Verified by 
“When you are dealing with questions too large for you [and] which, nevertheless, will not leave you alone, you are obliged to house them somewhere – and an old wall helps.”
-- from Archibald MacLeish, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in the Foreword to the published version of his verse play J.B.
To grapple with those large questions that would not leave him alone, that haunted him, MacLeish chose an “ancient structure” – the Book of Job.
The story of Job can be found memorialized in an ancient fable (folk tale), ancient verse, and, of course, in the Hebrew Bible and in Scripture. It was reimagined, reconstructed, in MacLeish’s J.B., which is a play within a play, framed by a duel of egos; and inhabited by two sufferers and three comforters.
Given all the devastation experienced by thousands as a result of natural (and, perhaps, unnatural?) disasters, in 2018 alone, and given all the losses of life and property that have had to be absorbed, a sufferer might wonder, “Why me and mine?” Those spared might thankfully wonder, “Why not me and mine?”
Why does extreme loss and suffering come to some, and not others?
How much could we endure, how resilient might we be? How much faith in the “rightness” of the world might we hold on to?
The playwright explained his play
MacLeish’s Foreword helped me grasp the dueling personalities that confounded my initial reading of his play, and my second reading. The Foreword (written as “a Trespass on a Monument”) explains that J.B. is “put in motion by two broken-down actors” who believe that they are to enact the Book of Job.
From a variety of reviews and commentaries, I finally surmised that, presumably to make a living, the broken-down actors have taken jobs with a traveling circus. One, a balloon-hawker imagines that he is to play the role of God, and assumes that role by putting on a God-mask. The other, a popcorn-vendor, reluctantly agrees to play the role of the devil, and does so whenever he puts on the leering red mask of Satan. When masked, these two actors challenge each other in a battle of egos, for the purpose of challenging Job’s steadfastness – his faith that God rewards good and only punishes when there is wrongdoing.
MacLeish provided this guidance: “Job’s search, like ours, was for the meaning of his afflictions – the loss of his children, the loss of everything he possessed, the loss of his wife’s kindness, who turned upon him in his agony with those ineradicable words, surely the most dreadful ever spoken by wife to husband: ‘Curse God and die!….'
“Job was, by witness of God himself, and twice repeated, ‘a perfect and upright man’ [who feared God and eschewed evil] and his destruction was, by the same unquestionable authority, ‘without cause….'
“My hero, called J.B. after the current fashion in business address, bears little relation to that ancient owner of camels, oxen, and sheep. He is not a particularly devout man. But he is, at the beginning of the play, prosperous, powerful, possessed of a lovely wife, fine children – everything the heart of a man can desire.”
MacLeish tells us that J.B. is aware – “as he could hardly help being” – that God has favored him. Like Job of the Bible, J.B. is not prepared for the “sudden and inexplicable loss of everything.” He is desperate to know the reason for his losses and his wretchedness.
Giving voice to God and the devil via “a stunning device”
In his December 30, 1958 New York Herald Tribune review, Walter Kerr advised his readers that “J.B. takes place under the dark and billowing canvas of an empty circus tent, where a balloon-man and a popcorn-peddler have decided to play God and the devil, respectively, while a band of unidentified mummers re-enacts the story of Job.”
The review informed readers that the pompous brimming-with-confidence balloon-man (played by Raymond Massey, “immensely dignified in a trim white beard”) assumed the role of God. Needing a foil, he has to coax the popcorn-peddler to take on the role of the devil.
The hawker with the tray of unsold popcorn does not relish the idea of playing the devil. But the popcorn-peddler (“performed with brilliant mockery by Christopher Plummer”) shrugs and murmurs, “Well, it’s a demanding role.” Almost immediately upon slipping on a glowing red, leering mask, which features a sneering lip, the popcorn-peddler warms to the role. The review informed readers that the moment he slips on the mask, “he discovers that the mask has its own life, that it speaks through him and for him; that, in fact, he cannot silence it.”
