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REVIEW AND COMMENT

Production of Medal for Willie by
Workshop 53 has strong impact

EVERY ONCE in a while a
play is produced which, by its
very timeliness and vivid refiec-
tion of reality, has a profound
impact upon the living issue.
Such a play is Medal For Willie,
by an American playwright, Wil-
liam Branch. Acclaimed by a
capacity audience in AUUCG Hall
here when it was first presented
by ‘Workshop 53 on April 17, it
received no less enthusiastic a
reception at a repeat perform-
ance given in the same hall on
Friday last week. ;

What gives Medal For Willie
its timeliness in this city is the
case of Clarence Clemens, the
Negro longshoreman who died
in Vancouver General Hospital,
where he had lain paralyzed for
months, after being arrested by
police. The protest movement

that swept this province when ©

the Pacific Tribune broke the
story suppressed by the three
daily papers also brought into
being Workshop 53, a drama
group composed of players drawn
from the city’s small Negro com-
munity and various. progressive
white organizations and formed
expressly for the presentation of
this play.

Medal For Willie is a power-
ful play at any time, for it draws
its drama from life and projects
it on to the stage as superb
theatre. In the context of the
Clemens case it has an extra-
ordinary emotional impact con-
veyed to the audience through
the acting of some of the Negro
players who are themselves lead-
ing figures in the fight to win
justice for a dead Negro worker.

William Branch develops his
theme simply and naturally. Wil-
lie Jackson, a Negro soldier, has
been killed overseas and his
mother, a working woman, is to
be presented with the medal
awarded posthumously to him
for bravery. The presentation
is to be made in the same school
from which Willie Jackson was
more than once put out on the
street, and by a general from
the Pentagon.

All the injustices, the inequali-
ties, the contradictions between
the pretense of freedom and de-
mocracy as practiced by the
whites of this typical Southern
city and thei reality as experienc-
ed in the everyday lives of the
Negroes, are shown without ex-
aggeration. But it is this very
quality that gives the play its
force — the cumulative effect of
the jimcrow discriminations that
denied Willie Jackson the edu-
cation he might have had, that
barred him from any but a menial

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OE te

Fran
in Medal For Willie.

job and finally drove him to join
the army.

And against this the playwright
skilfully sets the arrogance, the
bland assumption of superiority
by the whites, striving to main-
tain things “just as they are” and
utilizing even the presentation
to this end.

* * *

THE CENTRAL figure is Wil-
lie Jackson’s mother. No mat-
ter how well the other parts are
acted, the play stands or falls on
the portrayal of her role. In
Nettie Lane, who plays Mrs. Jack-
son, Workshop 53 has an actress
who lives and breathes the part,
compelling attention from her
opening lines and never once los-
ing it. She is well supported
by Lela McFadden, playing the
part of her daughter, Lucie May.

Other outstanding perform-
ances are turned in by Janet
Curtis, as Bernice, and Eleanor
Lane, who is delightfully natural
as Bernice’s kid brother, Buddy.

It is more difficult to single
out individuals among the white

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ood as John H. Masot; me and anet Cur is as

players. All are good, but the
acting, understandably, lacks the
living inspiration that disting-
uishes some of the Negro play-
ers. Perhaps Phil Gadd, as Gen-
eral Atkins, Allan Ross, as Mayor
Bleecher, and Alex Kucher, as
the barber, are the most convinc-
ing.

The finest single scene is that
between Frank Flood, playing the
part of John H. Mason, Jr., the
playboy son of a leading citizen,
attempting to pick up Janet
Curtis in the role of Bernice,
Willie Jackson’s former girl
friend. It is a difficult scene
and they do it well.

The full cast is:

Leroy King (Janitor); Darlene
Smith (Janitress); Virgil Lane
(Mr. Taylor); Nettie Lane (Mrs.
Jackson); Lela McFadden (Lucy
May); Phil Zander (Captain Ber-
ger); Allan Ross (Mayor Bleech-
er); Jock Taylor (Superintendent
of Schools); Phil Gadd (General
Atkins); Alex Kucher (Barber);
Stu Kennedy (John H. Mason);
Tom Robertson (Editor); Bea
Ferneyhough (Reporter); Janet
Curtis (Bernice); Eleanor Lane
(Buddy); John» H. Mason, Jr.
(Frank Flood); Leroy King (Prin-
cipal); Sylvester Risby (Mr. Jack-
son). :

In presenting Medal For Wil-
lie, Workshop 53 and its talented
director, Shelah Norman-Martin,
have made a significant contribu-
tion to progressive theatre in
Vancouver. The same influences
that suppressed the Clemens

: story, and now operate to ob-

struct the promised investigation
of the case, have denied it the
publicity it deserves. But the

impression on the hundreds who
have seen the play is real and
cannot be denied.

—HAL GRIFFIN.

GUIDE TO GOOD READING

Hardy's enthusiasm about .

Soviet Union

“J HAVE seen the future, and
it works.” exclaimed Lincoln
Steffens, American author, after
his return from the Soviet Union
nearly three decades ago. Re-
cently a famous young Australian
writer, Frank Hardy, author of
Power Without Glory, paid his
first visit to the USSR, and has
aptly named the book he wrote
on his return, Journey Into The
Future.

