“There’s Something Happening Here”
For my review of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.
The following essay, on the play's context in 70s political theatre, is posted only here.
In 1986, Greenwood Press published my book, Ten Seasons: New York Theatre in the Seventies. Below is a brief section from the book devoted to the political theatre of the decade. Some may find interesting its background on The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. I've given the section a new title and have expanded the part about The Trial with material from a a book I was planning to add to my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series before circumstances brought the project to an end.
***
“Political Theatre in New York during the Seventies and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine”
Because politics is so important in our lives and is so infrequently
a source of satisfaction to the average man, it is customary in free societies
to laugh at those officials and policies with which we disagree. Once more,
recall the Greeks. Nevertheless, political satire was not especially noticeable
on New York’s stages in the seventies, despite many issues that cried out for
laugh-provoking criticism and comment. Various reasons for this have been
advanced: the disturbing polarization of the nation in the wake of Vietnam; the
possibility that the radical movements of the sixties and early seventies made
political comedy redundant; the painfulness of the issues involved; a growing
feeling of apathy and helplessness, and so on. Whatever the cause, political
satire was not a fruitful mode for most of the decade.
The single most potent image for satirists was that of
former President Richard M. Nixon, who resigned from office in 1973. Of the
seven or eight works that might be termed political satires, four were aimed at
him, although the protagonist’s name was usually disguised. These were Gore
Vidal’s An Evening with Richard Nixon and
. . . , the musical The Selling of
the President, Peter Ustinov’s Who’s
Who in Hell, and Pop, a musical
farce using King Lear as its premise.
Other political satires were Rubbers and Dirty Linen,
the first being a deflation of the New York State Assembly, the second of
Britain’s Parliament. Political revues included Eric Bentley’s The Red, White and Black and What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a
State Like This?
Political concerns were present in many plays, but few were
directly addressed to the immediate interests of the American people. Most were
about foreign situations; the subject matter was usually of universal rather
than topical significance. Of the few plays that did look at American issues,
two dealt with the era of McCarthyism. One was Bentley’s docudrama, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Based
on the hearings in the forties and fifties by a subcommittee of the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) inquiring into the political beliefs of
major show business figures. An interesting feature of the piece was the use of
a series of star actresses to read a famous letter written by Lillian Hellman
to the members of the subcommittee. HUAC was also treated in Gerhard Borris’s After the Rise with its obvious debt to
Arthur Miller’s After the Fall.
Probably the most controversial of the topical political plays
was The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,
a docudrama by Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., one of the participants in the
action. (Saul Levitt adapted the piece for the stage.) It is about the trial of
Jesuit priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan and a group of seven other Catholic activists,
two of them women, for having used napalm to destroy 378 draft files at
Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968.
It opened at the Good Shepherd Faith
Church, adjacent to Lincoln Center, where it ran from February 7, 1971, to May
30, 1971, for 170 performances. It then moved for another 29 showings to
Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, from June 2 to June 26. Gordon Davidson directed.
Its Off-Broadway cast of thirteen, each playing a single role, included such
familiar actors as Ed Flanders, James Woods, Sam Waterston, Richard Jordan, and
William Schallert, with well-known names like Biff McGuire, Michael Moriarty,
Josef Sommer, and Mason Adams joining the Broadway cast as replacements.
The semi-documentary play, staged in a simulacrum of a
courthouse setting and performed in Theatre of Fact style, was edited from the
actual trial transcripts. It was viewed as
a plea for the necessity of civil disobedience as an act of Christian faith.
Many legal and social issues were raised by its attack on contemporary American
values and governmental policies, while it also managed to jab sharply at the
Catholic Church. It was the author’s contention that drama’s purpose is to have
a moral impact in the light of world problems. He condemned theatre that exists
only to pass the time and make money.
During the period when the play was in production,
all the defendants were in jail, sentenced to two to three and a
half years. Following his sentencing, Daniel Berrigan became a fugitive from the law. He was on the verge of being arrested at Cornell University when he enlisted the aid
of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, who were appearing there. Hiding himself in
the framework of one of their huge puppets, he managed to escape in a van but was eventually captured and sent to federal prison.
The play was considered artistically clumsy in structure and
technique— “like a roughly edited movie,” rapped Jack Kroll; “a play in name
only,” chimed in T.E. Kalem—but most critics agreed that the subject matter was
so potent it made the play’s deficiencies seem unimportant. The straightforward
directorial style and the effective performances helped make this plea for
civil disobedience in the face of American involvement in Vietnam a “powerful
and inspiring” (Martin Gottfried) event. “Like so many courtroom dramas, it
makes a positively riveting play,” wrote Clive Barnes. “Everything sounded as
if it were being said for the very first time, with the words plucked out of
the conscience of the speakers.”
Plays about political problems pertinent to blacks and women
have been discussed in earlier sections [of this book]. We have seen that
politics was not a major enticement for playwrights dealing with these groups.
Other political topics touched on by American playwrights were the problems of
labor leaders, campaigning for office, the foibles and achievements of past residents
of the White House, political skulduggery in a governor’s office, upper-class
Cuban attitudes toward Castro, and Japanese-American relations in the nineteenth
century.
