Brass Ankle. It takes a Southerner to convey adequately the potential horror and tragedy that lurk in the sociological backwaters of the Deep South. The cruelty of middle-class white "crackers" has been deftly transferred to book form by William Faulkner (Sanctuary), a reconstructed Southerner (TIME, Feb. 16). Further aspects of it are now to be seen in this grim play by DuBose Heyward of Charleston, S. C., author of the book whence came all-Negro Porgy three years ago.
Larry and Ruth are happy dwellers in Rivertown. They live over their store and are more ambitious than most of their neighbors. They hope some day to be somebodies, to send their fair-haired little daughter and their yet unborn son to college. Just as it seems that the world could not possibly be a better place, Mendel's Law steps up and destroys the lives of Larry and Ruth. Their little son is born black as a boogie.
What is Larry to do? He has been the chief agitator in the community for expelling from the white school the children of a family who have just been found to be touched with the tar brush. For Larry, for his friends the moonshiner and the sheriff and even the hardshell preacher, a drop of Negro blood, no matter how diluted, makes a person a Negro. Vainly the patrician doctor explains that Ruth's father and grandfather were considered -white, that Ruth never knew she was a hybrid, a "brass ankle." But good-natured, inarticulate Larry has nothing to depend on but the cruelty of his neighbors.
What is Ruth to do? Well she realizes their tragedy, but although her husband refuses even to look at his pickanniny. she clings to it. It is her baby. Escape is the only solution. Inexorable circumstances and the hysteria of her husband prevent escape.
Playwright Heyward has provided a Guignolesque way out for Ruth and Larry. After all, there is no solution for their problem.
Brass Ankle is the finest of the few American tragedies of this theatrical season. For while the author pours forth the deepest sympathy and pity for his doomed characters, hedged with a thorn-row of purest ethnological malice, he is also erecting an inevitable dramatic structure.
Ruth is played by Alice Brady (Bride of the Lamb, Karl & Anna), who does a highly creditable job in a part far removed from her regular line of work. Ben Smith, the sensible young hedonist of Holiday, plays Larry. A Texan, Actor Smith's understanding of his role compensates for any artistic shortcomings. Lester Lonergan is superb as the wise, tolerant man of medicine.
Following the sudden death of his father, thin, tall DuBose Heyward, descendant of the First Families of South Carolina, became the only man in his family at the age of nine. He sold papers for a time, and ill health later prevented him from obtaining formal schooling. In 1924 he dropped his moderately successful insurance business, took up writing.