Rocket to the Moon
At the end of the 1930s the great democratic experiment that had swept Europe and America 150 years earlier seemed poised on the brink of failure. The “free economy,” which had long promised independence in exchange for hard work, was revealed as a jury-rigged system that favored capital at the expense of labor. Roosevelt’s support for reforms like social security, the minimum wage, and collective bargaining began to be perceived as nascent socialism. In Europe, Hitler scooped up Czechoslovakia and promised to annihilate the Jewish race, Franco fought to impose his brand of fascism on Spain, and Stalin’s systematic extermination of “internal enemies” revealed the ugly totalitarian side of the 20-year-old Soviet experiment.
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But the playwright was nearly paralyzed by his personal situation. He felt helpless to duplicate his overwhelming initial success (in 1935 he’d had four plays on Broadway). His marriage to film star Luise Rainer was crumbling, sending the writer into bouts of the depression and mania that had plagued him for years. In 1938 he abruptly ceased work on all sociohistorical scripts and turned his attention to his “merely personal dentist play,” Rocket to the Moon.
In director William Brown’s handsome, well-paced production, however, that ring too often becomes a dull thud. The production gets off on the wrong foot in the opening scene, as Stark and Belle bicker about his career. Despite the script’s abundant evidence that Stark is a nebbish and Belle a matron–nearly every character comments on their imbalanced relationship–Brown places them on an equal footing. Steven Hinger’s Stark has backbone to spare while Karen Janes Woditsch’s Belle is oddly tremulous and plaintive. As a result Stark’s central dilemma is never established and he has no real stake, other than the purely libidinal, in dallying with his secretary. What should be a striving toward an entirely new self becomes a passing fancy.
Saroyan offers no political solution to the quagmire he portrays (although he takes an unmistakable antiunion stance), favoring a fiercely humanistic approach that encourages us to look for the good in people. It’s easy to dismiss the work as sentimental, but the play’s heart lies in its careful portrayals of day laborers, wannabe artists, drunks, society types, and working stiffs scoping each other out in the great American leveler, the cheap dive.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Michael Brosilow.
