English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Theater of War

Albert Wertheim. Staging the War: American Drama and World War II.  Indiana UP, 2004. 328 pp.  $35.00.

By Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford

            War and drama have a love-hate relationship.  “May we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?” Shakespeare asks in Henry V (Prologue: ll. 11-14), acknowledging the apparent folly of attempting to confine the phenomenon within representational space.  But if war resists its staging, it is also inescapably dramatic: the zones of operations in the Second World War were known as the European and Pacific “theatres.”  Albert Wertheim’s self-declared task is to answer the question, “how was the drama used during the [World War II] years to shape American attitudes about U.S. participation?” (ix) – in other words, how was such participation made palatable?  An apt question, and one worth asking every time a government takes its people to war.

              Wertheim examines over 150 plays from a period stretching from before Pearl Harbor until after the Armistice.  His approach is taxonomic: the plays are grouped thematically within five chapters dealing with the eve of World War II, the war years themselves, government-sponsored drama, radio drama, and the war’s aftermath.  A succinct account of each play is given and, if this is the book’s weakness–a great deal of ground is covered but in no great depth–it is also its strength.  This will form a valuable and thorough resource for anyone wishing to gain an acquaintance with this neglected seam of American drama.

              The first chapter is good on the conflict between isolationism and participation and on how playwrights schooled in the agitprop of the Depression Era converted techniques developed to encourage political activism for use in the pro-interventionist argument.  Primary among such techniques was to reveal American ideals and values in Europe, the message being “these people are like us – we must help them.”  Wertheim quotes Frederick Hazlitt Brennan’s The Wookey (1941): “I’m a British subjeck an’ I speaks me mind, war or no war.  This bugger ‘Itler, ‘e wants ter boss the ‘ole world.  We should ha’ kicked ‘s ribs in five years ago” (39).  The comic Cockney, it seems, would warm the New York audience to his cause.

              Propaganda of this kind lacks subtlety to the point that one wonders who could possibly be persuaded by it.  Though Wertheim faithfully records the dates and venues of each first performance, he does not analyse audience make-up.  He does, however, note that the aim of government-sponsored drama during the period was “to produce models of national unity for … an ethnically heterogeneous population” (130) (this itself, as Wertheim points out, was a small blow against German theories of racial homogeneity).  Chapter Three, on “official” drama is the most enjoyable of the book, revealing that the Army held a play-writing competition and commissioned a play “to extol and promote […] the Air Forces” (135).  Winged Victory was put on in 1943, involving over 300 military personnel onstage and an oversized military band in the orchestra pit.  Mario Lanza was a cast-member.  This, says Wertheim, “surely created in the audience a sense of national strength, patriotism, and the will to victory” (135).  It sounds unmissable, as do some of the Treasury plays for use in schools, hospitals and community centres like Bella Spewack’s Invitation to Inflation and Betty Bridgman’s Mother Buys A Bond.

              The fourth chapter makes the point that radio is better at actually conveying the sounds and scale of battle.  Indeed, Wertheim notes in the last chapter, soldiers on active duty–and all that that entailed–were rarely put before stage audiences during the war years.  Another significant omission–one that Wertheim, the son of refugees who escaped the Third Reich, traces throughout the book–includes depictions of what was going on in the Nazi death camps.  Images which have come to stand for the Second World War’s horrors were therefore, with a few exceptions (Ben Hecht’s We Will Never Die (1943) and Edward Chodorov’s Common Ground (1945)), unknown in the drama of the period.

If Staging the War has a flaw, it is a lack of analytical thinking about the precise affinities between war and drama.  Wertheim notes the will-we-won’t-we suspense before Pearl Harbor but does not engage with how the open-endedness of war affects the narratology of a play written before that war’s conclusion.  War’s other similarities with drama–unity of place; formal, “staged” development; camouflage; surprise tactics–might also have been noted.  War is, increasingly “a show of strength”; weapons are “emblematic”: indeed, the nuclear deterrent works because its consequences can be imagined–what has gone before has, in a sense, “dramatised” them.  “Playing” war is both a means of preparation for conflict (war games) and of recuperating from it (the curative effect of re-enacting trauma).

But these are issues for another kind of book.  Of this book, it can be said that Albert Wertheim has done a great service in discovering and illuminating a drama.