The Theater: Boston v. O'Casey

The Unitarians, Congregationalists and Episcopalians own Boston, but the Irish Catholics run it. Ordinarily a man named O'Casey, be he a saloonkeeper, a fisticuffer or a bicycle racer, might expect a warm Irish welcome in the capital of Massachusetts. Yet last week Sean (pronounced Shawn) O'Casey of Dublin found to his dismay that Boston would have none of his play, Within the Gates (TIME, Nov. 5).

Britain's Lord Chamberlain, world's strictest censor, saw no harm in Within the Gates. When the play opened in Manhattan last October, half the critical choir went into ecstasies over its allegory of a bishop's illegitimate daughter (played by Lillian Gish) who becomes a prostitute and dies in a raffish poet's arms unshriven by the Church. Since the bishop's creed was left scrupulously unspecified by Playwright O'Casey, no faction of the New York clergy felt impelled to lead an assault on the drama's heresies. But as soon as he heard that Within the Gates had taken to the road, was due in Boston this week, the Rev. Russell M. Sullivan, S. J., of the Boston College Council of Catholic Organizations, scuttled over to the City Hall. There he lodged a loud protest with Mayor Frederick William Mansfield, a devout Catholic like Massachusetts' new Governor James Michael Curley.

Jesuit Sullivan publicly denounced Within the Gates for its "sympathetic portrayal of the immoralities described, and even more so the clear setting forth of the futility of religion as an effective force in meeting the problems of life." A hearty ''Amen" went up from the Catholic Action Society and the Legion of Decency. A Methodist and a Universalist official also nodded assent. Yet the Puritanical Watch & Ward Society, which ran Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude out of Boston in 1929, coolly doubted if O'Casey's work was "bad enough to be banned."

To settle the question, Mayor Mansfield sent City Censor Herbert L. McNary to New York to see Within the Gates.* Censor McNary returned with so unfavorable a report on Within the Gates's indecencies that Mayor Mansfield last week not only forbade the performance of the drama but declared he would take steps to prevent the sale of the play in book form. "Nothing but a dirty book full of commonplace smut," cried he.

While the manager of the theatre where Within the Gates was to have been performed ruefully returned thousands of dollars worth of advance orders for tickets, John Tuerk, one of the play's producers, snorted: "Boston politicians have certainly made damn fools of Bostonians again." Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana announced that he was going to give a public reading of the play to see what the civic authorities would do.