With that review I began to grasp the role-playing assignments of the play within a play. However, by my reading, the devil becomes increasing compassionate as the God character insists on dealing J.B. misfortune upon misfortune; tragedy upon tragedy; unbearable afflictions; ultimate suffering and utter despair.
Why is J.B. being tested so severely?
Reconstructing a “thorny” Biblical story
A few weeks following the play being announced as the year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Life magazine devoted a lengthy article to MacLeish’s “monumental achievement which parallels the Bible’s thorny story of Job.”
In that May 18, 1959 issue of Life, readers were informed that “After declaring his faith in God’s justice, J.B. is beset by senseless disasters.” As if those unwarranted tragedies aren’t sufficient, the God character feels emboldened to visit still more afflictions and torments – to further test J.B.’s willingness to accept the God character’s ways. The devil is certain that these additional torments and physical afflictions will destroy J.B.’s faith in God. The latter believes that J.B. will accept these sufferings as his fate, and affirm his faith.
According to Life, J.B. “comes to realize that his repentance is for sins he has not committed and thus he recognizes that God does not operate by the laws of human justice.”
The play’s appeal: An exegesis on “shit happens”? or, is it ordained?
The play is not set in any specific time or place on Earth, thus its performances and favorable reception around the world.
Though the play’s initial conversations are set in or around an earthbound circus tent, what transpires between the God-mask and the Satan-mask seems to be on a different plane from that of the Earth – somewhere above or below any identifiable terra firma.
The play has us consider whether virtue is indeed its own reward – the only reward that may be reasonably expected. The play has us ponder whether misfortune, calamity, and catastrophe are ordained, or whether “shit just happens” to good people regardless of their goodness.
There’s also the cause-and-effect conundrum: Did Job’s (the prosperous businessman’s) self-assured piety arise from his desire to express gratitude for all his prosperity? Was he pious out of uncertainty, or from fear of losing his good fortune? Or did genuine pre-prosperity piety earn him his initial prosperity?
In the play, following declarations of faith and thanks at the family's Thanksgiving dinner table, J.B. is, as the devil labels him, the perfect pigeon for what we are meant to judge as unwarranted, unjust and cruel tests of faith.
Is the devil proposing one harassment after another, as a challenge to God’s certainty, God’s faith in Job? Or, are the afflictions God’s answers to the devil’s doubts about Job’s tolerance and endurance? I am not clear as to which player instigated the power play.
What is a mere mortal’s relationship with God and what might a mere mortal reasonably expect of and from God? What are God’s commitments and obligations to mere mortals, if any?
Job (a/k/a "J.B.") and Sarah’s “let’s make a deal”
At their Thanksgiving table, Job’s wife pronounces “Grace,” which she tells her children is “for the hunger.”
Mouth and meat by grace amazed
God upon my lips is praised….
But Sarah worries that they have too much of a good thing:
God doesn’t give all this for nothing….
If we do our part, He does His….
I get frightened, Job… we have so much.
In reply, J.B. assures her,
Not for a watch-tick have I doubted
God was on my side – was helping me….
People call it luck….
It isn’t luck when God is good to you….
With an ominous prescience, Sarah delivers this foreboding:
I know you trust it. That’s what frightens me…. God rewards and God can punish….
God and Satan’s wheel of misfortune: Sympathy from the devil
The vendor who has put down his tray of unsold popcorn dons the Satan-mask. Emboldened, he confronts the God-mask by referring to Sarah’s concern about J.B.’s certainty regarding their prosperity:
Bought and paid for like a waiter’s smirk.
Wait ’til you lift the lot, he’ll sing another canticle – to different music….
Wait ’til your pigeon pecks at the world the way the rest do.
From behind the God-mask, the balloon-hawker boasts to Satan:
Nothing this good man might suffer,
Nothing at all will make him yelp as you do.
He’ll praise God no matter.
