#SOAP THE MIDDLE OF A BATTLEFIELD IS NOT THE PLACE TO CONVINCE YOUR SUPERIOR TO FUCK YOU

[queermentaldisaster]

Ghoap flirting over comms, pt two

“No promises, Lt.” Soap’s voice came over the radio, and Simon rolled his eyes. “That’s an order, sergeant.” He responded, and hints of Ghost slipped into his voice. “Be careful.”

“Aye, Lt, ye got it.” They could hear Soap’s cocky grin from here. “Ah’m nae gonna make a peep, ye have mah word.” Simon smiled fondly, letting out a slightly bitter laugh. “Well you’re already failing, sergeant.”

Soap’s voice took on a more sensual tone. “Aye, well…maybe ye could…shut me up?”

[chiseler]

THEATER OF WAR

Irwin Shaw is probably most remembered now for his 1969 soap opera-y novel Rich Man, Poor Man, which spawned two soap opera-y TV miniseries in the 70s. That's too bad, because as a young man he wrote two of the most talked about and interesting plays of the 1930s. 

New York playwrights were having a heated conversation with their audiences about the growing threats of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and whether America should get involved. For most of the decade the great majority of Americans, still shocked by the appalling and seemingly pointless carnage of the Great War, were of antiwar and isolationist opinion. 

Shaw -- born Shamforoff in the Bronx in 1913 and raised in Brooklyn -- was 23 when he wrote one of the most striking and controversial antiwar plays of the era. Bury the Dead, a bitterly absurdist fable, ran from April to July 1936 at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It was set in "the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night." The corpses of six young soldiers who died in battle stand up in their shrouds and refuse to be buried. This causes all sorts of problems for the army brass, the warmongering businessmen, and the clergy, while the news media spin it as a sign of "the indomitable spirit of the American doughboy." In the play's best scenes, the corpses' wives and mothers try to convince them to lie back down. A twenty-year-old soldier tells his mom that he lived too little to be content with death. An angry wife berates her husband for only standing up to the generals now that he's dead. When no one can convince them, a frustrated general grabs a gun and tries to kill them all over again, but they simply walk off. 

Bury the Dead was a critical sensation. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson raved about "the genius of Mr. Shaw's lacerating drama. It is a rebellious dance of scabrous death on the battlefield. Take it also as a warning from the young." Eleanor Roosevelt had just begun writing a nationally syndicated daily newspaper column, "My Day," which, amazingly, she would keep up until a few months before her death in 1962. After seeing Bury the Dead in May 1936, she wrote that "the thoughts hit you like hammer blows," adding that it would be "long be remembered by anyone who sees it and its strength lies, I think, in the fact that it is the expression of the thought and feeling of thousands upon thousands of people today." 

She was right about its longevity: Bury the Dead remains one of the best-known of all American antiwar plays. Its Brechtian sardonicism and fabulist construct feel timeless, and it's still performed in revivals from time to time as the world lurches from one conflict to the next. 

When Shaw returned to Broadway in January, 1939, the world was a very different place. Japan had brutally invaded China, the fascists had won in Spain, and Kristallnacht, the previous November, had made the Nazis' intentions toward Jews unarguably clear. With other Americans, Shaw was reassessing his antiwar stance of just three years earlier. 

The Gentle People: A Brooklyn Fable premiered at the Belasco Theatre, with Harold Clurman directing an extraordinary cast that included Same Jaffe, Franchot Tone, Sylvia Sidney, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb. Shaw transposed events in Europe to the Brooklyn waterfront, where a pair of middle-aged fishermen, Jonah and Philip, are preyed on by a Hitleresque thug named Goff. He shakes them down for weekly pay-offs, and for a long while they give in, in effect appeasing him the way England and France appeased Hitler. 

"We are not all made out of the same material," Goff explains to them. "There are superior people and there are inferior people. The superior people make the inferior people work for them. That is the law of nature. If there is any trouble you beat 'em up a coupla times and then there is no more trouble. Then you have peace."

Eventually, Jonah tells Philip that the only way to rid their neighborhood of Goff is to murder him. 

"All my life I wanted only peace and gentleness," Philip counters. "Violence. Leave it to men like Goff."

Jonah replies that "if you want peace and gentleness, you got to take violence out of hands of the people like Goff and you got to take it in your own hands and use it like a club. Then maybe, on the other side of the violence, there will be peace and gentleness."

They kill Goff, and not only get away with it, but get back all the money he extorted from them. In an introduction to the published edition, Shaw wryly noted: "This play is a fairy tale with a moral. In it justice triumphs and the meek prove victorious over arrogant and violent men. The author does not pretend that this is the case in real life."

The Gentle People was adapted as the 1941 film Out of the Fog, starring John Garfield and Ida Lupino. That year, Shaw the former pacifist enlisted in the army and served as a warrant officer. He'd later put his wartime experiences into the 1948 novel The Young Lions, made into the 1958 Brando film, before writing the bestselling Rich Man, Poor Man.

by John Strausbaugh