All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (14 page)

Faust
was one of the Guild’s debacles. Apart from the ingeniousness of Lee Simonson’s set changes, nothing was praised. Worse, each critic found this
Faust
ridiculous in a different way: too perfunctory, too driven, too silly, too studied. Come to think of it, why was a German who couldn’t speak English hired to direct an English-speaking cast, at that in poetry? And isn’t this masterpiece at long last a poem that its author never meant to see performed?

Another Guild genre was the Inexplicable Novelty, put on as if defining the Guild with indefinability, in a string of objets trouvés. As I’ve said, what identifies the Guild
today
is the
Ex
plicable Novelty, something unusual yet artistically so righteous that it needs no excuse. DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s
Porgy
(1927), which we all “know” from the extraordinarily faithful Gershwin version, is an ideal example, for it centered the black folk play movement with such disarming sincerity that one can date the decline and eventual death of stereotype entertainment from
Porgy
’s premiere.

However, when the Guild was young many theatregoers associated the organization with the Inexplicable Novelty. This would be something like
Red Rust
(1929), given by the experimental Theatre Guild Studio, albeit in a full-scale staging at the Guild’s “other” Broadway house, the Martin Beck. A Soviet play, introduced in Moscow in 1927,
Red Rust
was a melodrama of the kind that later Soviet censorship would outlaw: the good guy was a bourgeois and the bad guy was a commissar. Some of the cast (Franchot Tone, Luther Adler, Lee Strasberg) would prove to be stalwarts of the Guild’s breakaway cell, the Group Theatre, warning us that those committed to social drama thought the Guild dispiritingly apolitical. Certainly,
Red Rust
was “Soviet” in little more than its setting; the
Times
called it “
The Front Page
crossed with Channing Pollock.” (The latter was a successful journeyman playwright who made a turnaround in the 1920s and went preachy.)

Another typifying Guild genre—but only from the late 1920s on—was the all-American piece by a pet writer. These were, first, Sidney Howard, then, chronologically, S. N. Behrman, Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert E. Sherwood, four of them founders of the Playwrights’ Company; and we know why. Yes, the Guild Board of Managers was rough on writers. Still, once the Guild got going, those six did prove loyal to the more apparent dramatists, at least some of whose prestige had been borrowed from the Guild’s.

The organization’s treatment of Sidney Howard is instructive, for the six became interested in him only after he had worked his way through a youthful output of fantasies and derivative European romances, including his translation of the Hungarian
Sancho Panza
for Otis Skinner that we glanced at a bit ago. When he found his métier, Howard excelled at edgy American stories about charismatic but somewhat unlikable people. He seemed to enjoy testing his public; or perhaps he simply saw the world as being filled with rogues and squishes. Interestingly, Howard’s most enduring work is his screenplay for
Gone With the Wind
—and while he didn’t invent its characters, note that each of the four leads is in one way or another unsympathetic, two of them squishes and the other two fascinating rogues.

The Guild embraced Howard in the mid-1920s with three works,
They Knew What They Wanted
(1924),
Ned McCobb’s Daughter
(1926), and, scarcely a month after,
The Silver Cord
(1926). Each is a variation on a format of the day—respectively, melodrama, crook play, and domestic drama—and Howard filled each tale with those characters we find engrossing and disagreeable. In
Ned McCobb’s Daughter,
it’s Alfred Lunt—or, really, it’s everybody, in a kind of bootleggers’ backstager about evading the feds, embezzling, and doing time. But it was Lunt who caught the eye, as Babe Callahan, speaking an underworld argot that was all the more flashy in the Maine seashore setting and getting into physical combat with his brother (Earle Larimore) and sister-in-law, the title role (Claire Eames). It is a picturesque irony of theatre history that some of our greatest actors couldn’t begin work on a portrayal till they physicalized it in some way. Olivier always started with the nose, and for Lunt’s Babe Callahan it was a gold tooth, so obnoxiously shiny that it blinded the balcony. This was a Howard family show, by the way: Eames was Mrs. Howard, and her baby girl was played by the Howards’ own daughter.

