Timebends (61 page)

I have never been surprised by the New York reception of a play, and opening night in the Martin Beck, some four years after
Salesman,
was no exception. I knew we had cooled off a very hot play, which therefore was not going to move anyone very deeply. It was not a performance from within but a kind of conscious rendering. Jed indeed had intimated more than once that he detested the emotionalism of Kazan's productions and was going to do
The Crucible
with his customary style. What I had not quite bargained for, however, was the hostility in the New York audience as the theme of the play was revealed; an invisible sheet of ice formed over their heads, thick enough to skate on. In the lobby at the end, people with whom I had some fairly close professional acquaintanceships passed me by as though I were invisible.

The reviews were not as bad as I had expected, although the
Times
calling the play cold reminded me of Jed's claim to have taken Brooks Atkinson to lunch during the rehearsals of Thornton Wilder's
Our Town,
hoping to prime him for what was then the revolutionary idea of a setless play. “I invited him into rehearsals so he could learn about the theatre, and I told him, I said, ‘Brooks, you don't know anything about the theatre, why don't we start giving you lessons with this play?' And he kind of chuckled and said he would love it but the
Times
critic just couldn't do anything like that.” And in fact, in his review of
The Crucible,
Atkinson could not separate the play from the cold production at all.

Business inevitably began falling off in a month or so, and Kennedy and Beatrice Straight would shortly leave for films. The rest of the cast insisted on playing even with little or no pay, especially after one performance when the audience, upon John Proctor's execution, stood up and remained silent for a couple of minutes, with heads bowed. The Rosenbergs were at that moment being electrocuted in Sing Sing. Some of the cast had no idea what was happening as they faced rows of bowed and silent people, and were informed in whispers by their fellows. The play then became an act of resistance for them, and I redirected it with Maureen Stapleton as Elizabeth Proctor and E. G. Marshall taking Kennedy's place. I had the sets removed to save stagehand costs and played it all in black, with white lights that were never moved from beginning to end. I thought it all the stronger for this simplicity. We managed to extend the run some weeks, but finally a sufficient audience was simply not there. After the last curtain I came out on the stage and sat facing the actors and thanked them, and they thanked me, and then we just sat looking at one another.
Somebody sobbed, and then somebody else, and suddenly the impacted frustration of the last months, plus the labor of over a year in writing the play and revising it, all burst upwards into my head, and I had to walk into the darkness backstage and weep for a minute or two before returning to say goodbye.

In less than two years, as always in America, a lot would change. McCarthyism was on the wane, although people were still being hurt by it, and a new
Crucible,
produced by Paul Libin, opened in one of the first off-Broadway productions in New York's history, at a theatre in the Martinique Hotel. It was a young production, with many of the actors neophytes who had none of the original cast's finish, but it was performed this time as it was written, desperate and hot, and it ran for nearly two years. Some of the critics inevitably concluded that I had revised the script, but of course not a word had changed, though the time had, and it was possible now to feel some regret for what we had done to ourselves in the early Red-hunting years. The metaphor of the immortal underlying forces that can always rise again was now an admissible thing for the press to consider.

In time,
The Crucible
became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there—it is either a warning of tryanny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past. As recently as the winter of 1986 the Royal Shakespeare Company, after touring
The Crucible
through British cathedrals and open town squares, played it in English for a week in two Polish cities. Some important government figures were in the audience, by their presence urging on its message of resistance to a tyranny they were forced to serve. In Shanghai in 1980, it served as a metaphor for life under Mao and the Cultural Revolution, decades when accusation and enforced guilt ruled China and all but destroyed the last signs of intelligent life. The writer Nien Cheng, who spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, told me that after her release she saw the Shanghai production and could not believe that a non-Chinese had written the play. “Some of the interrogations,” she said, “were precisely the same ones used on us in the Cultural Revolution.” It was chilling to realize what had never occurred to me until she mentioned it—that the tyranny of teenagers was almost identical in both instances.

In the late fifties a touching film version was made by the French
director Raymond Rouleau, with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, who had reportedly had a big impact in the stage production (I was prevented from seeing it under a State Department travel ban). Jean-Paul Sartre's screenplay, however, seemed to me to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities. Sartre laid the witchcraft outbreak to a struggle between rich and poor peasants, but in reality victims like Rebecca Nurse were of the class of relatively large landowners, and the Proctors and their like were by no means poor. It amused me to see crucifixes on the farmhouse walls, as they would be in French Catholic homes but never, of course, in a Puritan one. Nonetheless, Simone Signoret was immensely moving, and the film had a noble grandeur, Salem and the Proctors sharing a wonderfully French sort of sensuality whose repression trembled with imminent disaster.

In 1965 I had the curious satisfaction, sitting behind a young British couple at Olivier's production, of catching a remark the woman made to her escort after the second-act curtain: “I believe this had something to do with that American senator—what was his name?” The play had now become art, cut from its roots, a spectacle of human passions purely. Overhearing, I felt as though I had returned from the dead, and it felt good.

