Arts and Letters

At age twenty-one Paul Green had an unusual reputation as a mighty man at stripping fodder and picking cotton, and had already served two years as a school principal. His greatest fame by far, however, was as Lillington, North Carolina's star pitcher. He was a rare phenomenon, a switch pitcher who was also a slugger. Clearly he was a young man destined to leave his mark on the world, but this early fame hardly foreshadowed a career as a writer of short stories, plays, essays, poetry, movie and radio scripts, as a composer of many songs, as editor of a literary review, as his country's representative in many international conferences, or as the creator of an innovative form of theater, the "symphonic drama."

When meeting Paul, one was first struck by his vitality, friendliness, and openness, and a self-assurance coupled with great humility. As one came to know him better, one learned of his profound ethical convictions and his deep sense of social responsibility which, on occasion, could prompt him to fearless action. On one such occasion, a North Carolina governor was about to let a drunken chain gang boss who had seriously mistreated two black prisoners go unpunished until Paul threatened to bring in Paramount News and have the governor served with a writ. After a little more thought, the governor decided that justice should be done.

Another instance occurred in 1939 when Paul was asked to speak at the Annual Negro Night during the highly successful run of The Lost Colony, the first of his great historical dramas. He strode on stage and stood silently staring at the rope which segregated the audience until every eye in the amphitheater was riveted on that rope. He then said, "I'd like to say that I would not speak nor allow my play to be done until that rope was cut and taken out of the theater. However, we have a law which says that rope must be there. It is a bad law, and before I die my plays will be done in theaters where there are no ropes separating man from his fellow men."

At Chapel Hill, working with the Carolina Playmakers under Professor Koch, who insisted that his young dramatists write about what they knew firsthand—the familiar and well-remembered—Paul wrote his first plays and stories, which all dealt with the rural South he knew so well. In starkly realistic yet darkly poetic lines and scenes, he opened eyes and ears to the humor and the pathos, the frustration and tragedy of the blacks and whites suffocating in the South's impoverished economy. In most of the plays there were blues, spirituals, and folk songs, often of Paul's creation. From the start he felt a need to break out of the conventional dramatic formulas, a need which was to lead him to what he called the "symphonic drama," a form embracing every known theatrical element while keeping drama as the primary element.

It was perhaps inevitable that this desire for an all-embracing medium should attract him to the film which he had watched develop since 1915, when he was deeply moved by The Birth of a Nation. From Hollywood he wrote euphorically, "Here is a medium, infinite and universal in its power,… able to depict anything,… a medium which can be understood by black and white, yellow and red…." As with others, his disillusionment was not long in coming. A decade later he said, "The men who control the movies are a menace to civilization." Katherine Anne Porter wrote of meeting him "in Hollywood, of all places…. The honest, tender and gifted soul stood out like a stalk of good sugar in a thicket of poison ivy."

In 1937, The Lost Colony, the first of his sixteen symphonic dramas, opened in Manteo, North Carolina. In the historical drama Paul Green found full scope for his manifold talents. He even took part in planning and building the theaters. Here he found stages for the passionate expression of his idealism and his reverence for America's history. He must have had great satisfaction from the fact that millions of people may have experienced drama for the first time in the amphitheaters which house his vast pageants from Virginia to Ohio, Texas, and Florida.

During a time when drama has often tended toward microsurgery of petty psyches and the exposure of squalid souls, Paul Green's work is as from another world, a world in which the triumph or tragedy in the commonality of human experience finds moving expression. And though he has put great movers and shakers and heroes aplenty on the stage, the little people who also hope, dream, and suffer are always there. Of these none is perhaps more timely than his Johnny Johnson, whose simple yet practical dreams of peace end in tragedy which is more poignant in today's precarious world than ever before.