Ms. Hellman has certainly written better plays than [the recently revived] Days to Come, yet I found it interesting for a variety of reasons, even for its faults. For a start, it is about something real, something that matters. At the time of its original showing, it must have been regarded chiefly as a play about capital and labor, a "strike play." It offers the usual setup of a wealthy, more or less genteel Ohio family, owners of a brush factory; its loyal workers; an upright union leader; the benevolent but weak boss; his unfeeling partner, and the gangsters hired to bring in strike-breakers. There is an adventitious crime, a calculated outbreak of violence, the death of a child due to police brutality. These are the melodramatic trappings typical of too many plays of the 1930s. They are not false: all this is representative enough of what was or had been happening in the earlier days of the period.
Ms. Hellman's treatment of these materials is conventional because they are basically foreign to her experience. She gathered information from newspapers, special reports, political discussions, meetings that were prevalent at the time. Hindsight—our knowledge of what Ms. Hellman would subsequently write—reveals that Days to Come is not mainly concerned with the industrial warfare which is the "stuff" of her story for the first two acts.
This is a free excerpt of 223 words. There are 449 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Hellman, Lillian 1906–: Critical Essay by Harold Clurman Access Pass.
