Hoping For The Best

WILLIAM McCLEERY is an American playwright who tasted the sweet success of Broadway during the late forties. Good Housekeeping, Hope for the Best, and Parlor Story were his big hits. Now he splits his time between his editorial duties at The University, a Princeton quarterly, and the playwrighting courses he gives to undergraduates there. This week he has been at Harvard to offer benevolent advice and the salty insight of a rugged theater veteran to the Harvard cast of his new play Hardesty Park. The play opened last night in the Adams House dining room for its "pre-Broadway" run.

McCleery is an affable white-maned optimist of 62. He readily admits that his current lifestyle at Princeton is as fulfilling for him, a man consumed by his devotion to theater, as those days when he was a Broadway collegue of Helen Hays, Hal Holbrook, and Peter de Vrees. He exhibits a paternal fondness toward his students and their work, getting as excited about their plays and productions as about the professional scripts and shows he worked on in the past. He likes their fresh approach to theater, their desire to experiment, and their enthusiasm for their work. At one point he helped put together a road tour for a troupe of Wellesley students. That's how he met Evangeline Morphos, now an Adams House English tutor and the director of Hardesty Park. So, it's no real surprise that McCleery chose to premier his play at Harvard with an undergraduate cast.

McCleery explained that the play needs to be exposed to the intelligent, perceptive, and critical audiences a place like Harvard can provide. While he is quietly confident that Hardesty Park has commercial potential--several producers in New York have expressed interest in it--McCleery wants the type of response he can get from audiences here to point out the play's awkward edges and thereby help him buff it into finished form.

Hardesty Park is a naturalistic comedy, more subtle than a full blown farce or a thigh slapping burlesque. It's a delicate and good-humored satire, the type of play that fits in nicely with the new wave in dramatic taste here. Many students, tired of the riddles of absurdist pieces or the flamboyance of outrageous gut-splitters have come to appreciate more comfortable, less taxing plays, in which authors clearly intend to provide audiences with an evening of thoughtful levity.

McCleery wants to entertain in Hardesty Park by revealing the clever way a young husband-wife duo comes to terms with its conflicting yearnings to stay together, despite a sour marriage. The action in the play takes place on an idyllic corporation kibbutz, tucked into the folds of rural Connecticut. The husband and wife team has been selected by Fletcher Hardesty, a stodgy opinionated executive, to run his fiefdom after his retirement. Roger, the husband loves his job, but then he's got all the responsibility. Wife Pat, a talented aggressive careerist who's got the chance to make it big in the women's mag biz, loathes the crystal and china tea service life of a corporation hausfrau. She starts to come down strong on the jaunty Roger for not considering her professional objectives and personal needs in their life.

The excitement, tension, and comic blunders of this play, its pithy parts, all grow out of the antagonism between the rather cliched partners.

When I asked McCleery if the suspicious resemblance between the relationships in his play and in A Doll's House were merely coincidental, he acknowledged that Nora and Torvald Handover were pretty strong influences on him as he created the Hardesty pair. He drew a lot from Ibsen: marital strife stemming from an imbalanced relationship, the husband's view of the wife as a subservient partner, and the wife's surreptitious assistance to the husband and his career success. But Hardesty Park lacks the pessimistic and jaded timbre of Ibsen's drama.

McCleery finds that the type of skirmish in the war between the sexes lends itself to comic portrayal. In his play the struggle between modern mates for an egalitarian relationship is one for position, not for survival. No life and death issues are thrashed out here. "I wanted to show what marriage can be like for a young couple when the rules have changed. The old formulas aren't there any more and these people have to get by without any until new ones take their place," McCleery explained. "They have to remember the old joke about how porcupines make love," he added whimsically. "They do it very carefully." In Hardesty Park Roger and Pat blunder their way into a more balanced rapport, pricking each other with their quills in the process. By the end of the play McCleery offers an optimistic perspective on marriage. Egos remain intact, the puncture wounds have closed, and the couple settles down to a blissful future in Eden.

McCleery believes that audiences are ready for naturalistic portryals of topical issues, especially if they are couched in humor. He doesn't want us to take things too seriously. He writes about strong people, with "high blood pressure." When Roger and Pat confront a problem, they won't be crushed by it. They'll stumble around a little, but they'll work through their difficulties. Tragic figures are weak people, and take things too personally, too seriously, McCleery claims. The outcome of a play depends on the psychological components of its characters.

Naturalism is the right style for McCleery: it lets him explore real people in recognizably human situations making it through their crises with little psychic hurt. An optimist himself, McCleery consciously intends to stress the comic and the positive in plays. The vividness intrinsic to naturalism allows him to make his points clearly, showing his audience the dynamic process through which his characters resolve their conflicts so favorably.

McCleery's point of view reduces the seriousness of the issues his characters encounter, something of a sin in these cynical days. But if his plays work on stage, his positive reductionism could well be forgiven, even appreciated, for having provided an audience with the chance to lose themselves in a realistic world of make-believe for a few hours.