Endecott & the Red Cross

Robert Lowell has yet to learn that drama is more than the sound of one man talking. A poet by gift and craft, he is intelligent, passionate, articulate and astringent, but his dramatic imagination is embryonic. The result is that it is almost more rewarding to read his plays than see them.

While Endecott and the Red Cross, at the off-Broadway American Place Theater, is not really a play, it is a variety of some other distinctly interesting things. Based on two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it is a kind of animated syllabus on the making of the New England mind, and a soul-scorching look at the Calvinistic implacability of the Puritan temper. It contains the implicit suggestion that in the despoliation and murder of the Indians was born a legacy of violence that has remained a melancholy strand of American life.

John Endecott, sometime Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, has come to the settlement of Merry Mount, near Wollaston, Mass., with the intent to chastise its inhabitants. Merry Mount is anathema to the Puritans because it is an enclave of happiness, fostering a live-and-let-live philosophy, indulging in such rites as dancing around the Maypole. Its leader, Thomas Morton, flauntingly lives with the daughter of the local Indian chief, and carries on a thriving fur trade with the Indians by the dangerous practice of selling them firearms and liquor.

Endecott--played by Kenneth Haigh with the weary administrative sanity of Shaw's Caesar--is aware of the mourn ful carnage of retribution and revenge, and initially is reluctant to take any brutal measures against the colony. But then a clerical emissary from England arrives to announce that King Charles I intends to revoke the charter of the Massachusetts Colony and place it under the direct rule of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Morton taunts Endecott with this promise of lost authority, and suddenly the Governor becomes as steely as his armor. Delivering a flaming polemic against the King, he sunders his own flagstaff and tromps the red-crossed flag of England underfoot. It is the most powerful moment of the evening and brings to vivid life D. H. Lawrence's comment that Amer ica was born in "black revulsion." Black with wrath, Endecott orders Merry Mount burned to the ground and the Indians massacred. The historical moment is a century and a half before the American Revolution, but as the first shots are fired, and puffs of acrid smoke drift across the stage, the playgoer sniffs the unmistakable odor of revolt.

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