Guilt is running nudity a close second at theater box offices. Flesh peddling is relatively honest, since it makes no particular pretense of moral grandeur. But when the clink of commerce purports to be the thunder of conscience, all sorts of hypocrisies begin masquerading as virtues.
In recent seasons, the guilt peddlers have brought the following wares to the dramatic market: The Deputy, The Investigation, Incident at Vichy, Soldiers, The Man in the Glass Booth, The Great White Hope, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and now Indians. These plays have much in common. While an occasional effort is made to specify some individual responsibility for crimes, oppressions, injustices, and atrocities, the dominating j'accuse is hurled at the audience. The audience is presumed to be collectively guilty of every misdeed in recorded history. This is patently absurd. By embracing the abstraction of collective guilt, the playwright performs the singularly irresponsible act of absolving the specifically guilty parties involved.
Lesson in Irony. The audience for such plays apparently has a neurotic appetite for masochistic self-abasement. It seems bent on atoning for sins it has not committed and receiving the bogus absolution of ex post facto justice dispensed with casuistry and comfort in the theater. No one can bring the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe back to life; no one can restore dead Indians to their buffalo hunting grounds; no one can dis-invent the atomic bomb.
What, then, does such a playwright think he is doing? His rationale is that he is providing a cautionary moral lesson drawn from history that will enable people to avoid past errors and evils. Unfortunately, the profoundly ironic lesson of history is that people do repeat the errors and evils of the past, over and over and over again. The reality these playwrights ignore is that man is a finite being, bound always to act and react within the limits of his nature, "a fallen creature" in religious terms. If the human character could be altered and improved by a play, it would have happened ages ago. All wars would have ended 2,000 years ago with The Trojan Women—the greatest and most moving antiwar play ever written.
Another rationale such playwrights resort to is that they are alerting the audience's conscience to contemporary evils. Far from it. These playwrights simply trade on the headlines of the day and gamble that the people they attract will come to the theater precisely because their consciences are on the alert. There is nothing easier than to preach to the already converted. For any but a guilt-collecting audience, most of these plays rate a big B for Boredom. There is no moral suasion in crude hack work that substitutes lapel-grabbing diatribes for scrupulous dramatic craftsmanship. A poor play does not become a good play simply because the playwright's heart is in the right place.