Cries he:

. . . The air’s strange sharp, the voice rings here with a hard ring.

The beauty and newness of this American land have the young nobleman under their spell. He cannot believe the revolution will fail. But Washington is in sad agreement with the older heads. When Mary comes belatedly to fling herself at him, the Continental commander wearily sends her to bed by herself.

Next morning Washington finds the Congress has been dickering for peace with Howe behind his back. He throws two delegates out of his cottage by the seats of their pants, decides to avenge the betrayal of his men by accepting Howe’s overture, making a separate peace with the British. Agony in his eyes, he cries out to Mary:

I’ve given myself
to a footless insurrection, drained out my blood
on a mock heroic altar, made a monk
of what might have been a man. And I’ll get for that
what Jack Cade got. Three lines in a history,
touching a minor figure in a brief uprising
that died down early in some year of our Lord,
A.D., God quit the beggar.

In a haybarn on a little island in the Delaware, Washington and Howe meet. A skirmish has left some desperately wounded men lying in the barn. One dies horribly during the negotiations. Then Lucifer Tench staggers in, mortally wounded and promising to curse Washington’s memory until judgment day if he gives up the fight. Washington calls in a few ragamuffins from his band, asks them if they want to go on. They do. The decision is made. “At any rate,” observes the hard-jawed commander, “we’ll fertilize a soil that grows free men!”

Howe ruefully leaves for Philadelphia. The Americans prepare to bury their dead. Washington throws his cloak about his shoulders with the remark:

This liberty will look easy by and by
when nobody dies to get it.

“Shall we fire a volley over our dead?” he asks his men.

“No, sir. Dead men don’t hear volleys and we’ll need our powder.”

“So be it, then,” says George Washington.

The Actors. Whatever the Theatre Guild does, it does well. Directors John Houseman and Herbert Biberman were up against a particularly difficult task in casting Valley Forge. They had to get actors who looked like Colonial revolutionists instead of a table full of diners at Sardi’s theatrical restaurant. And they had to get actors who could speak Playwright Anderson’s semi-versified lines with conviction. Stanley Ridges is a particularly happy choice for the character of hard bitten Lucifer Tench. No less happy is the casting of Margalo Gillmore as the full-blown, romantic Mary Philipse. As Washington, Philip Merivale is close to perfect. Mr. Merivale is the greatest cloak-swinger on the U. S. stage. He swung one in The Road to Rome (1927-28). He swung another in Death Takes a Holiday (1930-31). He swung a third in Mary of Scotland (1934). His melancholy face with its skin stretched across the cheekbones like rawhide on a saddle frame, his clipped speech and full-stopped voice make him ideal for impersonating tragic historical figures. In spite of a tilted, completely un-Washingtonian nose, he admirably conveys an entirely credible portrait of the great general’s sombre personality.

The Author. No one is more aware than Maxwell Anderson of the pitfalls of historical drama. Quibblers are quick to pick up anachronisms, inaccuracies. Realists find the playwright’s exercise of hindsight irritating. Mr. Anderson’s feeling about historical plays is that the form is only useful when it is related to a problem of the present.

Mr. Anderson’s justification for Elizabeth the Queen on this score is that the play was intended to describe the love difficulties of a young man and an old woman. Mary of Scotland’s thesis was that history is written by the survivors. But, more than any other, the problem of government has been agitating Playwright Anderson ever since the U. S. entered its recent critical years. His attitude toward government is strictly anthropological: governments come and governments go, depending on the whims of the governed.

In 1932 his approach to the problem was a play called Night Over Taos. In that piece an old Spanish hidalgo in New Mexico in 1847 detects in his son democratic tendencies. The conflict between the two kills the old man, but not before Playwright Anderson has put in his mouth this pragmatic doctrine: . . . The north will win.
Taos is dead.
It’s right
Because what wins is right. It won’t win forever.
The kings will come back, and they’ll be right again
When they win again. . . .

Practical politics was the subject of Anderson’s Both Your Houses, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for 1933. Across his frieze of expedient contemporary Congressmen, Mr. Anderson wrote a dramatic motto to the effect that a people is worthy of the government it gets. He carries the theme a step farther in Valley Forge, asserting that, right or wrong, the government a people gets is the one it wants and should have. Neither his Washington nor his Continentals have many illusions about the republic they are about to set up, but Mr. Anderson does his best to dignify the perverse, wilful, homespun idealism which makes them fight for that republic. At a time when many people are scratching their heads over the anatomy and organism of government, Valley Forge is apt and to the point. Such is Mr. Anderson’s intention, for his forte is timeliness.

A peripatetic minister’s son, Maxwell Anderson was born in 1888 at Atlantic, a little crossroads town in western Pennsylvania. His Baptist father moved the family from pastorate to pastorate through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, North Dakota. Young Anderson graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1911, taught briefly in the public schools in that State, tried to write and finally moved away because his efforts to make lignite coal burn wearied him. He went to California, reported for San Francisco newspapers, was an English instructor at Stanford. At 46, he still has the slightly unkempt appearance, the tolerant smile, the low, mellow voice of an obscure but well-liked college professor.

When War came he was 29, married and the father of three. He did not see service. The New Republic brought him to Manhattan in 1918. Later, as an editorial writer on the old New York World, he met that paper’s book reviewer, ex-Marine Laurence Stallings. The pair decided to write a War play. The idea was Anderson’s and much of the writing. Stallings supplied the A. E. F. atmosphere and wrote the unforgettable dugout scene. The play was called What Price Glory? It was the play of 1924.

The nation had been waiting for a realistic, bunkless War play. Stallings & Anderson supplied that need. Alone, Playwright Anderson set about filling another dramatic need: a play dealing with the current ups-&-downs of the reckless young folk of the 1920’s. He called it Saturday’s Children, and once more tasted the joy of full houses and critical esteem. Gods of the Lightning, written in 1928 with Harold Hickerson, was a little too timely. A bitter denunciation of justice as evidenced in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, it proved to be medicine too strong for average playgoers. With his historical and governmental plays, Maxwell Anderson again hit a fairly consistent winning streak.

Most critics rate four U. S. dramatists in the top flight. Above all the rest stands Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, his head wreathed with the laurels of a decade’s thoughtful and utterly sincere work. Of the other three, Sidney Howard must concede a cubit or so of critical stature on account of the heterogeneity of his work, the unmistakable taint of commercialism in his bent for adaptations. Thus, neck and neck, come Philip Barry and Maxwell Anderson. Barry’s acute observations among the upper crust have produced a volume of successful work. No society reporter, Maxwell Anderson’s strong point is the honesty of his address, the dignity of his lines.

When the Anderson line is successful it is like the Notre Dame line. It has power and beauty of execution. It is rich, free-swinging, almost Elizabethan. When it fails it fails badly. Spectators at Valley Forge are likely to find the Anderson blank verse a little obscure, a little windy at times. No one will deny that he has packed his piece with some fine situations, valid emotions. But his plot for all its potentialities, is neither as tight nor as exciting as Mary of Scotland’s. Even if the play is not the sort of whopping theatrical sensation he has grown accustomed to, Mr. Anderson will probably not be wholly disappointed. In the one interview he ever gave (and that unintentionally), he temperately remarked: “All great plays I can remember were in verse. If we are going to have a great theatre in this country somebody has to write in verse, even if it is written badly.”