J.B. (play)

Last updated
J.B.
Written by Archibald MacLeish
CharactersMr. Zuss
Nickles
J.B.
Sarah
David
Jonathan
Mary
Ruth
Rebecca
First Messenger
Second Messenger
Girl
Jolly
Bildad
Zophar
Eliphaz
Mrs. Adams
Mrs. Murphy
Mrs. Lesure
Mrs. Botticelli
A Distant Voice
Sally Gibson
Date premieredDecember 11, 1958
Place premiered ANTA Playhouse
New York City
Original language English
SubjectA retelling of the Book of Job
GenreDrama
SettingA stage inside an enormous circus tent

J.B. is a 1958 play written in free verse by American playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish, and is a modern-day retelling of the story of the biblical figure Job. The play is about J.B. (a stand-in for Job), a devout millionaire with a happy domestic life whose life is ruined. The play went through several incarnations before it was finally published. MacLeish began the work in 1953 as a one-act production, but within three years, had expanded it to a full, three-act manuscript.

Contents

The play has won several accolades, including the 1959 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Two versions of J.B. are available, the original book, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the script that MacLeish revised substantially for Broadway, published by Samuel French Inc.

Plot summary

The play opens in "a corner inside an enormous circus tent". Two vendors, Mr. Zuss (evoking the chief Greek god Zeus) and Nickles (i.e. "Old Nick," a folk name for the Devil) [1] begin the play-within-a-play by assuming the roles of God and Satan, respectively. They overhear J.B., a wealthy New York banker, describe his prosperity as a just reward for his faithfulness to God. Scorning him, Nickles wagers that J.B. will curse God if his life is ruined. Nickles and Zuss then watch as J.B.'s children are killed and his property is ruined and the former millionaire is left to the streets. J.B. is then visited by three Comforters: Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar (representing history, science, and religion), who each offer a different explanation for his plight. J.B. declines to believe any of them, instead asking God himself to explain. Instead, he encounters Zuss and Nickles. Nickles urges him to commit suicide to spite God; Zuss offers him his old life back if he will promise to obey God. J.B. rejects them both, and instead finds comfort in the person of his wife Sarah. The play ends with the two building a new life together.

Productions

A first production was mounted by the Yale School of Drama at the Yale University Theater, New Haven, opening April 23, 1958. Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Being in an expansive mood, Archibald MacLeish has written an epic of mankind. He calls it "J.B." It was acted for the first time at the Yale University Theatre last evening." Directed by F. Curtis Canfield, the cast included James Shepherd as J.B. [2]

The three-act version premiered on Broadway at the ANTA Playhouse on December 11, 1958, and closed on October 24, 1959, after 364 performances. Directed by Elia Kazan, the cast included Raymond Massey, Christopher Plummer, Nan Martin, Ivor Francis, Pat Hingle (J.B.), Clifton James, Judith Lowry, Candy Moore, James Olson, Ford Rainey, and Andreas Voutsinas. [3] Brooks Atkinson wrote: "For 'J. B.', the title of Archibald MacLeish's new play at the ANTA Theatre, read 'Everyman'. Looking around at the wreckage and misery of the modern world, Mr. MacLeish has written a fresh and exalting morality that has great stature." [4] The production was recorded and released by RCA Victor Red Seal.

An off-Broadway production by the Equity Library Theatre opened on March 17, 1962, at the Master Theatre, starring John Cazale. [5]

The play was performed at the University of Nevada in Reno and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1963, in College Park Maryland at the University of Maryland in 1965,Hannibal-LaGrange College, Hannibal, Missouri, in 1966, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in 1971.

Characters

Awards and nominations

The ANTA Playhouse production won the 1959 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Direction. [3]

The play won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. [6] The Pulitzer Prize committee wrote: " 'Certainly no other play of this or many seasons has attempted to come to grips with so large and universal a theme and succeeded in stating it in terms more eloquent, moving, provocative' than J.B." [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Book of Job</span> Book of the Bible

The Book of Job, or simply Job, is a book found in the Ketuvim ("Writings") section of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the first of the Poetic Books in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Scholars generally agree that it was written between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE. It addresses theodicy through the experiences of the eponymous protagonist. Job is a wealthy and God-fearing man with a comfortable life and a large family. God asks Satan for his opinion of Job's piety. When Satan states that Job would turn away from God if he were rendered penniless, without his family, and materially uncomfortable, God allows him to do so to prove Satan wrong.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archibald MacLeish</span> American poet and 9th Librarian of Congress

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Margulies</span> American playwright

Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sidney Howard</span> American writer (1891–1939)

Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Daly (actor)</span> American actor (1918–1978)

James Firman Daly was an American theater, film, and television actor, who is perhaps best known for his role as Paul Lochner in the hospital drama series Medical Center, in which he played Chad Everett's superior.

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i> 1942 play by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. It was produced by Michael Myerberg and directed by Elia Kazan with costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy-drama is noted as among the most heterodox of classic American comedies — it broke nearly every established theatrical convention.

