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The American Legacy
The American Legacy
"Theatrical archaeologist
extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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Metropolitan
Playhouse
The American Legacy "Theatrical archaeologist
extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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| The Hero |
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| HERO with 2 FACES “A hero's a guy who
does somthin he wouldn’t a-done, if he’d stopped to think.”
- Oswald Lane “What is a hero?” is one question. Why we need heroes may be a more important one, and in the 1921 drama The Hero, it is the only question that matters. In 1919, Andy Lane is an upstanding, if unprepossessing, insurance salesman, a rural transplant to a New York suburb, now barely making ends meet for his small but too-large family: his mother, his wife Hester, their young son, and a Belgian orphan from the Great War. Particularly for Hester, their workaday life is one without change, seemingly without hope, when in drops Oswald, a prodigal son returned. Andy’s brother, Oswald ran away at sixteen with a forged check, and without his pregnant girlfriend, leaving Andy and his parents to pick up the pieces. Now, twelve years later, he is a wounded veteran of the French Foreign Legion with an easy charm and a romantic story. The family—indeed, the entire town—open their hearts and home to the war hero. But as the weeks go by, reckoning with the man behind the uniform proves harder and harder to do, as the romantic hero may not be all he seems. While author Gilbert Emery was a veteran, The Hero is not a play about the The Great War. It is an intimate story of one struggling American family grappling with a seemingly fragmented, rudderless new world. The war, of course, is essential context: the unspeakable horrors of trench battles and gas attacks that touched three continents were a bewildering break with the past. Its advent signaled the collapse of monarchies and the social order that underpinned them, from the Bolshevik revolutions in Russia, to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and the rebalancing of European power. At home, America’s entry into hostilities inflamed debates over isolationism and America’s role in the rest of the world. Beyond the war, domestic trials included the flu pandemic of 1918, the recession of late 1918 and depression of 1920, political upheaval around issues of social welfare, women’s suffrage, and immigration—all contributing to the sense that old rules no longer applied in an unstable new era. As Hester puts it: “Nothing seems right in this world.” EXIT STRATEGY For those who fought to “keep the world safe for democracy,” the distance between the ideals and the actualities could hardly have seemed greater. To Oswald, the fighting was neither dulce nor decorum. But for those who stayed home, the distant battles were inevitably fantastical, and what the returning hero is is less important than what they need him to be. An empty vessel for the family he returns to, Oswald is claimed by each: he is the embodiment of sacrifice to the wife who feels she has given too much, of bravery for the boy who dreams of glory, of charity for the brother before whom he is guilty, of wholeness for the mother who has lost her child, of companionship for the orphan who has no home. And to nearly every one, he is the way out of their real lives and into a life of excitement, significance, and hope. Out of these tensions between what is and what we wish for comes The Hero’s remarkable pathos and its wry humor. That tension is also evident in the play’s style, itself a product of cultural transition. The Hero is a work of a new theater rising from the old popular melodramas and comedies. The shocking twist in the final act is not the implausible reversal that might befit a melodrama. The modest living room of the Lane household is a far cry from the parlor of a whimsical comedy. The threshold of plausibility in theater had to shift with the times. Against sobering realities of modern warfare, crumbled states, psychological revelations, and growing class-consciousness, the stylized falseness of the popular theater of the past seems patronizing. The new drama portrays average people, speaking everyday speech, confronting uneasy choices ambivalent motivations, and appraised with moral ambiguity. Theater is always an illusion, but in The Hero, the measure of falseness in the illusion is very different from that of the generation before. The result is poingant, funny...and lifelike. JUST DESSERTS In the end, embracing a mix of illusion and reality becomes the real hope of the play. Rejecting false dreams, accepting unromantic truths, and finding strength in that acceptance are the ways ahead for those who have the courage to do so. The true heroes of the play are the ones who have come through their battles and vow to continue fighting. Perhaps, then, a hero is not one who acts without thinking, but someone who thinks plenty and goes on just the same. One complaint underlies nearly every dilemma of The Hero, and that is sense of injustice that infuses the everyday lives of the play. Unfairly deprived, unfairly accused, unfairly burdened, unfairly praised—no one seems to be given his or her just desserts. Yet moving forward still proves the right thing to do. And so we welcome The Hero as our third mainstage production in Metropolitan’s Season of Justice. -
Alex
Roe
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