In
The Silver Cord,
Howard brought his unpleasant people into the American middle-class parlor: two schmengie sons and their manipulative and grasping mother. This character, Mrs. Phelps, is a classic, very Jazz Age in Howard’s debunking of sentimental piety. But Howard is subtle. Other writers simply made mothers into heaving monsters; Mrs. Phelps is almost comical in her petty gameplaying. One striking scene finds her greeting son David, just back from Europe. Mrs. Phelps busily pets and fusses at him, all the while pretending that she hasn’t noticed that David has brought home his new bride, Christina: who is standing next to him. It’s the kind of thing Carol Burnett might have done, or perhaps Doris Roberts in a revue sketch (that is, if there still were variety revues). David keeps trying to introduce Christina, and Christina keeps trying to speak—yet Mrs. Phelps is all but annulling the marriage by instituting a village shunning. Finally, Christina gets out a sentence, and Mrs. Phelps now has to deal with her:

MRS. PHELPS:
(affecting surprise) Eh? (Noticing Christina as if for the first time, with a dead, flat tone) Oh.

A lot of content lay in that “Oh,” for Laura Hope Crews—later, by coincidence, the Aunt Pittypat of
Gone With the Wind
—played Mrs. Phelps as a kind of evil Billie Burke. “Sometimes she goes over to farce too generously,” Brooks Atkinson thought. No: the lady has charm and humor; that’s how she gets away with it. It’s a great role, but the play is unrevivable because of a stagnant ending: Christina analyzes Mrs. Phelps’ flaws like a detective summing up the case at the close of a whodunit.

They Knew What They Wanted
is not unrevivable, though its musical version, Frank Loesser’s
The Most Happy Fella,
all but subsumes it with more agreeable principals. It’s a triangle, centering on a young woman in a spot beloved by thirties Hollywood: caught between the hot man and the good man. The former, Howard tells us, is “dark, sloppy, beautiful, and young,” all appetite and no intellect, despite left-wing political interests. The good man, an Italian immigrant with a heavy accent, is “stout, floridly bronzed, sixty years old, vigorous, jovial, simple, and excitable.” That’s no fun, either.

The girl, at least, is a looker, originally played by Pauline Lord, one of the most mannered actresses of the day, though descriptions of her style suggest that she might have been a pioneer in a highly inflected naturalism. She was gifted, by all accounts: her Great Role was Anna Christie, in 1921. Tiny and fearful, hesitant of speech and forever keening and cringing, Lord was the ultimate
pathétique
. Yet she had stamina, and a strange ability to fill auditoriums with those moony quadrilles. Only the strongest actresses could be trusted with the decathlon part of Nina Leeds, in
Strange Interlude
. Lynn Fontanne created it, and a future Medea, Judith Anderson, replaced Fontanne and toured the show. But the first national company was headed by Pauline Lord.

O’Neill himself introduces another Guild sub-repertory, for he became a Guild partisan in 1928 with
Marco Millions
and
Strange Interlude,
assigning to the Guild all his New York premieres until his death. One cannot understand theatre in the 1920s without seeing O’Neill and the Guild as a correct mating. Inevitable, even—or simply as symmetrical as the last-minute pairing off of a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. For O’Neill was by 1928 the Great American Playwright and the Guild was Broadway’s most prestigious management.
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Moreover,
Marco Millions
and
Strange Interlude
in particular proved irresistible to the Guild: because the first presented a challenge to the designer in its kaleidoscope of exotic places, and the Guild pioneered in design; and because the second’s nine acts and strange Dinner Intermission spoke to the self-sacrificial attitude of the Guild devotee.

For its part,
Marco Millions
is one of O’Neill’s more enjoyable pieces—a comedy, in fact, on the adventures of Marco Polo. The show is as well a spectacle, turning that kaleidoscope so generously that O’Neill had wanted Max Reinhardt to stage the piece. Indeed, Reinhardt brought his Berlin production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
to Broadway scarcely two months before
Marco Millions
opened. But Reinhardt’s New York reputation rested not just on spectacle but on the colossal—remember Reinhardt and Norman Bel Geddes turning the Century Theatre into a Gothic cathedral for
The Miracle
? The Guild’s experiments in staging technology, on the contrary, lay in getting the most out of the least, “tricking” rather than filling the eye.

That approach suggests not Reinhardt but David Belasco. We remember him at the Century, too, helping out on
Aphrodite
. Still, Belasco’s art—that is, when he wasn’t setting a real-life Child’s pancake house on stage, complete to the coffee steam—was the art of illusion. However, Belasco was Uptown Establishment as much as anyone. It tells us how determined O’Neill was to get out of Little Theatre—or to bring it to Broadway—that he actually gave the
Marco Millions
script to Belasco. How did Old Broadway feel when the author of
The Emperor Jones
offered him his latest work? Astonished, surely. Flattered? Flabbergasted? Belasco even took an option, if perhaps only out of politeness. In the end, Belasco declined, and O’Neill presented
Marco Millions
to the Guild and launched their partnership.

