The Good Woman of Setzuan

Any friend of Hayes-Bickford well knows you must add or subtract one or two decibels from the continuous spiel of college theatre people, if you seek something akin to the ring of truth (that is). Whether you add or subtract largely depends on which way the warm wind blows; when a number of The Good Woman's company quit in desperation last week, the breeze ran swift and hot. My abacus lost track utterly, trying to keep count amid such blustery meteorology and all. You sometimes wonder why such a modest little show as this one should involve these higher mathematics and unsettling climatics.

For it's doubtful whether the last minute changes mattered a lot. Here is a rag-tag sketch, something informal, something that would suffer more from a bad stab at giving it professional gloss than from the loose and chaotic treatment Charles Mee, director, has given it. Not to say, of course, that a slick, carefully conceived job mightn't have been better; just probably impossible here.

The Good Woman is a preposterous "parable" that demonstrates you can't reconcile good and evil. The flame of goodness, however flickering, never expires. Yet evil is everywhere; so pervasive is evil that it lurks in goodness itself--in the blundering unwittingness of goodness. Specifically, Bertolt Brecht has written the story of an angelic prostitute (you never meet any other kind, on the stage, at least) who finds the wordly threats to her integrity so great she must mask herself as a loud-mouthed male. Thus better equipped to operate amid the avarice and lecheries of people, she can more effectively promote the interests of her goodness. Of course this sort of schizophrenia involves evil itself, but the gods don't much care. The world spins on, inexplicably, relentlessly.

All this goes on in China. That fact doesn't seem very significant because Brecht seems to write with a dark Germanic humor and the English version which the Harvard Dramatic Club chose is by Eric Bentley, who never uses a foreign word when an American one will do. The colloquiality (?) of the piece is one of its charms.

The caricatures drawn on stage by the HDC are violent, rakish monstrosities whose antics are usually funny, especially when the actors slow down and give Brecht's witty asides a chance. Perhaps, as the run progresses, some will give their lines more of the broad irony that Brecht seems to intend. Others, particularly Eugene Pell, Richard Smithies, David Mills and Edith Iselin lay it on just right. And Claire Lu Thomas, portraying the angelic prostitute, manages to keep her sweet head in admittedly adverse circumstances (everybody picks on her because she's good).

The big thing about The Good Woman is that it is a joke, a big, bizarre, stylish joke. The HDC seems to forget to laugh at times, but its confusing and spontaneous telling of the joke never bores and for this we are thankful.