The Petrified Forest by Robert E. Sherwood

First published: 1935

First produced: 1935, at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Melodrama

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Eastern Arizona desert

Principal Characters:

• Alan Squier, a drifter
• Jason Maple, the proprietor of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q
• Gabby Maple, Jason’s daughter
• Duke Mantee, a gang leader on the run
• Boze Hertzlinger, Jason’s employee and an admirer of Gabby
• Gramp Maple, Gabby’s pioneer grandfather
• Mr. Chisolm, and
• Mrs. Chisolm, travelers

The Play

As if suggesting a play of social protest, the action begins with a conversation between two telegraph linemen about freedom and socialism. The two are sitting in the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q, a filling station and café on the edge of the Arizona desert. Listening is Gramp Maple, the father of the proprietor; he tells the men of his pioneering days, especially of the time he was shot at by Billy the Kid. The talk thus leads to the subject of law and order, or the lack thereof, as evinced by Duke Mantee and his gang, who have massacred six people in an Oklahoma shoot-out and are now reported to be somewhere in the area. Jason Maple, the proprietor, is contemptuous of the gang and vows that he and his American Legion fellows will deal with them. Jason’s daughter, Gabby, has come in from the kitchen. Restless, impatient with her shallow father, she seems the controlling force of the place; she is a sensitive young woman who reads romantic poetry that Boze Hertzlinger, a gas-jockey and former college athlete, belittles with the self-assured cockiness of the failure. He is attracted to Gabby, but she curtly parries his advances.

Meanwhile, Alan Squier enters the eatery. Dressed in shabby elegance, shouldering a rucksack, and carrying a walking stick, Squier is a drifter, a sort of noble vagrant, a status that may be better understood in the context of the Depression. Gentle, soft-spoken, almost knightly, he takes a liking to the bluff innocence of Gabby, while she is vaguely attracted to his quiet urbanity. Finding a sympathetic ear, she tells Squier about her French mother, who married her father during World War I but who could not acclimatize to the desert and so returned to France, where Gabby hopes to go someday to visit her. Every year for her birthday her mother sends Gabby books of poems, and it is one of these books that she was just reading. At Squier’s request, Gabby recites a love poem by François Villon and expresses again her dream of going to France. Squier is touched by her innocence and sensitivity. He tells her of his own life: He wrote a self-consciously stark novel at age twenty-two; married his publisher’s wife, who ran off with him to the Mediterranean; lived as a frustrated, “inarticulate” writer for eight years, then left his wife and came to America to find “something to believe in.”

Convinced that she has found a kindred spirit and attracted by his knowledge of the world beyond the petrified forest of Arizona, Gabby shows Squier one of her paintings. He is impressed but bewildered, sensing Gabby’s restless, creative energy. He gently reproves her when she urges him to run off with her and take her to France. Instead, he asks her for a kiss as he prepares once more to set out on the road. Boze enters and in a jealous pique tries to throw Squier out, but Gabby checks him. Just then, Mr. and Mrs. Chisolm enter. Well-to-do, they are driving to California and have stopped to refuel. Gabby asks them to take Squier along. She and Squier shake hands in farewell.

After Squier and the Chisolms have gone, Boze romances Gabby, who agrees to walk with him in the desert moonlight. Before they leave, she begins to tell Boze about Squier’s remarks concerning man’s failure to conquer Nature, but just then the Mantee gang bursts in. Armed, the gang orders Gabby, Boze, and Gramp to stay calm while Duke Mantee orders food and drink. After a moment, Squier reenters to warn them about Mantee, who had intercepted the Chisolms and him on the road and exchanged cars. When Squier sees the gang, he resignedly asks for a drink. As the curtain closes, he raises his glass in a salute.

Act 2 opens half an hour later. Gramp has been recounting his pioneer days of law and disorder. Mantee has been listening to the radio news reports about his escape and the dragnet set for him. He is firm but civil in his demands for food and drink. Boze is openly defiant, but Mantee scornfully ignores him. When Boze grabs for a gun, Duke Mantee shoots him in the hand and warns Boze that next time he will kill him. Gabby comforts Boze, and they are taken out by one of the gang.

Meanwhile, Squier has been watching Mantee. The two have a subtle respect for each other; Squier in particular expresses his admiration for Mantee as a paragon of individualism. Even Mrs. Chisolm, who admits to having led a circumscribed life, declares her respect for Mantee.

This insight into Mantee as a kindred spirit prompts Squier to offer the gangster a startling proposition. Squier’s only asset is a life insurance policy to which he has not assigned a beneficiary. Perceiving Mantee as a “man of imagination,” Squier quietly asks him, along with Gramp and Mrs. Chisolm, to witness his designation of Gabby as his beneficiary. Then he pleads with Mantee to shoot him dead before leaving the cafe. Mrs. Chisolm at first believes Squier to be mad, but she then realizes that Squier is in love with Gabby and wants to give her a chance at a future. Mantee himself has already perceived Squier’s love and gently agrees to his request.

