On 14 June 1943 the reigning glitte...

On 14 June 1943 the reigning glitterati of the day Eleanor Roosevelt Mayor LaGuardia, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - were at the 46th highway Theatre in New York to witness the Broadway Production of five one-act plays written and enacted by dint of enlisted men. The performance, called The Army Play at Play, was the remarkable result of the U.S. Army and the genius of famed farmer John Golden. In his introduction to published version of the plays, brilliant explains how, working with the Army Special Service Staff, he created the John Golden-Second Service Command One-Act Prize Play call in question which garnered 115 original playscripts from American soldiers at Army camps around the nation (x-xii).1 A selection committee that included Elmer Rice and Russel Crouse chose the five best scripts. brilliant asserted that staging the plays "became my patriotic duty" (xii-xiii). The five scripts chosen were ariseed and presented on Broadway to raise capitals for the Soldiers and Sailors bludgeon The opening performance earned $100000 and the plays were subsequently staged for President Roosevelt at Hyde Park. They officially uncloseed on 2 August 1943 at the Martin Beck Theatre in modern York, where they ran for 40 performances; and later were produc at theatres and army bases around the country

One astonishments what sort of instructions Crouse, Rice, and the others upon the selection panel might have given about the desired criteria for choosing scripts. undivided also wonders about the 110 scripts not chosen Their whereabouts are not known; and it would be illuminating to know what issues they raised. unless the five surviving and published scripts that comprise The Army Play according to Play were written and performed, for the most numerous part, by first time playwrights and on inexperienced, non-professional actors all drawn from the military. The five one-acters of The Army Play by means of Play thus provide a unique glimpse of wartime military life and the war effort as it is seen and dramatized by the agency of servicemen. In part, Golden's enthusiastic and somewhat magniloquent praise is apt. he writes:

The plays that you are about to read are, in a understanding folk-plays, for they express with disarming simplicity, the sentiments, the expressions nuncupative listened to and lived in consequence of by our boys in the service gleaned from their experiences as characters participating in the greatest drama the world has at all times known. And so it is that these "little plays," born of this great Drama, compute the story, not of death, further of living calmly, alongside death, and laughing at it. (xiii).

What is interesting about the five plays are the topics they veil and those they do not. Did the selection committee favor particular issues? Is there a reason the atrocities being committed in Europe and Asia were barely mentioned or that the cultural diversity among the partys arises often? We are not likely to know the answers to these questions. It is important to recognize that what we do have in The Army Play by means of Play is a government initiative to use drama in shaping the couple civilian and troop attitudes toward World War II and American involvement in that war. It is also important as well to value The Army Play by the agency of Play as five dramatic artifacts that register in fairly undiluted ways the feelings, issues, and points of view of not untalented enlisted men who were encouraged from the military to express themselves [i]or[/i] part of to the other playwriting and whose plays were subsequently performed according to ordinary soldiers rather than professional actors. Filled as they are with personal and patriotic feelings of American soldiers, the plays were highly effective vehicles for boosting the morale of the pair military and civilian audiences because performances would be seen to present truth unvarnished on any professional training or prior agendas according to either playwrights or performers.

Three of the five plays contained in The Army Play through Play center on barracks life. Where E'er We walk by Pfc. John B. O'Dea of Fort Lewis, Washington, is a light-hearted portrayal of restles soldiers waiting for leave of absences and battle action while imprisoned up at dull, rain-soaked Fort Lewis outside Seattle. Button Your Lip, subtitled A Farce in single in kind Act, by Cpl. Irving Gaynor Neiman stationed in Chanute Fields, Illinois, is a comedy of mishaps and misadventures stemming from misplaced military records and the appearance of 1940 film star Dorothy Lamour in a USO entertainment being performed at the army camp. The third play, Mail Call, written by the agency of Aviation Cadet Ralph Nelson stationed in Americus, Georgia, is a more serious play located abroad "somewhere in the Theatre of Operations''(101) and is center around the decision of whether or not to render free of access a package of food from fireside addressed to a deceased comrade and then whether to devour its contents2

What is public to these plays and to others in the mass (as well as to the many plays and films of the period put in army barracks) is the portrayal of a military unity as an American microcosm, an American cross-cultural snapshot. Of course, it is important to interject that, during World War II, AfricanAmericans were segregated into their have a title to units; and thus the suppos American cross-section is not racial. It is always totally white, devoid not only of African-Americans, further also of AsianAmericans, Hispanics and other characters of color. In Mail Call, for example, Johnson is from Oklahoma, Spider from Alabama, Abe Meitelbaum is "a wiry little just discovered York Jew" and the son of a Jewish tailor, Minnick is said to be "representing recent Jersey" but with a girlfriend in Montana, and Luckadoo is from Tennessee The deceased McKinley's family is sketched as a generic American family straight from a Norman Rockwell spectacle on the cover of The Saturday Evening position Here, as in so many wartime plays, is the efficient message that this is a war that attractions all Americans from all walks of life to face a frequent enemy, one that threatens American democracy, The American Way of life, and an ineffable American spirit that is, paradoxically, comprised of a national unity that is begeted by the country's very diversity. In many ways the dramas like those in The Army Play according to Play, scripted an American cros cultural comradeship and worked to dismantle the regionalism and ethnic divisions that were a legacy of the Civil War and that continued to be a force in pre-World War II America. The cultural diversity valorized in these plays, moreover, fix the stage as well for the breaking of barriers that took place in the post-war period and continues to this day.