Rouben Mamoulian directed, following up on his Broadway debut directing the Guild’s
Porgy
the previous year. Mamoulian had distinguished himself especially in the use of music and in his deftly detailed crowd scenes, and
Marco Millions
is filled with crowds and music. The latter comprised new material by Emerson Whithorne and also Rudolf Friml’s
Chinese Suite,
borrowed for the occasion. Unfortunately, O’Neill’s wide-ranging scene plot outwitted Lee Simonson so consistently that the public’s enjoyment was compromised by long waits between each sequence.
5
Nevertheless, both the Guild and Mamoulian extended themselves in giving
Marco
the color and activity that O’Neill asked for. Those two nouns are not typically associated with O’Neill—but he is not as monolithic as his popular profile suggests. There are plenty of aberrant O’Neill plays, especially in the 1920s and especially
Marco Millions.

For one thing, it has almost as much plot as a farce. The Prologue, though relatively short, is crowded with event. It is set in the middle of a great empty space in the Persian wasteland, marked by a single tree of sacramental importance. There, three commercial travelers—Christian, Magian, and Buddhist, to establish the play’s war of West and East—take rest from the heat. While sharing news, they argue over legends of the tree’s origin. The Buddha picked his teeth with a twig that grew into this very—No! Here was found the wood that made the True Cross! Nay, you fools, it was planted by Zoroaster!

As the dispute continues, we learn that the Christian is an agent of the Venetian trading house of Polo Brothers and Son, and that the Prologue occurs not before but
after
the action of the play proper: an introductory epilogue. Meanwhile, thirty Chinese extras drag in a wagon bearing a coffin covered in white cloth; a Chinese captain is escorting the body of Princess Kukachin to her burial. It’s an arresting coincidence, for the Venetian has already implied that Marco Polo and the princess may have been intimately involved, in a kind of peace of West and East. Uncovered, the coffin is revealed to be glass, Kukachin’s lovely face glows, and music plays—as if, O’Neill directs, “the leaves [of the tree] were tiny harps strummed by the wind.” The captain and the three merchants fall to their knees in alarmed prayer, and the dead Kukachin speaks, apparently to the Polos’ deputy:

KUKACHIN:
Say this, I loved and died. Now I am love, and live. And living, have forgotten. And loving, can forgive. (Here her lips part in a smile of beautiful pity) Say this for me in Venice!

I ask you, does this suit that popular idyll of O’Neill the mournful autobiographer, thrilled with his own incoherence and mythic to a fault? Remember, his blood ran with the zest of Old Broadway from his actor father, the Count of Monte Cristo. Eugene was even born on The Street, at Forty-third and Broadway, on October 16, 1888. And note the black humor with which he closes the Prologue: as three of the bearers have died from the labor of racing across the plain with their burden, the Captain decides to enslave the three traders in their place. Frantically, the Venetian shows the Captain a letter of introduction to the Chinese court, which the Captain promptly tears up. “And now,” he concludes, “forward march!” With the three traders bound to the others, the Captain whips the wagon off to wails of despair, leaving behind the three dead coolies and a reminiscence of Kukachin’s tiny harps. The Prologue is over.

Wow. If
Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931) had as much sheer story, the premiere wouldn’t have let out yet. Then, too, O’Neill’s Marco is no avatar of legend but, quite simply, a babbitt among sophisticates. The court of Kublai Khan treats of nuance and wisdom, while Marco communicates in clichés and chamber-of-commerce good-guy routines. He likes to repeat the joke that “an Armenian doily-dealer told me down in Baghdad,” the kind that begins “An old Jew named Ikey,” and it seems that our Marco can handle anything except honest feeling. In fact, he writes poetry—but furtively, lest anyone suspect him of effeminacy. So Mamoulian timed his drums, gongs, and choruses to visual coups, working with Simonson on the lighting to be certain that the audience saw the East that Mamoulian saw; but Marco toured it all without ever taking it in. Here’s why: he doesn’t listen. No matter where he is, he might as well never have left the city of Zenith in the state of Winnemac. It’s what Italians call “campanilismo” (literally, “church-belltowerism”): knowing only what everyone else in the parish knows, ignorant of all else. In a way, O’Neill might have designed this eye candy of a play precisely to characterize his unappreciative hero. The audience, taking in scene after scene of luxury and worldliness, could thus watch in real time as Marco endlessly fails to get it.