Title: The house beautiful
Description: Jennifer and Archibald Davis buy a house in West Hills, New Jersey, and for the next thirty years their lives and the fate of the West Hills community are intenwoven into what the playwright called "a saga of all the brave, honest, little men who march to work every morning and come home at night to the castle where the women they love keep the flag flying." Davis is a failure from a materialistic point of view, but he and his wife cling to their ideals in a world of greed and cynicism... The play is thus a paean to the lives of people who had comprised Pollock's audience, an idealization of their everyday existence. To underscore the idealization, Pollock introduced a kind of fantasy element: after crucial moments in the lives of the Davises, the walls of their little West Hills house parted, trumpets sounded, and the modest, unassuming suburbanites found themselves in the court of King Arthur, with all the trappings of mediaeval chivalry. --William Grange, "Channing Pollock: the American Theatre's Forgotten Polemicist," Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1987), p. 160.
Subjects: Families, Drama, Middle class, Social life and customs, Suburban life