By my reading, Satan (or the role-player) appears to be discomfited by God’s (or the role-player's) piling on of afflictions. If “suffering teaches,” surely J.B. has learned whatever lesson, passed whatever test, had been intended. So Satan asks,
Why then must he suffer?....
Why then try the trust?
I could be mistaken, but by my reading, the popcorn-vendor sheds his Satan role for a moment, out of concern for J.B.:
God won’t let it happen, not to Job, the perfect and upright man. Job deserves his luck. He’s earned it.
Not yet disaffected, J.B., sobbing, declares his acceptance of misfortune,
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
God commands, Finish it, Blessed be the….
What hath God wrought? and why?
By my reading, Satan (or the actor playing Satan) feels for J.B. The actor playing God comes across as arrogant. The latter seems pleased that he has destroyed J.B. without cause.
The popcorn-vendor is taken aback by all the suffering visited upon Job, “without cause”:
It isn’t decent! It isn’t moral even. It’s disgusting! His weeping wife in her despair. And he beside her on his trembling ham bones. Taking it! Eating it! It isn’t decent!
God (the role-player?) is victorious in the fear challenge. To Satan, or to popcorn-vender playing at Satan, the balloon-hawker playing God boasts and gloats:
You don’t lose gracefully, do you?
J.B., persecuted in what could be viewed as a show-trial to test faith, cries out for an answer, an explanation. He is desperate to know why he has been so afflicted. He assures his bereft wife,
God will not punish without cause… God is just!
In response to his wife’s seemingly realistic, wholly understandable despair and anger, J.B., prostrate, pleads:
Show me my guilt, o God!
Rising to his knees, arms outstretched, he repeats,
Show me my guilt, o God!
Satan (or is it the pretend Satan?) concludes that there seem to be “no reasons adequate to J.B.’s catastrophes.”
Guilt – very cold comfort
Satan seems to conclude that J.B. has been made “worthy of his wretchedness” by “the gift of guilt, that putrid poultice of the soul that sucks the poison in, not out!”
Still not disaffected, J.B. rebukes his Comforters (one presumably a psychiatrist and one a cleric). He declares,
Guilt matters. Guilt must always matter. Unless guilt matters the whole world is meaningless…. Guilt must always matter…. I’d rather suffer every unspeakable suffering God sends… knowing that I had earned the need to suffer.
A Comforter suggests that “from guilt, hope begins.” When J.B. retorts, “Show me my transgressions,” the Comforter advises, “Search your inmost heart! Question it! Guilt is a deceptive secret….”
Doubt – and hopeful hopelessness
Finally, J.B. becomes desperate to be told his fault; to learn what he did to justify him suffering so much misery. He asks, “Shall I repent of sins I have not sinned?"
The actor who plays at being God offers this perspective:
We take what God has sent – the Godsend….
A world where there can be injustice….
Finally disaffected and assertive, J.B. declares,
I will not duck my head again to thunder.
In rebuke, the actor playing God stiffens:
We have no peace but in obedience.
Our peace is acquiescence in the Will of God.
J.B. counters with resentment and his own declaration of independence from “life as a filthy farce”:
I will not laugh and neither will I weep among the obedient who lie down to die in meek relinquishment protesting nothing, questioning nothing, asking nothing but to rise again and bow!
In stage directions, MacLeish instructs the actor playing J.B. to move “slowly, with difficulty” to deliver, “at last,” to his wife, “the hard words” about God’s unwillingness to explain “Why”:
We can never know….
He answered me like the stillness of a star that silences us asking….
We are, and that is our answer. We are and what we are can suffer. But what suffers loves, and love will live its suffering again, risk its own defeat again, endure the loss of everything again, and yet again and again, in doubt, in dread, in ignorance unanswered, over and over….
Theology in the Theatre: Is J.B. cynical and irreverent? sacrilegious? blasphemous?
In his 1960 Journal of Bible and Religion appraisal, Religious Studies Professor Burton M. Wheeler wrote that amid the “comforting [to churchmen] sweetness and light” of some 20th century theater touching on religion, “Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. intruded on the scene with troublesome audacity.”
