Yes and No

Pasadena's thriving Playhouse had what was locally termed an "event" last week. While 400 customers were turned away, 850 squeezed in to witness the world premiere of Gertrude Stein's Yes Is for a Very Young Man.

Whether, afterwards, those who got in had a clearer idea of Yes than those who did not, remained a moot point. Between the acts the spectators, if bewitched, were also pretty bothered and bewildered. Said one first-nighter solemnly: "It's something you have to digest." Said another: "I don't try to understand it; I'm an old Saroyan man myself." But on at least one point a dowager was quite firm: "The love interest is very dull, indeed very dull, certainly very dull indeed."

Playwright Stein (Four Saints in Three Acts) had, as usual, not truckled to the conventions. Though her play dealt with life in France during the occupation, it was largely undramatic--a succession of scenes that snapped their fingers at continuity, pace and mounting impact. The dialogue was typical Stein--like something written for the hard of hearing.

Complicated & Simple. Yet, if fuzzy, Yes was by no means foolish. In its chip-shot fashion, it possibly came closer to revealing a French family disrupted by clashing political loyalties than something more dynamic and excitable would have done. Playwright Stein, who spent the war among such people, wanted "the audience to realize that French families were divided as our American families were divided in the Civil War, and it is complicated and simple." In Yes, Henry and his young brother Ferdinand become part of the Resistance; Henry's wife and her aristocratic family are pro-Petain. There is plenty of squabbling but no melodrama --"that's the way it was, you know"--and Henry, while loathing his wife's politics and relatives, never ceases to love her.

The best thing about Yes is its hard, humorous understanding and worldly wisdom. Playwright Stein ridicules rather than berates the Petainists, particularly when they try at the end to come over to the winning side. Notably Gallic is her mention of the collaborationist shopkeeper who was dead sure the Germans would win but had kept his assortment of little French, British and U.S. flags--just in case. Miss Stein jabs at obedience ("Obedient people must sooner or later follow a bad leader") and at discipline ("It is the unsuccessful people in the world who want to discipline everybody").

Yes got its world premiere in Pasadena because two earnest young Playhouse couples, Jane and Robert Claborne, and Toni and Lamont Johnson, while touring France with the USO last year, phoned Miss Stein in Paris and asked if they might call on her. "Certainly," she replied, "you certainly may come up, please come up, please come up right away." They did, and in the midst of being slapped down for their opinions on French politics, were snapped up as "perfect" for her new play.

The Assassins

It was getting so that the Broadway critics scarcely had time to duck. Maxwell Anderson had socked them for their treatment of Truckline Cafe (TIME, March 11). This week Playwright Irwin Shaw, in a preface to the published version of his short-lived Assassin (Random House; $2), socked them harder.

Shaw socked not only critics, but audiences, actors, censors, directors, theatrical unions, and virtually anybody he could reach.

OF AUDIENCES: "The writer for the theater in America today has a special relation with his audience. It is the same relation that Marie Antoinette must have had with the crowds along the streets on the way to the . . . guillotine."

OF ARMY CENSORS: who had to pass on the script of The Assassin, because Shaw was in uniform, "After holding it just long enough to halt production that year, it was passed--with one reservation. In the third act the hero is asked where he got the gun with which he assassinated the tyrant. In answer, sardonically, he says, 'From three medical students in exchange for the address of a Spanish whore.' The Army objected to the word 'Spanish,' explaining that Spain was a neutral country whom we did not wish to offend. They suggested as an alternative that I substitute a Greek whore, Greece, I presume, not being considered neutral and therefore capable of being offended without danger."

OF ACTORS: "Building a theater today with the present members of Equity is like, trying to build a bomb shelter with sand."

OF CRITICS: "There is a constant pull exerted . . . to write a bad review of a play. Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms. Their bons mots, which are quoted and remembered, are always capsule damnations, cutting and sour. Their reputations, and I suppose their pay, depend, then, upon disliking plays . . . In no other art is there anything vaguely resembling this. . . . [Critics] become Shakespeare's peer. "It was better in France. There the critics were perceptive and corrupt. The managers paid them off and bought good reviews and the plays were left to the honest decision of the audiences. . . . "

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