UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY ABOUT THE EDITOR Joseph Mersand, Ph.D., has devoted himself throughout his long career as a teacher to the theatre and its literature. He has written and edited books about the drama over a period of twenty years. Among these are The American Drama, 1930-1940; The Plays the Thing and The American Drama Since 1930. Dr. Mersand was chairman of the Editorial Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English, which authorized the publication of Guide to Play Selection, a standard work. For ten years Dr. Mersand served as chairman of the English and Speech departments at Long Island City High School, in New York City. Highly regarded in his field, he has been an instructor at Cornell University, Queens College, Teachers College, Columbia Uni- versity, Syracuse University and New York University. He is past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and is presently chairman of the English department at Jamaica High School, in New York City. THE J\JS 1A SERIES OF DISTINGUISHED PLAYS Fifteen American One-Act Plays: The Lottery, The Devil and Daniel Webster and thirteen other outstanding plays (W0650 600) Three Comedies of American Family Life: I Remember Mama, Life with Father, You Cant Take It with You (W0651 600) Three Dramas of American Individualism: Golden Boy, High Tor, The Magnificent Yankee (W0653 600) Three Dramas of American Realism: Idiot's Delight, Street Scene, The Time of Your Life (W0652 600) Three Plays About Business in America: The Adding Machine, Beggar on Horseback, All My Sons (46852 750) Three Distinctive Plays About Abraham Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln, The Last Days of Lincoln, Prologue to Glory (W0655 600) Three Plays About Marriage: Craig's Wife, They Knew What They Wanted, Holiday (W0659 600) Three Plays About Crime and Criminals: Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Lady, Detective Story (W0934 750) Three Plays About Doctors : An Enemy of the People, Men in White, Yellow Jack (W0656 600) Three Plays by Maxwell Anderson: Valley Forge, Joan of Lorraine, Journey to Jerusalem (W0670 600) Three Plays by Victor Hugo: Hernani, Ruy Bias, The King Amuses Himself (W0662 600) Three Classic Spanish Plays: The Sheep Well, None Beneath the King, Life Is a Dream (W0660 600) Three Scandinavian Plays: The Father, The Lady from the Sea, The Wild Duck (W0657 600) THE SERIES OF DISTINGUISHED PLAYS T|jREE DRAMAS OF AMERICAN INDiViDUALISf by Clifford Odeis by Maxwell Anderson TOE MAGNIFICENT YANKEE by Emmet Uvery Edited and with Introductions by Joseph Mersand WSP WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, INC. <> NEW YORK THREE DRAMAS OF AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM A Washington Square Press edition 1st printing February, 1961 3rd printing November, 1968 Published by Washington Square Press, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. Washington Square Press editions are distributed in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10020 and in Canada by Simon & Schuster of Canada, Ltd., Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. Standard Book Number: 671-46859-6. Copyright, ©, 1961, by Washington Square Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION o o • • • Golden Boy . by Clifford Odets INTRODUCTION 97 High Tor 103 by Maxwell Anderson INTRODUCTION 177 The Magnificent Yankee 183 by Emmet Lavery Any group that wishes to produce any of these plays will find production information for each play on page 266. GOLDEN BOY Introduction Writing in his Contemporary American Playwrights, in 1938, Burns Mantle stated: The most promising playwriting talent that has come into the theatre in the last ten years is the possession of a young man named Clifford Odets.1 By that time Odets had written Awake and Sing!, Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die, Paradise Lost and Golden Boy. To many critics and playgoers, Golden Boy was his best play to date. The story of a young Italian-American boy who has been trained to become a violinist but who decides to become a prize fighter was commercially the most successful play the Group Theatre had produced and was eventually sold to Hollywood for $75,000. In some respects Golden Boy marked a considerable de- parture for Odets. It contains less of the anticapitalistic propa- ganda that is so characteristic of Waiting for Lefty. In other respects Golden Boy reinforces the theme of frustrated efforts to live a decent life, which had been so prominent in Awake and Sing! The hero, Joe Bonaparte, is an interesting portrait of a sensitive man endeavoring to overcome his feelings of failure by adopting a materialistic philosophy repugnant to his inner self. This is by no means a new theme in American drama, but it is told by Odets in his distinctive idiom and style. 