In the following essay excerpt, Falk examines J. B. within the context of the morality play, focusing on similarities between it and the story of Job in the Bible.

Writing in 1955, MacLeish rejected T. S. Eliot's statement that no play should be written in verse if prose were "dramatically adequate." He answered Eliot by saying that prose is adequate for an illusion of the actual; but, if the dramatist is concerned with the "illusion of the real," then he is concerned with "the illusion which dramatic poetry can pursue." He gave as examples "the illusion of Oedipus apart from the plot," or "the metaphor of Prospero's island," or "Yeats' Purgatory," or Hamlet which offers "a perception of the nature of the human heart." Only poetry creates an illusion which can foster an understanding by the mind, by the emotions, and by the senses—that is, by...