Maxwell Anderson's 25th play, Truckline Cafe, reached Broadway last week. Without providing any excitement of its own, it managed to provoke quite a little.
Setting its scene in a populous diner along a California highway, Truckline Cafe takes a look at the dangling lives and dislocated marriages resulting from the war. It is most concerned with two couples: a former soldier who kills his unfaithful wife; a former soldier whose wife had believed him dead, taken a lover, then run away when she learned her husband was still alive. The husband tracks her down, but even after confessing his own infidelity, he cannot blot out her sense of guilt and defeat. What largely changes her mind is the futile tragedy of the other couple.
Truckline Cafe wholly muffed a chance to give dramatic, or even melodramatic force to a timely theme. In its casual moments it was flaccid, in its crucial ones unreal. Playwright Anderson's small army of bit parts had an effect of shambling vaudeville. His main story became a hollow study of two people speaking high-busted clichés. Too often, as in the past, he slubbed words into what was neither poetic language nor human speech.
"Downright Unbearable." The daily critics, to a man, trounced Truckline. Said the Daily News's John Chapman: "The worst play I have seen since I have been in the reviewing business." Moaned the Sun's Ward Morehouse: "In its more pretentious interludes, it becomes downright unbearable."
Then Truckline's producers, Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan, tore into the critics. In an angry New York Times ad they announced they would close Truckline this week, but not "without saying a few things that are on our minds." Sample:
"Our theater is strangled in a bottleneck . . . made up of a group of men who are hired to report the events of our stage and who more and more are acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise—either by their training or their taste. . . . No opposition point of view is ever expressed. There is a blackout of all taste except the taste of these men."
Next Playwright Anderson let fly in an ad in the Herald Tribune: "It is an insult to our theater that there should be so many incompetents and irresponsibles among [the reviewers]. ... Of late years all plays are passed on largely by a sort of Jukes family of journalism."
What was probably the last word belonged to the New Yorker's Wolcott Gibbs, whose review had not yet appeared. Said he: "I'd say offhand that there are only about three newspaper reviewers here who are competent to write about anything, but it is absolutely absurd to make an issue out of this play, which has no merit whatsoever."