No Living Room for Sin?

Books, movies and the stage sometimes tell as much about the spiritual state of an era as the churches. Broadway's most notable failure this season was Roman Catholic Novelist Graham Greene's play, The Living Room (TIME, Nov. 29), in which an adulterous triangle destroys itself in the helpless presence of a paralyzed priest, against a background of bigoted neurosis. In London the play ran to packed houses for 38 weeks; in Manhattan it lasted just 21 performances. Last week the Roman Catholic weekly, Commonweal, registered a well-taken complaint:

"The New York opening of Graham Greene's The Living Room provided some interesting insights into the status of American culture, 1954. [It] gave the New York critics an opportunity to disport their innocence of Christian knowledge or culture. Sin? Suffering? Salvation? What, most of them asked, is all the fuss about? From reviews of The Living Room . . . one gained the impression of a culture not merely secularized but somehow de-intellectualized, a culture stripped of even passing acquaintance with the fundamental concerns which had made it great.

"Mr. Brooks Atkinson, for example, confessed in his [New York] Times review . . . that a dialogue on sin between a psychiatrist and a priest was quite beyond him. And he wondered what all the play's gloominess, all its brooding over guilt, was about . . . After all, Mr. Atkinson implied, religion is meant to make people 'happy' . . .

"What has religion to do with suffering? What is guilt? What is sin? What is the problem of evil? Graham Greene may or may not have dealt successfully with these questions in The Living Room, but the fact that the majority of New York reviewers could not see that the questions are real is a depressing sign of what our culture has come to. We have been fed such a diet of peace of mind and peace of soul, and been provided with so many guides to confident living, that we apparently can no longer grasp the meaning of spiritual anguish or pain in our drama . . . And so there will be no Living Rooms on Broadway; there will be only Solid Gold Cadillacs . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.