Professor Wheeler did acknowledge, “Whether or not the verse is thin or the vulgarity is stagey or the dramatic conditions are confused, J.B. has impact on an audience and its future for revivals seems assured.”
In his Life magazine essay, “Arid Repudiation of Religion,” the Reverend Thurston N. Davis asserted that J.B. was neither a religious drama or a morality play: “If J.B. means anything, it is an urbane but shallow repudiation of religious faith."
Reverend Davis was editor-in-chief of America, a weekly journal of opinion published by the Jesuits of the United States and Canada. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, a scholarly religious congregation of the Catholic Church. In his view, the play's ending tells all about playwright: “It becomes quite obvious that the God who has been ‘bullwhipping’ our contemporary Job with his thundering, amplified pronouncements suddenly becomes, in Mr. MacLeish’s hands, about as meaningless as the mask worn by the old balloon-vendor who plays the role and speaks the lines of God. If J.B. ‘means’ anything, it means that the God of the Job story – He who commands the morning… gets told off and sent ingloriously to the wings by Man.”
Rev. Davis conceded that, “On the positive side, J.B. tries hard in its closing moments to become a secular affirmation of human life and human love as the sole props and rationale of bewildered humanity.”
Nevertheless, having read the J.B. script and having seen the play itself on two occasions, Rev. Davis concluded his appraisal with questions and a somewhat damning rebuke: “Are there divine ‘reasons’ for human pain? Is there at last a Justice that will set things right? Is there a Mind and a Providence at work in human affairs? Is Man enveloped by God’s Love? If I read and hear him aright, MacLeish is saying No.”
An ancient confrontation, with modern implications
In his Life magazine essay “Modern Answers to an Enigma,” Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a professor at Union Theological Seminary, credited MacLeish with “undertaking a difficult task” – attempting to answer “searching questions about the meaningless of extreme human suffering.” The attempt, wrote Niebuhr, was done with “artistic ingenuity.”
Niebuhr explained that while MacLeish’s play emphasizes “meaningless suffering,” the play “neglects the ancient book’s even more searching question about the meaning of life.”
This, Niebuhr contended, is “an even deeper problem than that of meaningless suffering but one more poignantly relevant to an atomic age which has the greatness to discover nuclear energy but lacks the wisdom to avoid the risk of nuclear war. MacLeish neglects this vital dimension of the original.”
Theologian and ethicist Niebuhr wrote, “Though MacLeish himself evidently does not believe in a personal God,” he does have God appear to Job in “a whirlwind to confront him [J.B] with all the mysteries of creation to prove that there is a meaning to life beyond that which any mere man can provide from his own limited perspective.”
The need for answers and explanations
In his Life magazine essay “Insight into Our Deep Need,” Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, who was chancellor of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, opened his assessment with this: “What is most startling about MacLeish’s distinguished play is its success as a Broadway production. A moralistic fable, based on the most difficult and perplexing book in Scriptures, attracts crowds in numbers usually expected only at musical comedies. Obviously J.B. answers a deep need.”
Finkelstein, a Talmud scholar, observed, “The play conveys, of course, the unspoken agony of a generation which, having witnessed the most horrible war in history, fears even more horrible catastrophes….
“In MacLeish’s view, one of our greatest problems is our failure to find any purpose in the sufferings of our time.”
The Playwright felt the need to “confess” and contest
In an article for The Christian Century, Archibald MacLeish confirmed that J.B. is intended to posit that while “God is, man may know Him only through love.”
MacLeish continued, “The justification of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God’s inexplicable will, nor our trust in God’s love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him… love is the only possible answer to our ancient cry against injustice.”
Luck, hard-luck, and harsh judgments
The New Yorker magazine’s theater critic, Kenneth Tynan, found the 1958 Washington Square, Greenwich Village, presentation “flawless,” but wrote, “The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the thing presented.
