Thespis in New Moscow

Six Soviet Plays Compiled and Edited by Eugene Lyons. 469 pp. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co. $3.00.

No serious student of the theatre can afford to be without a copy of Eugene Lyons’ “Six Soviet Plays,” for whether or not you will agree with Elmer Rice in his prefatory statement that “the Soviet theatre is the most interesting in the world today,” you will have to admit that the new Russian theatre has a significance that makes awareness of it essential for a clear picture of the world theatre today.

In the Soviet Union the theatre is admittedly a “weapon” of the state, a dramatic and forceful means of presenting propaganda. And with the six plays presented in Mr. Lyons’ selection illustrating this point, it is interesting to note that the Soviet brand of theatrical propaganda is essentially different from the American of the species. The left-wing theatre in this country is one of protest, a cry against the established order. It is militant, vigorous and dynamic. It literally shrieks as does “Waiting for Lefty,” the best example to date. Not so the Soviet plays. Many of them employ satire, dialectics, appeals to reason and simple dramatic symbols. They are more like the traditional “problem” play than the American left-wing theatre. Most assuredly the American is more the theatre of revolution than the Soviet.

A case comes to mind. “The Sailors of Cattaro,” a play by the German, Dr. Friedrich Wolf, who now resides in Moscow, is more a studied appeal to reason than its Theatre Union successor, “Black Pit,” a thoroughly American example. And further, while the American left-wing plays end in tragedy, glossed over with the happy ending of a new era to come, the Soviet theatre is almost as devoted to the “happy ending” as the traditional American theatre. As in everything else, it’s a matter of the “ins” and the “outs.” The Soviet theatre is propaganda in the sense that the better American “problem” play is. Neither advocates revolution; both indicate the need for a particular way of life. Because the Soviet play points the way to a revolutionary (to us) way of life, it is a revolutionary play. But in no other way.

Lyons, who was for a number of years chief of the Moscow bureau of the United Press, tells us that his six plays are typical. There is “Days of the Turbins,” a drama of the revolution, which the Moscow Art Theatre recently performed here and which was done in translation last year by Yale University players. There is “Squaring the Circle,” a broad farce, which is the unchallenged favorite of the mass of Soviet theatregoers, what with the pokes it takes at petty-bourgeois notions of marriage and family and (strangely, you think) the attempts of some Communists to discount love, as Lyons puts it, “as a mere bourgeois prejudice.”

“Tempo” glorifies the American engineer of the days of the Five Year Plan. “Bread” chronicles the Soviet triumph in the collectivization of agriculture. “Inga” treats of women and how the revolution has affected them. “Fear” is a study of the conflict between the intellectuals and the proletarian dictatorship.

In all the Soviet is triumphant. But in the American theatre, isn’t the triumph of capitalism likewise implied?