New Play in Manhattan

Bury the Dead (by Irwin Shaw; Alex Yokel, producer) made its author famed before it was given a full-fledged production. A 23-year-old Brooklynite, Irwin Shaw had previously distinguished himself chiefly as a third-rate semiprofessional football player and writer of the "Dick Tracy" radio child thriller. Last autumn he heard about the radical New Theatre League's play contest. Bury the Dead was not finished in time to compete, but Playwright Shaw took his script to the League's Manhattan headquarters when he completed the fiery paean against war. A pair of tryouts by a group of proletarian mummers was arranged, the critics applauded vigorously, Mr. Shaw got a Hollywood contract and, since shrewd Broadway has caught on to the fact that one does not have to believe in collectivism to collect on the new vogue of social drama, it was not long before Producer Yokel, whose most notable previous theatrical venture was the incredibly lucrative Three Men on a Horse, had arranged an uptown presentation of Bury the Dead.

Second sight of Bury the Dead confirmed critical opinion that Irwin Shaw is a comer. His play is a passionate rewrite of Austrian Hans Chlumberg's Miracle at Verdun, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1931. During "the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night," a burial detail of U. S. soldiers is shocked when six corpses rise from their trench grave, refuse to be interred. "Maybe," guesses one of the living dead, "there's too many of us under the ground now. Maybe the earth can't stand it no more. You got to change crops sometime." As in Miracle at Verdun, this ghastly irregularity spreads panic and consternation through the high command, has repercussions far outside the war zone on Press, Church and Business. However, unlike Playwright Chlumberg, who tried to fix original responsibility for the conflict, Playwright Shaw never penetrates as high as the nation's statesmen, as deep as the nation's populace. He is willing to concentrate his indignation on the Generals who run the war in such a way that men get killed. What young Mr. Shaw really hates is not War but Death.

Immature though his sense of generality may be, Playwright Shaw displays an easy, forceful style of writing. Says one of his live soldiers to another: "Kids shouldn't be dead, Charley. That's what they musta figured when the dirt started fallin' in on 'em. . . . Did they want to be standin' there when the lead poured in? They wanted to be home readin' a book or teachin' their kid c-a-t spells cat or takin' a woman out into the country in an open car with the wind blowin'. ..."

Final and important departure of Mr. Shaw's Bury the Dead from Mr. Chlumberg's Miracle at Verdun is the Brooklynite's scornful refusal to lead his cadavers back to the grave as the cynical Austrian did. On the contrary, the hopeful curtain of Bury the Dead falls on men marching off the battlefields.

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