Johnny Johnson (words by Paul Green, music by Kurt Weill; Group Theatre, producer) is described by its authors as "a legend." It is also a fable, a fantasy, a dream of peace and goodwill stated in terms so simple and childlike that, while it may irritate the sophisticated, it should please the pure in heart.
Johnny Johnson should also appeal to playgoers interested in seeing some of the theatre's traditional dimensions torn out and enlarged. Playwright Green, who supplied the Group with its first play, The House of Connelly, and fugitive German composer Weill, who set The Beggars' Opera to new music with notable success three years ago, have fashioned a show which does not hesitate to exploit any form of theatrical procedure necessary to attain its end. The production begins conventionally enough in April 1917 with Johnny Johnson (Russell Collins), a tombstone carver with an odd way of thinking things out straight, surrounded by his fellow townsmen who have come to see the mayor unveil Johnson's statue to Peace. The ceremony is interrupted by President Wilson's declaration of war against Imperial Germany and thereafter the narrative plunges into a succession of reveries and nightmares. Torn at first between his love for his patriotic sweetheart (Phoebe Brand) and his pacifism, Johnny does not volunteer for the War until President Wilson proclaims it a war to end war.
In a series of vaudeville blackouts, he is soon befuddling the Army psychological examiners while they are trying to catechize him; enraging the drill sergeant who will not realize that Johnny is lefthanded; unintentionally stealing the captain's girl. From this rough & tumble, the show then leaps to exalted heights when Johnny apostrophizes the Statue of Liberty as he sails away to France. And from the revue stage and poetic drama, the play proceeds to a forceful sequence of impressionistic scenes. Johnny is found in a trench with his company and while they writhe their twisted limbs in troubled sleep, three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, ghoulishly croak a lament:
We might have served a better -will,
Ploughs for the ground,
Wheels for the mill.
Johnny almost stops the War by forming an alliance with the German ranks, dosing the Allied High Command with laughing gas. For his pains he is sent home, locked up for ten years in an insane asylum.
Johnny is let out by and by. His girl has married a Wartime malingerer who made a fortune from laxative water. Simple, defeated but undismayed, Johnny becomes a sidewalk hawker. "Toys," he cries. "Toys. Toys for good little girls and boys." He sings a melancholy little song about his faith in man's ultimate goodness, walks away up a long street.
Credit for the Group's finest and freshest show since Waiting for Lefty can be squarely split four ways: to Actor Collins for his good humor and dignity in a part which might easily have been confusingly eccentric; to Donald Oenslager for a series of arresting and imaginative sets; to Poet-Playwright Green for a profound and witty evangelical address to a world he at one point concedes to be "bass ackwards"; to Composer Weill for the weird, haunting little ballads and Europeanized fox trots which immensely help to articulate the play.