21 - Burning Bright (the play, 1950)

Summary

Brooks Atkinson.

“At the Theatre.”

New York Times,

19 October 1950, p. 40.

Credit John Steinbeck with having the courage to try something that is difficult. Credit four actors and a director with a superb performance. For Burning Bright, which opened at the Broadhurst last evening, is written in the form of an epic and acted like a poem.

But there is always a “but” at the end of such salutations. Although Mr. Steinbeck is a man of faith, he does not write with the majesty of a prophet and Burning Bright does not have much eloquence in the theatre. Mr. Steinbeck has been happier when he has been closer to mice and men and the itinerant Okies. Abstract ideas do not appear to be his medium.

Like the preacher in Ecclesiastes, he says that the earth abideth forever. The human race must go on, though the method does not matter. To illustrate his thesis he offers a middle-aged husband, a young wife, a friend of the family and a young lover. Although the husband is sterile, he longs for children to continue the inheritance he has had from his forebears. Descendants are a religious obligation to him.

To gratify his vanity, the wife secretly takes a lover and pretends that the child is her husband's. When he discovers that he has been deceived, he is crushed and horrified. But in the end, Mr. Steinbeck shows the husband as resigned to any method that keeps the chain of life unbroken.

To give his theme a universal significance Mr. Steinbeck presents his characters first as circus folk, second as farmers and third as sailors.