The Petrified Forest
It must have been a thrill to be an American socialist in 1935. The Bolsheviks had proved they had staying power. Upton Sinclair had made an impressive bid for the California governorship the year before with his socialist EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform, receiving nearly one million votes. And to cap it off, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the first federal welfare programs in the nation’s history.
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The Petrified Forest is an overlooked American masterpiece, one of those monumental high modernist epics that recast the everyday world in mythic proportions. Perhaps the play’s reputation hasn’t quite recovered from director Archie Mayo’s 1936 celluloid banalization. His Hollywood version introduced a white-hot Humphrey Bogart to the world but reduced Sherwood’s sweeping social commentary to Saturday-afternoon tear jerk. Today even the Blockbuster Video packaging can offer only faint praise: “Prototype characters and much-imitated plot. Film’s treatment of black characters is interesting for its time.”
Sherwood’s strong political conscience gives his drama high stakes. But his artistic sensibility is even stronger: politics ultimately pale beside the mysterious workings of the human heart. Like that other great modernist playwright Jean Anouilh, Sherwood puts his faith in only one force: love, especially when it’s destined to fail. Squier, the man who finds more nourishment in love than in food, knows his days are numbered; Sherwood writes of the character’s first entrance: “There is something about him–and it is impossible in a stage direction to say just what it is–that brings to mind the ugly word ‘condemned.’” Yet Squier can declare, with Sherwood’s full blessing, “Any woman is worth everything that any man has to give–anguish, ecstasy, faith, jealousy, love, hatred, life or death. Don’t you see, this is the excuse for our existence.” Done well, this is the kind of play that can sweep you off your feet one moment and lay bare your soul the next.
You’ll see two performances every bit as good, however, if you stay for Mary-Arrchie’s dazzling late-night offering, The Killer and the Comic. Holed up in a woodland cabin outside of Buffalo, serial killer Carl bangs out his memoirs on an old manual typewriter and waits for his next victim to knock unsuspectingly at the door. Today it’s Barney Goldrose, a failed middle-aged Jewish stand-up comedian who was on his way to a gig at a convalescent home when his car skidded off the road.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Daniel Guidara.