<i>Street Scene</i> (play) 1929 play written by Elmer Rice

Street Scene is a 1929 American play by Elmer Rice. It opened January 10, 1929, at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City. After a total of 601 performances on Broadway, the production toured the United States and ran for six months in London. The action of the play takes place entirely on the front stoop of a New York City brownstone and in the adjacent street in the early part of the 20th century. It studies the complex daily lives of the people living in the building and the sense of despair that hovers over their interactions. Street Scene received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucille Lortel</span> American actress

Lucille Lortel was an American actress, artistic director, and theatrical producer. In the course of her career Lortel produced or co-produced nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for Tony Awards: As Is by William M. Hoffman, Angels Fall by Lanford Wilson, Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina!, and A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing. She also produced Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, a production which ran for seven years and according to The New York Times "caused such a sensation that it...put Off-Broadway on the map."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">August Wilson Theatre</span> Broadway theater in Manhattan, New York

The August Wilson Theatre is a Broadway theater at 245 West 52nd Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1925, the theater was designed by C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim and was built for the Theatre Guild. It is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson (1945–2005). The August Wilson has approximately 1,225 seats across two levels and is operated by Jujamcyn Theaters. The facade is a New York City designated landmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brooks Atkinson</span> American theatre critic (1894–1984)

Justin Brooks Atkinson was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1922 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him "the theater's most influential reviewer of his time." Atkinson became a Times theater critic in the 1920s and his reviews became very influential. He insisted on leaving the drama desk during World War II to report on the war and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times. He returned to the theater beat in the late 1940s, until his retirement in 1960.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Barry</span> American playwright

Philip Jerome Quinn Barry was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ketti Frings</span> American dramatist and screenwriter

Ketti Frings was an American writer, playwright, and screenwriter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958.

<i>Say, Darling</i> Play

Say, Darling is a three-act comic play by Abe Burrows and Richard and Marian Bissell about the creation of a Broadway musical. While the play featured nine original songs with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne, all the songs are presented as either rehearsal or audition material.

<i>The Old Maid</i> (play)

The Old Maid is a 1934 play by American playwright Zoë Akins, adapted from Edith Wharton's 1924 novella of the same name. The play as published has six "episodes", covering twenty-one years of time. It has a large cast, and three settings; one is used for the last four episodes (scenes). The story concerns two women, cousins, who allow rancor over a lost love to become a struggle for the illegitimate daughter of one.

No Place to Be Somebody is a 1969 play written by American playwright Charles Gordone.

<i>Look Homeward, Angel</i> (play)

Look Homeward, Angel is a 1957 stage play by the playwright Ketti Frings. The play is based on Thomas Wolfe's 1929 largely autobiographical novel of the same title.

The Actor's Workshop was a theatre company founded in San Francisco in 1952. It was the first professional theatre on the west coast to premiere many of the modern American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and the world dramas of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. For the 1953–1954 season, the Workshop offered six plays: Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; Venus Observed, by Christopher Fry; Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller; a revival of Playboy; The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov; and Tonight at 8.30, by Noël Coward. On April 15, 1955, the Actor's Workshop signed the first Off-Broadway Equity contract to be awarded outside New York City.

The Trial of God is a play by Elie Wiesel about a fictional trial calling God as the defendant. Though the setting itself is fictional, and the play's notes indicate that it "should be performed as a tragic farce", he based the story on events he witnessed first-hand as a teenager in Auschwitz. The play was reimagined for television in God on Trial by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Fayette Curtis Canfield was an American theater director, drama professor, and the first dean of the Yale School of Drama.

<i>Panic</i> (play) 1935 verse play by Archibald MacLeish

Panic is a 1935 verse play by Archibald MacLeish. A tragedy that is one of the author's least-known works, it was written during the sixth year of the Great Depression. The drama is set during the bank panic of 1933 and concerns the fall of the world's richest man, a banker named McGafferty. First presented March 14–16, 1935, at the Imperial Theatre in Manhattan, the production featured Orson Welles's first leading performance on the American stage. Panic was produced by John Houseman and Nathan Zarkin as the first project of their new Phoenix Theatre. Sets and lighting were designed by Jo Mielziner; Martha Graham directed the movements of the chorus.

References

  1. "Old Nick, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 April 2015.
  2. Atkinson, Brooks. "Archibald Mac Leish's New Play, 'J. B.': Poet's Epic of Mankind Staged at Yale Title Role Is Modern Counterpart of Job", The New York Times, April 24, 1958, p.37, ISSN   0362-4331
  3. 1 2 " J.B. 1958" playbillvault.com, accessed November 28, 2015
  4. Atkinson, Brooks. "MacLeish's 'J.B.': Verse Drama Given Premiere at ANTA", The New York Times, December 12, 1958, p.A2, ISSN   0362-4331
  5. J.B. Archived 2012-10-11 at the Wayback Machine Lortel.com
  6. "The 1959 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama". The Pulitzer Prizes.
  7. Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich. "1959 Award", Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies: Pulitzer Prize Winning Theater Productions, LIT Verlag Münster, 2013, ISBN   3643903413, p. 88