All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (13 page)

Thus, the title of the “Prohibited” scene is a loaded pun: combining Prohibition (the setting is a speakeasy) and the forbidden love of adultery (Clark Gable comes into the Young Woman’s life at this point) but also the feeling that anything gentle, pretty, or caring is banned in the Young Woman’s life. More: the even more forbidden love of the homosexual world gets what may be its first honest presentation in Broadway history in this scene. True,
The Captive
had come and gone two seasons previously. However,
The Captive
kept its Captor—the other woman in the lesbian affair—offstage. The fearless Treadwell shows us an older gay man picking up a chicken, and her stage directions tolerate no ambiguity. She calls one “a middle-aged fairy” and the other “young, untouched.” They are last seen leaving the club together, supposedly to view the older man’s rare-book collection. “I have a first edition of Verlaine,” he says, “that will simply make your mouth water.”

This subversive honesty is very much a part of twenties Broadway. It’s why the authorities pounced with legal penalty but also why they finally gave up: there was too much of it. The Charles Frohman theory of playgoing held that the theatre is a place of beauty. The generation of managers that succeeded Frohman’s, led by Winthrop Ames, Arthur Hopkins, and Gilbert Miller (son of the star actor Henry Miller, whose theatre still stands on West Forty-third Street), held that theatre is a place of surprise. Not a plot twist: an insight.

This introduces the second of the great twenties novelties, the long-lived one: the Theatre Guild. Indeed, it endured for fifty years, though its days of greatest influence did not outlast its first decade or so, after which it became, increasingly, a producing organization like most others, eventually taking on conventional comedies like
The Tunnel of Love
(1957) and
A Majority of One
(1959) and conventional musical comedies like
Bells Are Ringing
(1956) and
Darling of the Day
(1968), the final Theatre Guild presentation.

Yet in its heyday, its admirers claim, the Guild specialized in surprise, in the utopian philosophy that worthy plays should be produced even if they are too special to succeed. Imagine going into business to lose money. Actually, the Guild didn’t expect to fail, but rather to develop an adventurous audience with a string of what we can call “prestige successes.” It’s a euphemism, of course. Long after all this, thinking of her own lean years with Kurt Weill when they first came to America, that symbol of twentieth-century Western-civ show biz Lotte Lenya dismissed the concept of prestige successes. “You can starve on them,” she said.

The Guild didn’t starve—but then those who scorn it believe it imposed an embourgeoisement upon nonconformist theatre. Yes, it made available work that was unproduceable before 1919: but to a public that expected to be reverent and even awed but protected from having to think, because to subscribe to the Guild was already an intellectual act, complete in itself. One didn’t have to attend in any deep sense, simply to go, sit, and bring home the program. The Guild, say doubters, was not revolutionary. It was fat and happy.

There was a Board of Managers, and the managers
were
the Guild: phlegmatic maestro Lawrence Langner, chic designer Lee Simonson, chief stage director Philip Moeller, character actress and professional eccentric Helen Westley, moneybags Maurice Wertheim (historian Barbara Tuchman’s father, by the way), and all-around directrix Theresa Helburn. Broadway needed and resented them. The problem was the obvious one: how can six people, especially six as cantankerously discrepant as these, ever agree on anything? They can’t. They didn’t. Many a future hit for other producers was turned down by the Guild because half the committee scorned the script. Then there were the Sunday-night run-throughs for the committee, with six wildly different opinions bearing down on playwright, director, and cast. One of the Guild’s most eminent offshoots was the Playwrights’ Company, a management founded by major dramatists who couldn’t stand dealing with the Gang of Six any more.

The Guild itself was an offshoot, of an earlier group called the Washington Square Players, founded in 1914 and somewhat recherché in its emphasis on one-acters, especially by European writers. America’s entry into the Great War broke up the organization, but in 1919 it came back together, this time for full-length outings on The Street. All but penniless—the coffers held about two thousand dollars—the Guild had to oblige itself to philanthropy for its home. That ubiquitous Maecenas Otto Kahn lent them the Garrick Theatre, which he held under lease, and which we know was to see the Guild triumphing with the only non-musical play to run through the Actors’ Strike,
John Ferguson
.

