Gideon (by Paddy Chayefsky) explores the relationship of an ordinary man to God. There could scarcely be a larger theme. It demands great powers of eloquence and intellect, a burning air of exaltation that Playwright Chayefsky does not fully command. But he does possess high gifts of humor, characterization, and a sense of the dominion and perplexity of faith, and these help make his play a lustrous and compelling experience.
The play is drawn from three chapters in the Book of Judges. The Israelites are in the toils of a false god, Baal, and harsh enemies, the Midianites. The Angel of the Lord (Fredric March) appears before Gideon (Douglas Campbell) and hails him as a "mighty man of valor" chosen to lead his people to victory. The comic incongruity of the choice is heightened by Gideon's initial appearance as a kind of donkeyfied village dolt. The Angel, who is, in effect, the Lord, lays down a plan by which 300 Israelites will rout and slay 120,000 Midianites.
While this miracle is duly passed by Director Tyrone Guthrie in tumultuous blood-spattered surges of on-and off-stage violence, a far more significant encounter takes place. Gideon walks and talks with God in all the glory and torment of the ancient Hebrew prophets. The Lord is wrathful and jealous; yet his fatherly love is ever close. Gideon is skeptical and petulant; yet at times he almost swoons in an ecstasy of faith.
To watch March and Campbell shade in the lights and shadows of this relationship is to see something like acting genius at work. March hisses and rumbles like an active volcano, and his "I am the Lord" is an eruption of molten lava. At times, March seems to take an actorish delight in playing the Lord, but he is awesome when, with magnetic all-seeing eyes, he probes for Gideon's soul in a speck of human dust. Douglas Campbell can be a simple-minded oaf one minute and a Judaic Henry V the next, and his voice ranges even more remarkably from a love-lyrical caress to a doggish snarl. At one affecting moment, he says simply, "O, I love thee, Lord," and it is like hearing ineffable music carried on clear night air over still water.
In the second and weaker of Gideon's two acts, Gideon falls un-Biblically out of love with the Lord. He fails to heed the Lord's command to kill some idolatrous Hebrew tribal chiefs. There is an extenuating fleshly circumstance. One of the chief's daughters is a pelvic marvel (Lorraine Egypt) who does a temptress dance to rival Salome's. More pertinently, and impertinently, Gideon pleads that his pity for fellow humans is above God's law. He asks the Lord to be released from the "covenant of love." arguing "You are too vast a concept for me." Sadly, ironically, the Lord concludes: Man wants to be "a proper god. You know, he might some day."
This flawed ending echoes the flawed conclusion in Broadway's J.B. of three years ago; both Playwrights MacLeish and Chayefsky assume that man has somehow outgrown God and must evolve a higher morality. They deny that the end of man is to glorify God and seem to agree that man must express, sanction, and glorify himself. Paradoxically, the denial and doubt of God have led not to the affirmation of man but to his greater despair. For it is despair from which such questing morality plays as J.B. and Gideon seem to spring.