1 P. 115. See also John Gassner, (ed.), A Treasury of the Theatre, p. 950. 3 CLIFFORD ODETS Some critics contended that Bonaparte's sacrifice of his love for music for the more material gains of prize fighting may have been symbolic of Odets' own withdrawal from Broadway in response to the lure of Hollywood. Others, like Harold Clurman, who directed the Broadway production, generalized even further: The story of the play is not so much the story of a prize fighter as the picture of a great fight—a fight in which we are all involved. What the golden boy of this allegory is fighting for is a place in the world as an individual.2 Regardless of the various interpretations that the reader may care to give to the play today, its virtues remain as vivid now as they were in 1937, when it opened to almost unani- mous critical acclaim. Thus, the opening-night review by John Mason Brown summarized some of Odets' excellence as a dramatist: Certainly it is not new to report that Mr. Odets' drama- turgy can be possessed of uncommon vitality. Or that he has an astonishing ear for dialogue. When he is writ- ing at his best, none of our younger dramatists can equal him in giving the essence of a scene or an indi- vidual with almost telegraphic brevity. He is a shrewd observer. He has a fierce humor and a relentless vigor. Among his high talents he can count a gift of revealing everything by the uncanny use he makes of humanizing 3 details. All of these aspects of Odets' skill as a dramatist have been praised repeatedly. Eleanor Flexner described his power of constructing a play as the best up to 1938. To John Gassner, 2 Introduction to Golden Boy in The Plays of Clifford Odets (New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 429-430. 8 Two on the Aisle, p. 220. Introduction writing in 1939, it was "his best constructed and least rampant play/' 4 The dialogue was praised by Joseph Wood Krutch: "His dialogue is brilliantly suggestive, especially when he 5 puts it into the mouths of ignorant or uncultivated people." Odets' power of characterization has also won praise from many critics. Montrose J. Moses and Oscar J. Campbell in their anthology Dramas of Modernism state: But all the characters live and breathe with an almost painful intensity, and their encounters create moments of poignant emotion. Their speech is pungent and subtly 6 accommodated to the lips of the actors. To Eleanor Flexner, his talent had never been seen to bet- ter advantage than in "its long and rich gallery of charac- terization in Golden Boy." 1 Perhaps the fact that the first New York production was in the capable hands of Harold Clurman and the actors of the Group Theatre helped to give the play the intensity and mov- ing power felt by so many playgoers. One of the most fascinat- ing accounts of an acting group's development of a philosophy of acting consonant with its philosophy of life is in Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years, which includes some of the trials and tribulations, frustrations and triumphs of Golden Boy. THE PLAYWRIGHT Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia on July 18, 1906, but spent his childhood and adolescence in the Bronx. He attended Morris High School but left before graduation to go into radio as actor, announcer and author. He had con- siderable acting experience in stock and on Broadway. Odets 4 Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre (New York: Crown, 1939), p. xxi. 5 The American Drama Since 1 91 8, p. 272. 6 P. 853. 7 American Playwrights, 1918-1938, p. 300. CLIFFORD ODETS first came into prominence with his prize-winning one-act play, Waiting for Lefty (1935), which was based on the New York taxi strike of 1934. The novelty of construction and power of characterization revealed an exciting new talent. The success of Waiting for Lefty encouraged the Group Theatre to produce his Awake and Sing! (1935), a study of middle-class life in the Bronx, a life Odets knew very well. That same year saw two other productions, Till the Day I Die and Paradise Lost. Odets' other plays include: Rocket to the Moon (1938), Night Music (1940), Clash by Night (1941), The Big Knife (1949) and The Country Girl (1950). Odets has served in Hollywood as both writer and producer (None But the Lonely Heart). His later plays have not been charged with the social propaganda that was blatant in Waiting for Lefty. His ability to reveal character quickly and briUiandy, his memorable dialogue and his deep interest in the frustrations of lonely individuals in their struggles toward self-realization are present in almost all of his plays. While the encomiums of the thirties, when he was looked upon as the American Chekhov and the greatest new talent since O'Neill, may not be apropos today, Odets maintains his position as the leading social dramatist of the Depression.