To Side with the Light: Conscience and Power in the Drama of Barrie Stavis

When the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis chose Harpers Ferry in 1967 as the first new play that it would produce, Tyrone Guthrie wrote: "The play has been included in our classical repertoire because we believed it to be an interpretation of noble and monumental simplicity of a piece of American history, small almost local in scale, but like many apparently small events, of large symbolic importance .... Furthermore the architectural design of the play disregards the conventions of the naturalistic theater. Even if technical means could be found (and they probably could) of changing from scene to realistic scene without slowing up the play's progress, literal indications of locality would reduce the legendary nature of John Brown's extraordinary exploit to the level of prosaic fact."' Like all of the Barrie Stavis plays, Harpers Ferry is a play of history, but it is not an historical play in the conventional sense. It does not treat the facts of history realistically. To quote Tyrone Guthrie again, Barrie Stavis "has selected and simplified, not with the intention of grinding a moral or political axe, nor to magnify or minimize John Brown's achievement, nor to glorify or denigrate his character; but rather to show that a person of such character cannot, literally cannot, act otherwise than as he believes right." (8) Pure in his idealism, John Brown was ready to pay with his life for his