After Clifford Odets’s heyday as the voice of the people in the Group Theatre in the Thirties, he went off to Hollywood but returned to the New York stage with three final plays in new, postproletarian modes. The Big Knife (1949) was an expose of Holly wood moguls cruelly manipulating actors and writers under their thumb. Clearly, Odets had a score to settle. In 1950, he wrote The Country Girl, a backstage triangle story, and, in 1954, The Flowering Peach, a play about Noah that was highly praised by Eric Bendey. (The Fifties were something of an Indian summer of biblical dramatization. Broadway saw not only The Flowering Peach but Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., a Pulitzer-Prize-winning verse drama of Job. The movies, with equal meretriciousness but more nonchalance and fun, produced ex travaganzas like The Robe, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, and Ben-Hur. But the specious and solemn hollowness of all this provided, in no very long run, fodder for the cynicism and nihilism waiting to swallow popular culture in the next decade. The Bible became artistically unusable—radioactively contaminated by camp, so to speak—for quite awhile.)

But it is The Country Girl that concerns me here, for the Roundabout Theatre Com pany, a respectable revival organization now based in the superb old Tammany Hall building at Seventeenth Street and Park Avenue and celebrating its twenty-fifth anni versary, has chosen to revive the play on the fortieth anniversary of its premiere. The Country