When Gabby returns from tending to Boze, Squier admits his love for her and encourages her to follow her dream. Just then Jason Maple and his fellow Legionnaires come into the café. The gang takes them prisoner, but Jason informs Mantee that the gang is trapped, as the sheriff and his posse are on their way. Shooting is heard outside as the sheriff arrives. There is much gunfire and everyone in the café keeps low. Mantee decides to make a run for freedom, but as he prepares to escape Squier reminds Mantee of his promise. Acknowledging that they will meet each other again soon, Mantee shoots Squier and runs from the café amid a fusillade.

In the final scene, Gabby cradles the dying Squier in her arms. She fights back tears as the men decide to give him a hero’s funeral in the petrified forest. As the curtain falls, Jason telephones the police, warning them that Mantee is heading south.

Dramatic Devices

Like a well-made classical drama, Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest observes the unities of time, place, and action. No more than two hours elapse, and the entire action of the drama takes place in the lunchroom of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q. No attempt is made to use innovative staging or to evoke moods with lighting. Though evening approaches near the end of the play, the darkness beyond the interior of the café is not so much symbolic as simply naturalistic. Everything in the play is intended to enforce the deadening reality of the characters’ situation. The lunchroom is minutely depicted—the walls are covered with advertisements. The dialogue is unobtrusively correct, natural. Such colloquialism is suggested rather than conscientiously transcribed, as in many of the realistic plays of the 1930’s.

The characters themselves are more stereotypical than profound: Gabby is the young ingénue; Gramp, the garrulous old pioneer; Jason, the shallow, would-be bourgeois; Boze, the failed college athlete. It is in this very clarity of presentation, the direct simplicity of exposition, however, that the play holds the interest of the audience. Sherwood establishes a sense of inevitability early, with the reference to the Mantee gang foreshadowing the subsequent action. When Squier leaves the café and Mantee subsequently enters, the audience is presented with a neat anticlimax, or rather, a double-climax, as Squier reenters and finds himself a captive as the curtain falls on act 1.

The ending of the play echoes the beginning. Just as the telegraph linemen open the action with a discussion of liberty and socialism, so the conclusion is a kind of physical reenactment and interpretation of the argument: Mantee has “freed” Squier from his world-weariness while the gangster himself remains free, though hounded by the State. In addition, Sherwood’s flat, almost prosaic dramaturgy, stressing a kind of blunt reality, provides a powerful contrast to the frustrated idealism of Squier, the inchoate dreams of Gabby, and the thwarted individualism of Duke Mantee.

Critical Context

Of the fifteen plays that comprise Robert Sherwood’s dramatic compositions, The Petrified Forest is the eighth and thus stands almost in the center of his creative work, chronologically as well as artistically. It was the first of his three masterworks composed within a three-year period (The Petrified Forest, pr., pb. 1935; Idiot’s Delight, pr., pb. 1936; Abe Lincoln in Illinois, pr. 1938, pb. 1939) and the first to treat seriously the theme of idealism and the decline of Western values.

His first play, The Road to Rome (pr., pb. 1927), poked fun at the bourgeois values of ancient Rome—in an analogy to the materialistic American society of the 1920’s—and defended the ideal of pacificism through the love affair between Hannibal and Amytis, who persuades her lover to renounce war. After several less successful works, Sherwood produced Reunion in Vienna (pr. 1931, pb. 1932), another comedy, this one satirizing Freudian psychology. It was followed by Acropolis (pr. 1933), which drew a pointed analogy between the death of the democratic ideal in ancient Athens and the growing totalitarianism of Europe in the 1930’s.

These plays clearly show Sherwood as a versatile dramatist, trying his hand at the popular comedy of manners, a form exemplified by the work of his contemporary Philip Barry, at sentimental comedy, and at thinly veiled fables, such as Acropolis. As one of the country’s foremost film critics during the 1920’s, Sherwood understood the popular taste, and some cinematic characteristics are evident in his work, as, for example, in the shoot-out in The Petrified Forest. Interestingly, the role of Duke Mantee, both on Broadway and in the screen version, was played by Humphrey Bogart.

Like many of his generation who had served in World War I, Sherwood, who had been wounded, returned with scars deeper than the simply physical. He perceived the world as on the brink—civilization bankrupt, society bereft of values. His plays suggest a need for tolerance and understanding. The compassion of Abe Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a play which garnered for Sherwood one of his three Pulitzer Prizes, differs only in degree and circumstance from the kindred understanding of Duke Mantee and the gentle sadness of Alan Squier.

The Petrified Forest thus treats idealism not as a comedy of manners but as melodrama, what the erstwhile film critic himself called a “good show.” As such, its themes are clearly related to the earlier works while also looking ahead to the defeatism of Idiot’s Delight and to the serene integrity of the young Lincoln in Illinois. The Petrified Forest makes no claim for the liberal or the conservative, for the Americanism of the workingman or the leftist beliefs of the intellectual. It merely dramatizes the dilemma between them, the polarity between freedom and death, reality and idealism.

Sources for Further Study

Broussard, Louis. “Everyman at Mid-Century: Robert E. Sherwood.” In American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.

Brown, John Mason. The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Gould, Jean. “Robert E. Sherwood.” In Modern American Playwrights. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966.

Kulshres, Chirantan. “Robert Sherwood.” In Reference Guide to American Literature. 2d ed. Chicago: St. James, 1987.

Meserve, Walter. Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

Shuman, R. Baird. Robert E. Sherwood. New York: Twayne, 1964.