But at the time,
The Crucible
was still another defeat—about which, however, I was far from regretful. I had spoken my piece into the teeth of the gale. People now assumed I had some claim on leadership, and though that was the last thing in my mind, it was hard to avoid an occasional speech, as when the Newspaper Guild asked me to address them on John Foster Dulles's recent declaration that his State Department had a perfect right to refuse newsmen passports for a trip to China: “If the Government has the right to forbid businessmen from helping Chinese Communism by doing business with them, the obligation of writers is no different.” He apparently imagined his ban on information about it would cause the world's most populous nation to drop out of history. Paraphrasing Hitler on war, I called this “total diplomacy,” and the
Times
ran a respectable report of my remarks. But one would have had to be a fool to think the American people did not agree with Dulles. Huey Long's “fascism arriving as antifascism” kept coming to mind as we kept losing track of first principles; for the people's right to know was definitely not the same as its right to buy and sell. I had no doubt such speeches of mine were simply going into J. Edgar
Hoover's dossier on me. I spoke to a quasi-radical group, the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, saying that in view of the almost total absence of movies, plays, or books about blacklisting and the onslaught against civil liberties in America, one had to wonder if self-censorship was not the real problem before us. But then as now, speeches always left me emptied, with only feelings of futility. The work was all that mattered in the end, and good work would last long after speeches were forgotten.

Still, it was not easy to go back to the desk again, especially when I felt that though
The Crucible
had failed as a commercial production it had succeeded as a play. I could not help thinking in 1953-54 that time was running out, not only on me but on the traditional American culture. I was growing more and more frighteningly isolated, in life as in the theatre.

It was around this time that Montgomery Clift called, asking if I would come and watch rehearsals of a production he and Kevin McCarthy were doing of
The Seagull
at the Phoenix Theatre. With no director, I thought this well-meant effort had no concise center, and even with Sam Jaffe playing Dr. Dorn it never lifted off. I talked to the actors a couple of afternoons, searching out some consistent metaphoric line they might follow, but nothing took except one remark that Monty repeated for years to come, even into the shooting of
The Misfits
some seven years on. As Treplev, he was not quite sure why he commits suicide, and I suggested that he think of Treplev aiming the revolver through his own head at Arkadina, his mother. This idea absolutely delighted him and made him wish his suicide occurred onstage instead of off.

But all this was a diversion; I had no drive to be a director, if only because it was difficult to be in the company of others for such long periods with my own narcissism having to make way for theirs. Besides, the written word travels gratifyingly farther than anything else and can be invested with surprising new meanings, some that illuminate the writer to himself. I had an unexpected example one evening as I was leaving the theatre lobby after a rehearsal with Monty and Kevin.

A downpour that wouldn't stop was flooding Second Avenue. Just inside the otherwise empty lobby, a wet umbrella at his side, stood a strikingly odd young man in rubbers, white shirt and black tie, black overcoat, and black suit, with black eyes and a curly helmet of black hair. A feverish, fanatical look in his eye as he approached, spittle in the corners of his mouth.

He reminded me that he had phoned some weeks before, asking
for a few minutes to explain a problem, and then I recalled him, a Columbia sophomore from Argentina who wanted to discuss
The Crucible.
I let him sit beside me in my car, figuring to get rid of him more quickly there than in a living room, for he was terribly strange and made me uneasy.

The downpour continued mercilessly, waves of water pushed by the wind across the empty avenue. He sat formally with his umbrella between his knees, and I noticed he was wearing a ring with a large diamond. After some chitchat about art—he was a painter, he said—I pressed him to his question, which was whether I believed that one person can “influence” what another person does. Assuming he was talking literature or painting, I said that I had been influenced by various writers, but he meant something different.

“I mean that one person can . . .” He hesitated.

“Control?”

“Yes, that's it, control.”

“Somebody controlling you?”

“Yes, always.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“My aunt.”

This lady, he said, had practically raised him in the family's great house, bathing him, teaching him, dressing and undressing him, until in his early teens he experienced an insidious shift of focus and realized that what she had secretly decided to do was to murder him. “I knew when she was approaching the house from even five blocks away, her influence was so strong on me.”

But now in New York he surely had nothing to fear? On the contrary, at a party only last week he had started across the room to greet a girl student he liked when he was suddenly pushed against a piano, breaking two of his front teeth and disfiguring his upper lip. He showed me two tooth shards nestling in a blood-spotted handkerchief.

“But who pushed you?”

“My aunt. She does not wish me to be a friend to girls.”

“All the way from Argentina?”

“The distance is not important, she can be anywhere.”

“You've been to see doctors, I suppose.”

“Yes, they don't know anything.”

“Why did you pick me to tell this to?”

“Because of
The Crucible.”

I was flabbergasted. “But what in
The Crucible
would lead you to think …”

“The girls. They are tormented by these witches.”

“Oh, yes. I see. But you understand that I don't believe they were telling the truth.”

“But of course they were.”

A chill went up my back. I denied it, trying as best I could to straighten the poor boy out.

“But I saw this play in Buenos Aires, and I knew that you would understand me because you know that this happens.”

It was the end of the following summer before he finally walked out of my life, hospitalized, his delusions beyond the reach of psychiatry. Yet he had detected a reality in the play that I had not vouched for in writing it but that he made me realize was certainly there.

Still at loose ends, I accepted, despite misgivings, an invitation from the Arden, Delaware, summer theatre to direct a production of
All My Sons
with Kevin McCarthy and Larry Gates as Chris and Joe Keller, and my sister, Joan Copeland, as Ann. (Joan had become a gifted actress; she appeared in many Broadway productions, including
Detective Story
and
The Diary of Anne Frank.)
I was feeling disoriented and weak then, the demise of
The Crucible
having bitten deeper than I had let myself believe, and so it was unsettling to find actors investing me with authority. It had never dawned on me before how exposed and vulnerable the actor feels onstage, and how easy it really is to make him a dependent and oneself a person of importance.

But the whole process was repellent, and less than ever did I want to be a director, the provider of reassurance that for the most part I did not possess myself. The very idea of authority was fraudulent. I seemed to have passed over the line where I could trust myself to another person. It was not a question of being angry at life but of recognizing its plainest terms. Ibsen's line, “He is strongest who is most alone,” kept coming to mind.