Ironically, while the Guild saw itself as New Broadway, destined to repave The Street with Art, the Garrick was Old Broadway, down on Thirty-fifth Street just east of Sixth Avenue, where nothing mattered. Opened in 1890 as Harrigan’s Theatre after Ned Harrigan broke up his act with Tony Hart, the playhouse was managed by Richard Mansfield and saw one of the classic performances of the age in William Gillette’s assumption of the title role in his own adaptation of
Sherlock Holmes
(1899). Charles Frohman produced it, as he produced also at the Garrick the emergence of Ethel Barrymore in Clyde Fitch’s
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
(1901). Gad, what great names of Old Broadway!—even if Barrymore was by 1919 in mid-career and Gillette still turned up as Holmes from time to time.

Thus, to enter the Garrick was not unlike stepping into a Great Pyramid. Worse, the Herald Square location did not encourage walk-in business, at a time when improvisatory theatregoing provided the bulk of a show’s audience at most evening performances.
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Nevertheless, the Guild prevailed. It so energized a New Public to match its New Broadway that the Guild was able to build its own theatre in 1925, six years after it had opened shop at the Garrick. The new house, the Guild (today the Virginia), was consecrated with a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra,
with Lionel Atwill and Helen Hayes. (Helen Westley played Ftatateeta.) And here’s another irony: to raise funds for tapestries to dress either side of the new auditorium, the Guild gave Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart their Big Break with a revue opportunity. The result rocked the town with delight at our old friend the Garrick, now within a decade of demolition yet immortalized in the revue’s title:
The Garrick Gaieties
. The show began with a spoofy quartet called “Soliciting Subscriptions” that rhymed a knock on culture vultures (as “people on Fifth Avenue”) with “We bring out the aesthetic soul you didn’t know you have in you.” This is where the Guild’s supporters and critics come together: was this a breakthrough in theatre culture or mass-market snob appeal?

Take the Guild’s views on casting. Running annual, full-scale seasons without at least a star or two would have been unthinkable, and the Guild did use stars—Ina Claire, George M. Cohan, Katharine Hepburn, and, above all, the Lunts. However, for its first decade or so the Guild banned star billing by policy: the
play
was the thing. Is this idealism, or the flattery of Guild subscribers, who have thus been distinguished from the mob of star chasers? Indeed, was the Guild trying to imply that it had been graduated from the Old Broadway of the hokum queen and the matinée idol with an integrated acting ensemble?
That’s
why the hoardings never mentioned the players? At times, the Guild would rotate productions in repertory at a single house with a kind of stock company. There was Helen Westley as the Old Dame, Dudley Digges’ Heavy Father, George Gaul for the Romantic-Heroic roles, Margalo Gillmore’s Chirpy Ingenue, and Utility Juvenile Earle Larimore. It had consistency, if nothing else: but it had nothing else, because the Guild’s sense of “ensemble” simply meant The Same People in Every Play.

On the other hand, twenties theatregoers would not have known how to respond to stagings that were not star-centered. In
Caesar and Cleopatra,
for instance, one followed the action through the confrontations of Atwill, Hayes, and Westley: the “spotlight” aroused concentration. Yes, the Moscow Art Theatre made its famous visit in 1923; but they were acting in Russian, out of the loop. Not till the 1930s, when the Group Theatre was formed—paradoxically, by restless Guild underlings—was Broadway to have its own acting ensemble with a philosophy of aesthetics to match a philosophy of subject matter.

The Guild’s subject matter, following the Washington Square Players’ penchant, was Europe. There were scarcely any Americans—and none of note—in the Guild’s first four seasons. Rather, there was Jacinto Benavente, St. John Ervine, August Strindberg, Leonid Andreyef, and Georg Kaiser, whose
Von Morgens bis Mitternachts
(1917), given as
From Morn to Midnight
in 1922, is sometimes considered the first work of classic (i.e., European) expressionism seen on Broadway.

Elmer Rice turned up in the Guild’s fifth season. Still, Europeans overwhelmed local talent till the tenth season, and not till the fifteenth season did Americans predominate. Of course, there had to be a little something by Luigi Chiarelli slotted in with the natives, of course in the Somerset Maugham translation.

And there was Shaw. A great deal of the Guild’s reputation depended on Shaw’s giving it world-premiere rights to his newest pieces when he was the most imposing playwright in the English-speaking world.
Heartbreak House
(1920),
Back to Methuselah
(1922), in three nights, and
Saint Joan
(1923) were thus launched under Guild auspices; between them, older Shaw was revived to assert Guild interest. Yet no one spoke of a Guild playing style in Shaw: or, to repeat for emphasis, a Guild playing style at all.

