The Work
J.B. was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1958 and premiered at Yale Drama School before moving to Broadway, where it ran from December 1958 to October 1959. Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Pat Hingle as J.B., Christopher Plummer as Nickles (Satan), and Raymond Massey as Mr. Zuss (God), it won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1959. It is the most celebrated American verse drama of the twentieth century and the most significant theatrical adaptation of the Book of Job.
The play is set in a circus tent. Two down-and-out vendors, Mr. Zuss (who wears a God-mask) and Nickles (who wears a Satan-mask), climb the scaffolding and watch and partly orchestrate the drama of J.B. below them. J.B. is a prosperous American businessman - banker, family man, patriot - whose children die one by one in a succession of modern disasters: war, automobile accident, sexual violence, nuclear explosion. His wife Sarah eventually abandons her faith and him. The three comforters arrive (a psychiatrist, a priest, a communist) offering modern versions of the theodicy that Job's friends offered. God speaks from a whirlwind.
Biblical Engagement
Job 1:21 ('And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord') is J.B.'s initial response to his losses - an orthodox, beautiful acceptance that MacLeish dramatizes as genuine and not merely performative. J.B.'s faith is not shallow; his suffering is all the more devastating because it begins with real theological depth.
Job 38:4 ('Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding') is the climax of the divine theophany - the point at which God speaks not in answer to J.B.'s questions but in assertion of divine transcendence. MacLeish uses this moment with full awareness of its ambiguity: the divine answer does not explain J.B.'s suffering but it does establish a relationship between the human being and the God who made the world. The question is whether this relationship is adequate as a response to innocent suffering.
Job 42:5 ('I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee') is the verse MacLeish circles around in his resolution. J.B.'s restoration - unlike the biblical Job's, which includes new children and doubled wealth - is more existential than material: what is restored is the capacity to love and to live in the face of absurdity. Sarah returns; they agree to begin again; the lights come up in the darkness. MacLeish's ending, which has been criticized as sentimental by some and as genuinely hopeful by others, turns on this verse: the seeing of God, however partial and painful, is itself the vindication.
Author and Context
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was a Harvard-educated poet, playwright, and public intellectual who served as Librarian of Congress (1939-1944) and as Assistant Secretary of State (1944-1945). He was one of the leading voices of the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s, associated with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and later became one of America's most publicly engaged literary figures.
MacLeish wrote J.B. in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. The play's modern setting - the disasters that befall J.B. include World War II and nuclear warfare - makes explicit what the biblical Job leaves implicit: that innocent suffering is a structural feature of a world in which human beings have both the freedom and the capacity to destroy one another on a massive scale. MacLeish's question is whether the God of the Bible can survive as a morally credible figure in the face of Auschwitz and the bomb.
Themes
The play's central theological tension is between two voices: Mr. Zuss, who insists that God's ways are beyond human comprehension and must be accepted in submission, and Nickles, who insists that J.B.'s acceptance of his suffering is not heroism but self-deception - that a God who permits such suffering is not worthy of worship. This debate does not resolve neatly. MacLeish is too honest a thinker to simply vindicate either position.
The three comforters offer modern theodicies that MacLeish finds equally inadequate: the psychiatrist offers psychological explanation (J.B.'s suffering is the product of his unconscious guilt), the priest offers ecclesial comfort (the church's sacraments can console what reason cannot explain), and the communist offers political analysis (J.B.'s suffering is a product of social systems that can be reformed). Each explanation is true at some level and insufficient at the level that matters.
Reception
The play was one of the most discussed cultural events of the 1950s. Theologians including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr responded to it in print. Its engagement with the Holocaust made it particularly significant in the emerging field of post-Holocaust theology. Some critics found MacLeish's ending - J.B. and Sarah's decision to love again in the face of absurdity - insufficiently grounded in the biblical text, which includes divine restoration; others found it the only honest ending available to a modern writer.
Legacy
The play remains the most performed and most studied American theatrical engagement with the Bible. Its staging of the theodicy question in a post-Holocaust, post-nuclear context has influenced subsequent dramatic and theological engagements with suffering. Its influence on American theological culture was direct: it brought the question of theodicy into secular Broadway theaters and made it a subject of mainstream cultural conversation.