Tarnished Spoon

Spoon River. There are three fixed ideas that Americans like to entertain about small towns: 1) they are bucolically idyllic, 2) they stunt, thwart and twist people's lives, 3) they harbor an incredible amount of sexual hanky-panky behind their primly drawn curtains. If any one book by any one man may be said to have fostered these notions, it is Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which first appeared in 1915. Masters, who died in 1950 at the age of 81, was a Chicago lawyer-turned-poet who had grown up in Petersburg and Lewistown, 111. In Masters' book, 244 small-town dead speak their autobiographical epitaphs in free verse. Spoon River Anthology was the logical forerunner of Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, and Our Town, as well as such garbage as Peyton Place.

In an evening of dramatic readings, a troupe of West Coast actors transplanted to Broadway are trying to add histrionic vitality to Masters' historic importance. Charles Aidman, who staged the project, has linked related characters and interspersed the verse vignettes with folk songs. He and his fellow actors animate the characters with consummate skill and sly humor. But the overall effect is spasmodic and ineloquent. Whenever Masters tried to draw a lyrical breath, he was apt to exhale some inflatedly gassy lines. Bloated example:

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln . . .

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

Masters had a keen eye for the eccentric and the cantankerous, the wistful dreamer and the self-pitying failure. He tried to give them tragic dignity, but his talent rarely carried him beyond the ironic cynicism that is merely unearned despair.

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