You almost certainly have never heard of the play The Rope Dancers by Morton Wishengrad.
Moreover, you have also almost certainly never heard of Morton Wishengrad in any context.
Having just read the play, I am stunned, truly stunned, that this play languishes in obscurity.
How obscure is it? There is no Wikipedia page for the play or for the author. Think about that. There is a Wikipedia page for everything I ever look up. Until now. If you start looking for discussions about the play, you’ll find a handful of old reviews of productions of the play, but I have not yet stumbled on anyone who simply wrote about the play.
You, the Reader, now suspect that this is one of those plays which deserves no critical attention. You will think that until you read one of the reviews of a performance. “A powerful play—tragedy almost in the classical sense—showing great psychological insight and making telling use of symbols.” “It is, in fact, one of the most uncompromising plays I have ever seen; if Mr. Wishengrad can maintain his integrity in the hurly-burly of Broadway, he may yet, in that respect at least, confirm his leading lady’s premature contention that he’s the finest American playwright since O’Neill.” “The power of realism, when employed by American writers, goes even further, with greater originality, depth, and art in Morton Wishengrad’s The Rope Dancers, a play that is as difficult to describe, as it is to assay.”
Unconvinced? The play was included in the anthology Best American Plays Fifth Series 1957- 1963, published in 1968.
It is not a perfect play. (The reviewer for the Kenyon Review was not a fan.) It won’t hold up to Shakespeare, Moliere, or Shaw. But, it fits right in with the mid-20th century American greats: Miller. O’Neill, and Williams. Again, it’s not Death of a Salesman, or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or A Streetcar Named Desire, but it is far closer to them than a play that languishes in total obscurity should be.
The plot summary will make the play sound maudlin, which it most definitely is not. A woman (Margaret) and her 11 year old daughter (Lizzie) move into a 1950s New York tenement. Margaret is a hard women; an overly friendly new neighbor is treated rather roughly in a welcome-to-the-apartment-building visit. The daughter seems fragile, or at least is treated as fragile by her mother. Lizzie wears a white dress with a very bright pocket in which she constantly keeps her hand which is in a black mitten. She skips rope (symbolism alert) to rhymes she has invented (including one about President Rutherford Hayes!) The father (James) shows up after a bit; he is an impossibly charismatic drunk, who is as well-read as anyone I have ever met. Toss in a truant officer, trying hard to get Lizzie to school over the objections of her parents, and a Doctor, called in to deal with Lizzie’s ailment, St Vitus Dance. Well, that is her obvious ailment. Her other ailment, the source of great shame to Margaret, and by extension Lizzie, is the six fingers on Lizzie’s mittened hand.
And now you don’t really want to read the play because, like I said, it sounds like some sappy made-for-TV movie. It isn’t. The plot is there for the dialogue, which is incredibly sharp. The end of the play is fascinating once you get past the shock. The three main characters are deep and deeply fascinating. If you like reading mid-20th century American plays, I cannot recommend this play highly enough. (If you don’t enjoy the genre, then first read more Miller and Williams to develop your taste.)
The title of the play is a reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. James reads a portion aloud in the middle of the play and, as is suspected since it is the source of the title, it provides the key. At the outset of Nietzsche’s book, Zarathustra wanders into a town in which a tightrope walker is about to perform. Zarathustra takes the opportunity to offer a lengthy series of cryptic remarks (if you have read Nietzsche, this does not come as a surprise). The rumination is about how man is a tightrope, a perilous link between where man starts and the unknown destination to which he is going. Man “is a bridge and no goal.” And so on. (If you want to piece all this together, read Zarathustra a few dozen times.) But for the purposes of the play the important line is the one James looks up from the book to quote from memory: “I love them that are in great scorn, for these are they that are great in reverence.”
The obvious scorn in the play is that between the estranged Margaret and James; and the great reverence is manifest right beneath that scorn. But stepping back, the whole play is an exercise in great scorn, which is simply a mask for great reverence. The play is a microcosm of the human condition, how we all are forced to wrestle with the aftermath of Original Sin, and the guilt we feel in the face of the effects of sin, and how our attempts to overcome those feelings of guilt inevitably fail. It is a demonstration of how we learn to work that part of ourselves of which we are most afraid into becoming a vital part of our identity, and how the removal of the evidence of guilt can lead to our own destruction. It has a surprisingly effective reflection of the nature of education, why we force children into school, and whether it is more important to learn knowledge or wisdom.
The depths of the play keep unfolding the longer you stare into it. So, why is this play completely unknown? Undoubtedly part of the explanation is the obscurity of the author, whose biography is not easy to piece together in the absence of a Wikipedia page. He was a writer for radio and TV serials, including a hundred episodes of The Eternal Light (which does have a Wikipedia page!). As far as I can tell, The Rope Dancers is his only play.
It was, however, a Broadway play, with a notable cast. The family was played by Siobhan McKenna (here is her Wikipedia page, which notes she received a Tony nomination for her performance in this play), Art Carney (here is his Wikipedia page, he was a mega star), and Beverly Lunsford (who would later go on to fame in Leave it to Beaver—not surprisingly, she also has a Wikipedia page). Even the actress who played the neighbor, Joan Blondell, has a long Wikipedia page.
Yet, Morton Wishengrad and The Rope Dancers languishes in obscurity. The only copy in print seems to be from one of those presses that just scans old library books. (The Mount Holyoke Library had three (3!!—was this once used in an MHC class??) copies of an old, out-of-print edition from Samuel French.) A play this good should really not be so hard to find.
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