New Play on Broadway

All the Way Home (by Tad Mosel) reshapes for the stage the late James Agee's extraordinary Pulitzer prizewinner, A Death in the Family. The undertaking could not but be hazardous: beyond the tact that Agee's novel was not quite finished and not quite a novel, what made it memorable was the highly personal charge of the writing-- fine special sharpness of detail and as uncanny a gift of memory as of metaphor. And what the book had. in the absence of all unity of form, was marked unity of feeling. Considering how much A Death lacked that the theater finds important and how much of importance it had that the theater cannot convey. Mosel's adaptation--greatly helped by Arthur Penn's staging--had a good deal to be said for it. Though hardly a play, much of it proved vividly playable. Mosel, clearly respecting the book preserved much of Agee's feeling for people and of his sense of mood and scene, and transmitted a poetic nature that never surrendered its realistic indeed relentless eye. The best moments in All the Way Home illuminate; the best scenes are truly moving.

In this chronicle of family life in Knoxville, Tenn. in 1915, the very theme in the end is family life: husband, wife, small son in-laws, generations, dissimilar family backgrounds, differences over religion conflicts due to temperament, conjugal love, ultimate human separateness. What shifts various stresses, what tightens and loosens knots, is the impact on so many lives of young Jay Follet's sudden death in an automobile accident. The immediate, wrenching impact, above all on Jay's pregnant wife, gives the play its most powerful scene, an emotional climax from which the rest of the play moves downward. Jay's death not only reveals character, it challenges and shakes it. Secret human doors suddenly fly open, and inconsistency occasionally raises its honest face.

There are things in All the Way Home that seem quite wrong. Jay's brother looms too large, performs too loud; the play is far too long in ending and then ends badly. Other things in the play seem insufficient and even flat: scenes lack outward drama without displaying any of Agee's inner force. But, with good performances by Colleen Dewhurst, Arthur Hill, Aline MacMahon and John Megna (as the small son), the people, most of them, smell of life and their behavior smacks of truth. Miles apart as in many ways they are, Agee, like Chekhov, really substituted feeling for drama, like Chekhov tinged sadness with humor, and showed a compassion that though it might not acquit errant beings, would always pardon them. It is for such things that All the Way Home, whatever its inadequacies, has more small coins of pure silver to offer, and less stage money than any other American play this season.

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