Yes, the constant use of director Philip Moeller suggested a wish to harmonize Guild actors’ self-presentation; and Moeller employed exercises to test and expand his troupe’s abilities, much as the Group was to. However, the Group’s Lee Strasberg worked from a program of thespian preparation. Moeller was a showboater, making it up as he went along; he often began rehearsals without having read the script.

As for designer Simonson—who often planned costumes and lighting as well as sets—here at least was a unifying contribution. He helped pioneer the use of a permanent structure against which inserts and drops could be flown for fast changes of scene. Alternatively, Simonson kept the playing area all but empty against a great simple backdrop. He put this effect to spectacular use in that
Caesar and Cleopatra,
in the fourth-act banquet scene: the back half of the stage was cut off by what looked like a silken nothingness, hung from wing to wing. Before it, Simonson set a simple dining table and a wooden lounge chair, with the stage apron cut open for the entrance of slaves from below bearing trays, urns, and exotic carvings. It was an eyeful fit for the opening of the Guild’s own theatre, even if the drop was so sensitive that if someone in the last row of the balcony fidgeted with his program, the entire back of the stage billowed like an ocean. Still, it must be said that, in design at least, the Guild was often bold, commissioning sets and costumes from Miguel Covarrubias for
Androcles and the Lion
(1925) that created a children’s-book atmosphere for this most gentle of plays.

Was this constant presence of Shaw the Guild’s unifying element? No: because it put on anything else. The Guild’s historical reputation is based exclusively on its famous shows, its prominent authors such as S. N. Behrman or Ferenc Molnár, its Paul Robeson
Othello
. But, in between, the Guild simply took a smash at a piñata of theatre work, staging whatever could—however dimly—be called “artistic” rather than “commercial.” Including musicals. Including even an opera—but that was
Porgy and Bess
.

Let’s get our bearings with a few more or less descriptive titles, for if no single idea or person essentialized the Theatre Guild, certainly the organization created a body of work that
seemed
to amount to something. First of all, we should cite the Bizarre European Piece—such as a tale of poor folk in Budapest, with a tremulous heroine who falls for a thuggish merry-go-round barker who abuses her and kills himself after a botched robbery. With its somber background and drably eccentric characters, it’s a flea market of a play, suddenly moving into fantasy late in the evening, to show that even Heaven cannot redeem its anti-hero. It’s like
Carousel
without the music. It
is Carousel
without the music: Ferenc Molnár’s
Liliom,
“a legend in seven scenes and a prologue,” put into English by Benjamin F. Glazer for the Guild’s 1920–21 season.
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Liliom
was a surprise hit, moving from the Garrick up to the Fulton (later the Helen Hayes, now demolished) and even the oversized Forty-fourth Street, for a total of 311 performances.

We might also consider the first play about robots—the work, in fact, in which the word “robot” was coined, from the Czech
robota
(“work”). In Karel Čapek’s
R.U.R.
(for Rossum’s Universal Robots, the company that manufactures them), robots are workers, slaves of mankind till they rebel. Clad in leather helmets, metallic tunics (bearing serial numbers) with flaring shoulders, and knee-length boots with pointed tops, they looked fit for a fifties kiddie matinée, even a film by Ed Wood. But then,
R.U.R.
generally has a horror-film feeling, though in the end a male and female robot develop feelings for each other and look to be the Adam and Eve of a new race. This show, too, was a hit.

While the Guild doted on those Bizarre European Pieces, there was nothing like the Absolutely Guaranteed Classic for inspiring the troops. Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
(1923), an adaptation of
The Brothers Karamazov
(1927), and the First Part of Goethe’s
Faust
(1928) were useful here. Fidelity to text was a Guild hallmark at a time when producers routinely put on adaptations rather than straight translations of foreign-language writing. However, if
Peer Gynt
is long, even the first half of
Faust
is endless. Shaw held the Guild to word-complete performances of his plays—and he kept watch through a confederate living in New York. But Goethe was dead, so the Guild borrowed a translation by Graham and Tristan Rawson, used in 1924 at London’s Old Vic, that cut whole scenes (including the Prologue in the Theatre, Goethe’s timeless excoriation of moneybags show biz). Further, the Rawsons made combinings and tucks all along the way; one has to, just to get this show onstage. Perhaps out of guilt, the Guild imported Friedrich Holl, director of the Berlin Volksbühne, to direct: an authentic
Faust
, or at any rate a German one. The casting drew heavily on the Guild stock company, with George Gaul’s Faust, Dudley Digges’ Mephistopheles, and Helen Westley’s Martha, though the Chirpy Ingenue, Goethe’s Margaret (so called in the Guild’s program), was Helen Chandler.