It’s a sparkling book, sincere,
witty and devoid of cliches.

Going through customs when
he landed by plane in Moscow,
Hardy tells how he solved the
language difficulty. The customs
officer, smiling and jovial, came
across several copies of Power
Without Glory in one suitcase
and scratched his head. Then he
picked up a large envelope full

' of photographs, looked at some

of them.

+“ ‘Berlin Festival?’ he asked,
this time in German.

“Da, I replied, proudly using
my first Russian word without
referring to the dictionary in my
pocket.” .

At the National Hotel on the
corner of Gorki Street, opposite
the Kremlin across the wide
square, Hardy and his wife were
given a large suite. Usually a
deep sleeper, he had trouble
sleeping that first night, so he
go up and wrote his first notes
at three o’clock in the morning.

Later he regretted missing
those few hours of sleep, for in
the five weeks that followed his
hosts kept him travelling at a
merry clip.

Other writers who have visited.
the Soviet Union have written
about the places Hardy visited,
but few (Dyson Carter is the only
one I can recall at the moment)
possessed such a reportorial eye
as the shrewd, alert and cultured
Australian. Whether he is de-
scribing a football game, horse
race, Stalingrad, the care of chil-
dren, equality of women, a fac-
tory, trade union procedure or
any other subject, Hardy is never
pedantic, and never dull.

One day he went to the circus,
after saying to his wife, “This
will be just an ordinary circus,
they can’t excel at everything.”
(Previously the Hardys had visit-
ed the ballet, the opera and a
concert). But he was wrong.

To begin with, the circus open-
ed with a speech about world
peace, which made it unique in
comparison with our circuses.
Then came a variety of numbers,
including “acrobats .. . jugglers

.. clowns ... then the Babnovi
Four, the inevitable young ladies
in brief tights and brassieres,
performing high up on a trapeze
. . . a mind-reading act,. ..
tight rope walkers” and so on.

“The final act is a fitting climax
(I never thought I’d live to see
a bear walk the tight-rope, but
I did.) Boris and Samara Ador,
People’s Artists of the Russian
Republic and their performing
bears . . . seven bears, four of
them enormous, one a_ baby,
walked the tight ropes high up,
two ef them actually walked the
width of the arena on their fore-
paws; they even turned somer-
saults on the tight rope.”

* * *

Like all visitors to the Soviet
Union, Hardy was intensely in-
terested in the great construction
works of Communism. But be-
cause he is a writer, he was
even more interested in the peo-
ple he met, and they come alive
in the pages of his book—cul-
tural workers, trade unionists,
farmers, scientists. Nor is there

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MAY 8, 1953 — PAGE 8

contagious -

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any sharp dividing line between
them.

Travelling from Moscow by car
to a coal mine, the Hardys were
accompanied by an interpreter
and Mikhail Apletin, vice-prest
dent of the Foreign Division of
the Union of Soviet Writers.

“On our way, we talked
about everything under the sun
from literature to football,
amid frequent laughter. ..°

The driver entered into the

conversation and was* general-

ly treated as an equal; this
was typical of the feeling of
friendship and equality that
exists between Soviet people
“no matter what their occupa
tion may be.”
* x x

H. G. WELLS once called Len:
in “the dreamer in the Kremlin.”
Hardy found that there are 200
million dreamers in the Soviet
Union today, and what’s more,
they are making their dreams
come true, in,the same’ fashion
that Lenin’s dream of electrifi-
cation of the country was realiz
ed in 10 years.

“Everyone you meet, from
children to old-age pensioners;
tells you about their plans
for the future; ‘especially
about what they call the Great
Construction Works of Com-
munism. The only subject
that will excite the average
Soviet citizen more than a2
argument about football is @
discussion about the details of ©
these works.”

In Journey Into The Futuré
(obtainable here at the People’s
Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender, price $1.45), Hardy
writes about these great projects
in exciting prose. I defy you t0
read his book without getting
excited, too— BERT WHYTE.

Stefan Heym
leaves U.S.

STEPHEN HEYM, the Amer!
can novelist, has announced tha
he no longer plans to return 10
the U.S. and has been grante
citizenship by the German Demo
eratic Republic government.

Now in Berlin, Heym has T&
signed his commission as an 0%
ficer in the U.S. Army reserv®
corps and has returned to Hise”
hower the Bronze Star Medal he
was awarded in the Second Wor
War.

In a statement to the pres®
Heym explained that “the steadily
increasing drive towards fascis™
and war by the American 90”
ernment is making it almost i”
possible for any honest write!
within the U.S. to function at bis
craft and to bring his’ work
the American public.” es

For a native born America®
writer, he said, the only choicé
is “between losing his integrity
by writing what the FBI, the
state department and big bus”
ness will approve, or  beil®
hounded for writing the trut
while seeing his work barre
from publication.” f

For the American writer °
foreign birth like Heym, “tht
choice lies between being sile?
on what is happening to t
adopted land .. . or speaking Ouy
and being deprived of his Am
erican citizenship. . . .”

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