To Make Reason and the Will of God Prevail: The Heroic Dramas of Barrie Stavis

Abstract

I confess the personal element that must intrude upon any observations I make about the plays of Barrie Stavis. No statement of mine about them can escape the autobiographical element that affects my association with them. For me, from the start, Stavis' work has raised central issues about the relationship between literature and political doctrine, issues that for many decades have been helping to shape the development of my theoretical writings as they confronted the problems of relating literary form to what I long ago termed thematics.' In order for the reader to judge my judgments, I should first trace the private history of my own connection to Stavis and, through him, to my earliest concern (inspired by our discussions relating to his work) with reconciling the simultaneous claims put forth by literature and the political. Today, so many decades later, there is probably no more provocative concern stimulating academic debate in the humanities. (Readers of this Journal are well aware that this discussion has for some time also absorbed considerations of the law and of legal interpretation within its compass.) In October 1942, one of the youngest army recruits in Fort Dix, New Jersey, met one of the oldest. In a few days of conversation and camaraderie, I, not yet nineteen, had my ways of thinking about literature transformed, and to an extent far beyond what I then recognized. Barrie Stavis, then in his late thirties, had already established himself as a playwright in New York theater movements. I remember my conversations with him about the Group Theatre and how awestruck I was by his association with it. And amid our discussions of left-wing theater and the threat to it from creeping commercialism, we spoke of Clifford Odets, both his early brilliance as a playwright and, alas, the later Hollywood letdown. In the midst of our conversation, which dealt with what might still be authentic in what remained of the motives that produced the Group