Last year I had the pleasure to read How Not to Read a Play by Walter Kerr and in it he argued that part of the turn the populace did from theater to movies was that theater started serving up moralizing lessons instead of entertainment. In particular he spoke first about the Propaganda Play which was softened into a Thesis Play and further softened into the Problem Play.

While I have read plenty Thesis and Problem plays until now I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever read a propaganda play (unless one counts the play-long screed against witches Macbeth), until I read Plunder a soap operatic, decades-spanning attack on Western Imperialism, trade, and potentially pacifism and work broadly.

I want to get something out of the way first: the dialogue is hamfisted, the manner of presentation suggested by the script cumbersome, and the play as a whole overly long. I can find no production history online to suggest that Plunder has ever been performed live, and its publishers are not dramatic houses, but socialist/anarchic presses (depending on the printing). As such this seems to be a work of closet drama, and the play is more interesting as a work of literature than as a breathing document from whence to entertain (or indoctrinate) an audience, so I’m not going to spend time on how I would design this show (painted backdrops, weird masks,) or what I can learn from it as a writer (don’t do this, it relies too heavily on narration, is inelegeant with its themes, and the dialogue is poor,) and instead I will look at it as the audience, as a person who read it.

First things first we’re at a play within a play, and the nested play is written for the benefit of the author’s family who is watching in the audience and reacting to the goings on onstage. The Stark family has gathered to watch a play written by (what I assume is) the youngest son, Bruno. As far as I’m aware, this relation is never actually made clear in the text of the play, the fact that Bruno Stark is a child and brother of the family interrupting the performance is only spelled out on the character page of the document.

Regardless, Darius Stark made his fortune importing ceramics into India after WWI, and the family business grew to many factories, mines, and other concerns throughout what we would later call the third-world of Africa and Asia (South America is not mentioned in the play.) Darius, his three sons (who are both embedded in government and corporations), and his son’s light-skinned Indian wife Pretoria are all in attendance.

Usually I wouldn’t grouse too much about unrealistic reactions from the peanut gallery, but the way the author’s family reacts strains any amount of credulity. The Starks will occasionally start complaining only to stop mid-thought so that the action in the nested play is heard properly before picking up as though nothing has happened.

The play we’re watching onstage we eventually learn is all for the benefit of Pretoria, the Indian wife of one of the Stark brothers: as the action unfolds we see how Krishna Moksa who starts as a young potter in India and ends as a lunatic beggar in Indonesia is affected, buffeted, and indirectly injured by the Stark’s wanton business interests in the region, while we also learn that Krishna is Pretoria’s father, and she grows angrier and sadder as the full knowledge of the Stark’s greed and carelessness comes to life.

Otherwise the play is episodic and, I assume, is historically based. We begin in India where Darius Stark is looking for partners in an importing business, move onto South Africa where there is oppression at a mine owned by the Starks, go back to India where the ground is fallow and the factories kill Pretoria’s mother, are moved to begging in Indonesia (where Krishna dies), and finally Pretoria’s elder brother goes to fight in the Congo while her younger brother agitates for peace (and ultimately shows up onstage, and presumably told all this to the author Bruno Stark.)

Throughout the play Krishna is depicted as a well-meaning but ineffective man, that engaging with the West will destroy his soul and so he lets his body wither through the atrocities which are committed to him: he doesn’t want to help Darius Stark trade in India because his pots are not a means to an end (money) but an expression of himself; he doesn’t engage violently at the mine because doing so will injure his righteousness; when we arrive to Indonesia the crazed and elderly Krishna, starving, finally accepts help from the west (food sent by Pretoria,) but it is too much for him and he dies.

His eldest son, with the not at all heavy-handed name Indio, is painted in a more sympathetic, but still not agreeable light, as he wants to fight: fight in Africa, fight in Asia, and ultimately fight for freedom for the Congolese. He is not shown to be effective, and dies in Africa after his mistrust drives him to foolish decisions.

If the play suggests a remedy (and it doesn’t, really) it is in the youngest son of Vasiya, who is not as inert as his father and not as reactive as his brother, and instead stands for separatism, a kind of severing of east from west where they shall not interact and kind will stay with kind (the play has the effect of driving Pretoria away from the Starks to returning to the east with Vasiya.

The play contains a useful through-line of how thoughtless pursuit of industry coupled with dehumanization leads to horrifying consequences, the more effective outbursts from the Starks are when the business leaders talk about the cost of this or that when speaking of riots and deaths, but its pro-segregationist attitude and its drawing of a moral equivalency between commerce and violence ultimately led me to rolling my eyes more than in thinking hard about the (non)arguments it presents.