Tynan credited MacLeish with going at “the task of justifying the ways of God to man” by employing the Book of Job, “that greatest of hard-luck stories,” which the playwright “retold in the form of a morality play.” While the playwright clearly wanted to raise “whirlwinds,” the critic bristled at the play’s “devotion to an antique and extravagant concept of the Deity.”
In that critic’s view, God and Man were pugilists in a metaphorical boxing match under a circus tent: “After each new body blow, God’s chosen sparring partner staggers back off the ropes for more, to the delight of God and the chagrin of Satan,” who, seemed (to me) to have moved into J.B.’s corner in the hope that the pummeled and bloodied mortal would throw in his pious towel, to “renounce and curse his Creator.”
Like a number of critics, Tynan was quite displeased with the play’s resolution – finding it to be a betrayal of all that had preceded: “To say that the ending cheats is to put it mildly. The play rests on the assumption, everywhere endorsed by the text, that we are judged by God. It then poses the question: Why are we judged so harshly?”
Tynan skewered, “Long before the final curtain, I was bored to exasperation by the lack of any recognizable human response to calamity.”
Tynan asserted that “justice, which distributes punishments and rewards, is a human invention.” He declared, to be wronged by misfortune or injustice is “not an evidence of sin.”
A contrasting concept was presented in “J.B., Job, and the Biblical Doctrine of Man,” by Mary Frances Thelen, a Professor of Religion. Thelen observed that many reviewers “speak of the confusion in which the audience finds itself at the end as to what is the real outcome of the play, what the author has finally concluded concerning the problem of the suffering of the innocent.”
Yet, Professor Thelen would go on to assert that J.B. must surely have had “tangible sins and sinfulness of which to repent, even if he has done nothing so dreadful as to merit the crushing disasters which overtake him”
Divine doings, wrath? or Mankind’s interventions, exuberance and inattentions?
In the ultimate show of incontestable prowess, MacLeish has God come to J.B. in a whirlwind, highlighting all that is in His power and domain.
Can we reasonably extrapolate from that demonstration of might that God is to blame for hurricane-force winds, tornadoes, and the wildfires fanned and spread by wind? Are the torrential rains that bring devastating floods, rockslides, and mudslides punishments demanding a modern-day Noah?
Or, has Nature been so impacted by Man, the steward and groundskeeper of Earth, as to despoil what was entrusted to Man by the Creator?
Are we to expect God’s intervention to halt and restore what came about as a result of Man’s inattention? over-extension?
Has Mankind’s unkindness to the planet rewritten the God-mortal pact to read, “The Lord giveth, and Man taketh away?”
All this is beyond me. I report, you decide.
But like J.B.’s wife, I do wonder how it is that I have been so very fortunate (so damn lucky), while others have not. “Why me?”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acknowledgments:
J. B. – the Samuel French, Inc. acting edition
“Theater: MacLeish Drama Based on the Story of Job” New York Herald Tribune, December 30, 1958
“The Ageless Story of Job’s Ordeals in the Year’s Prize Play” Life magazine, May 18, 1959
“Job’s Ordeal in Great Play” Life magazine, December 22, 1958
“Theology and the Theatre” by Professor Burton M. Wheeler, published in the Journal of Bible and Religion, Oxford University Press, July 1960
The New Yorker magazine, Kenneth Tynan review, December 20, 1958
“J.B., Job, and the Biblical Doctrine of Man” by Mary Frances Thelen, published in the Journal of Bible and Religion, Oxford University Press, July 1959
“The Book of Job” by Archibald MacLeish, published in The Christian Century, April 8, 1959
The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person (Nextbook Press) by Rabbi Harold Kushner, excerpted and adapted for Tablet magazine as “Bad Things, Good Person: Is Misfortune God’s Doing?” 3 October 2012
Special thanks to Janet Valeski of Quinnipiac University’s Bernhard Library, Christina DeLucia of Quinnipiac University’s School of Law Library, and Amy Bush of the University of California Davis Shields Library.
