Speaking the Truth--Whether Dark or Cheery : The greatest plays don’t take a benevolent view of the human condition

A few weeks back I wrote a column wondering why no playwright had written an optimistic modern Christmas fable, akin to director Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I have received an answer.

“Why should the Christmas season be any different than the rest of the year?” writes Donna Lowre of North Hollywood. “Stories like ‘Wonderful Life’ aren’t being written or produced at any time.

“Too many plays are dark and dreary with a malevolent view of what life is all about. Art is not news, Mr. Sullivan. It reflects the artist’s value judgments. In my opinion, it should show life the way it can be and should be. Not the way it is at its dreariest level.

“If that isn’t true, Mr. Sullivan, then why the popularity of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’? Why do you yearn for its type of story--its benevolent view of the world and of its heroes who overcome adversity and win ?

“Maybe if reviewers did not praise plays that see man as immoral, or inept, or irrational, or drugged out, or hopeless, with no control over his life--but as a rational, intelligent, moral being with a sense of values and a sense of humor--then maybe some changes may start.”

I disagree with about 75% of this. I think that art is news--information about the human experience. (“News that stays news,” as Ezra Pound said about poetry.) This information can come from any level of experience that the artist cares to deal with. I’m not calling for someone to write another “It’s a Wonderful Life”--not if he doesn’t see the world that way. I was wondering why nobody had written one.

Still, Lowre’s letter was a pleasure. First, because we in the stage department don’t often hear from readers on the big questions. Usually it’s a complaint about how rude the ushers are at Theater X.

Second, because it is important what kind of stories get acted in a particular time. If each era has its climate of opinion, it also has its climate of emotion. Plays contribute to this, either directly or in screen translations. (“Talk Radio,” “Torch Song Trilogy” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” to name three recent examples.) One wants the contribution to be useful.

Only . . . what is useful? What do we need to hear more of from the theater right now? What do we need to hear less of? And who decides?

Reader Lowre says that we need to hear more about the human potential for good. Yes, always. That’s why Robert Harling’s “Steel Magnolias” was so satisfying at the Pasadena Playhouse last year--despite all those one-liners. First Harling showed a mother and her touchy daughter working out their lines of communication, not without static. Then he showed how the mother’s friends shored her up when she lost her daughter.

Some critics thought it a sentimental show. I thought it an observant one. Parents and their grown-up children have been known to come to terms. Friends do come through in a crisis, sometimes. “Steel Magnolias” admired its people, but there was a scene where the mother showed how furious she was at the daughter for dying. There’s always room for a play like that.

But do we need a generation of plays devoted to the message that friends always come through? That people are invariably kind-hearted once you get to know them? That for every problem there’s a solution? That tomorrow will be better? That, all in all, it’s a wonderful life?

The Soviet theater had 50 years of such plays. Stalin and his successors forced Soviet playwrights to write “positive” scripts on the premise that the Revolution had purged people of their old selfish ways and created an altruistic creature known as the New Soviet Man and Woman. Audiences put up with the fiction. But for the truth about human nature--the whole truth--they went back to Chekhov and Shakespeare.

American radio and TV have also given us half a century of cheerful family comedies where slight domestic misunderstandings are cured by everybody sitting down at the table and talking it out. We have also had many a dramatic series like “The Waltons,” where hard work and family pride got John Boy and his folks through the Depression.

That’s fine for TV, which is meant to put people half to sleep, so that they’ll be susceptible to the commercials. But imagine a theater that was nothing but sitcoms and “The Waltons.”

We wouldn’t trust it. We’d say: “But it doesn’t always work that way. Family pride can bring down a family. Hard work isn’t enough if you’re living in the Dust Bowl. Talking-it-out can leave people more embittered than they were before. Some people get worse the more you know them.” We would also become bored. It’s difficult to find tension and texture in a play where little is at risk. If the characters all mean well, where’s your antagonist? If nothing can seriously go wrong, where’s the suspense?

The playwright doesn’t have to deal with life “at its dreariest level.” But I think we do want him or her to deal with life as it is, even when he sets his play in Never-Never Land or Oz, two worlds where defeat was possible. Unless we recognize the moral landscape, what good is his parable to us?

We certainly recognize Hamlet’s Denmark. In the original legend, a clever prince kills his wicked uncle, reclaims his father’s crown and marries his sweetheart. This is life as it ought to be.

Shakespeare gives us a hero who isn’t sure that he is doing the right thing, a villain who says his prayers at night and a denouement that would be a comedy of errors, except that the players are dying. This is life as it is. On the one hand--”What a piece of work is man.” On the other hand, catastrophe.

Greek tragedy can be read the same way. It’s curious that the plays that seem to offer the fullest account of the human experience don’t offer the “benevolent view” that Lowre speaks of, but the tragic view. Rather than celebrating life’s terrific possibilities, they seem to be warning us not to push our sense of those possibilities too far. That message too is always in season.

But when Lowre talks about hopeless characters with no control over their lives, she is probably not thinking about Oedipus or Lear. Perhaps she is thinking of the two tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” slogging through the ashes. Or maybe she is thinking of the druggies in “Hurlyburly.”

In fact, “Hurlyburly” offers some hope at the end that the hero has bottomed out and is ready to clean up his act. And “Godot” suggests that while Godot may not be keeping his appointment, the two tramps are keeping theirs.

But the critic isn’t there to measure a play’s hope-content. He is looking to see whether the playwright has put a world on stage that squares with the experience of its audience and enlarges it. If so, it’s a good play, even when its characters aren’t behaving admirably. Maybe it’s even a positive play, in that it may catch the conscience of the viewer. That’s why Hamlet put on his little show at Elsinore.