All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (29 page)

NAPOLEON:
Your account? You mean my account?

GOURGAUD:
I thought you meant me to write it, sir.

NAPOLEON:
(impatiently) We will see. A comma or full stop by me changes everything.

America’s chronicler-in-chief was Maxwell Anderson, whose output took him from
Elizabeth the Queen
(1930) to our colonization of northern Mexico in
Night Over Taos
(1932), from
Mary of Scotland
(1933) to
Valley Forge
(1934), and even to the Mayerling incident, in
The Masque of Kings
(1937). All were verse plays—but, as well, star vehicles for the Lunts and Helen Hayes and also Theatre Guild productions or, in the case of
Night Over Taos,
a contribution to the Group Theatre in its first season. That is, Anderson was at once the professional nonconformist, the honcho of the snob hit, and the supporter of the idealistic liberal stage, which is about as many different people as one playwright can hope to be within a single decade.

Anderson was also a figure of fun among some of the New York intelligentsia, partly because verse theatre seems vainglorious in an age that takes its romance in prose and partly because verse theatre makes pretentious opinionmakers nervous. Plays written in poetry are comparable to our modern-day pop operas in that the characters’ feelings are so intensely expressed that the good shows are not all that different from the bad ones. So it becomes easy to dash one’s reputation with the gaffe of enthusiasm. Of course, if one must write a verse play,
Elizabeth the Queen
is at least scenically hospitable: everyone’s already dressed for Shakespeare. But the aforementioned
Winterset,
in which Anderson’s typical speechifying treats contemporary concerns, bemused the nonbeliever. In
The New Yorker,
wicked Wolcott Gibbs proposed the Maxwell Anderson version of Little Eva’s death scene in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

LITTLE EVA:
What says it by the clock, by that shrewd handyman of Time there on the wall?

HER FATHER, ST. CLARE:
Four-forty-one. Four-forty-one or two.

…

LITTLE EVA:
I’m going home. To God!

ST. CLARE:
To God? And where is God, or what?

LITTLE EVA:
(with tender amusement) He is no thing, I think, that you would know. No wheel, no gear, no formula, no strict pragmatic pattern or design that you can study from a book.

…

ST. CLARE:
She’s dying, Tom!

UNCLE TOM:
Dyin’? Whut is death? De faulty chemistry ob our po’ flesh may melt. De atoms change aroun’. De earth git back to earth. De
soul
don’ nebba die!

Eventually, Little Eva floats away, to be heard offstage, “explaining something to God.” Tom shoots St. Clare in revolt against their very style of speech—”al dem purty words dat don’ quite rhyme, but run in neat and calculated rhythm.”

At least everyone agreed on the continued advantage of revisiting classic titles. Another of the great evenings still recalled at thespian dinner parties right into the 1960s was the 1930
Uncle Vanya
directed (as well as produced) by Jed Harris, almost certainly because the Age of the Producer had begun to cede prestige to the Age of the Director, and Harris wanted top rating. The event centered on Lillian Gish’s return to the stage after a generation in film, and she soon added Marguerite Gauthier and Ophelia to her résumé. The latter occurred during the dueling
Hamlet
s of the 1936–37 season; Gish played in John Gielgud’s entry, universally preferred to Leslie Howard’s. Interestingly, the rest of that
Uncle Vanya
—Walter Connolly, Osgood Perkins, Eugene Powers, Joanna Roos—suggests no more than sound support for Gish’s star magnetism. Yet the production was hailed as an outstanding instance of ensemble playing, more evidence that, whatever else Jed Harris was, he certainly knew how to run a good show.

If Leslie Howard’s Hamlet merely failed to impress, Tallulah Bankhead’s 1937 Shakespearean Cleopatra opposite the Antony of Conway Tearle (and with Mr. Bankhead, John Emery, as Octavius Caesar) lasted 5 performances after a sirocco of contempt from the critics. This was a sumptuous
Antony and Cleopatra,
designed by Jo Mielziner with music by Virgil Thomson. Reginald Bach, the director, apparently sought to recapture the spirit of turn-of-the-century Shakespeare, picturesque and hieratic—but Bankhead gave a post-flapper Cleopatra, as if one of Clare Boothe’s schemy women trapped in the WAYBAC machine. As John Mason Brown famously put it, Bankhead “barged down the Nile … and sank.”

Two of the outstanding Shakespearean outings of the decade were updatings. Enfant terrible and Wunderkind Orson Welles, just barely in his twenties, staged an all-black
Macbeth
(1936) for the Federal Theatre in an ambience of Caribbean voodoo, and then played Brutus in his own Mercury Theatre’s
Julius Caesar
(1937). Set in the Rome of Mussolini, the production utilized modern-day street clothes and military uniforms, stripping the stage right to the bricks and steam pipes on the back wall. Quite aside from the novelty of playing Shakespeare simultaneously in two different fascisms, Welles’ staging looked like nothing seen before, live theatre in black and white: for Jean Rosenthal’s lighting, now opening up acting spaces and now closing them down to pinpoints, was the sole visual element in a tumultuously drab presentation.

On the other hand,
The Importance of Being Earnest
can only be done one way, even if, after local appearances in 1895, 1910, and 1926, it went over to musical comedy as
Oh, Ernest!
, in 1927. For its next visit, in 1939, the Wilde reverted to form, though traces of musical-comedy casting may be discerned in the two male leads, Clifton Webb and Derek Williams (who played the Noël Coward figure in
Jubilee
), and also in Hope Williams (who played the heroine of another Cole Porter show,
The New Yorkers
). The Lady Bracknell of this
Earnest,
Estelle Winwood, served also as its director, a rare instance of a woman’s taking charge when she was neither playwright nor actor-manager.
5

One of Broadway’s last East of Suez pieces was Robert Keith’s
Singapore
(1932), which the reviewers chose as that season’s joke title, the notices to comprise non-stop sassing and larking about. At that,
Singapore
offered an opportunity to second-stringers to show off, for there were two other openings on the night the show baited its satirists; most of the critics attended a passion play at the New Amsterdam,
The Dark Hours
. Oddly, it was the work of Don Marquis, a humorist remembered today for
archy and mehitabel.

So while the
New York Sun
’s Richard Lockridge took in
The Dark Hours
or the other first night, that of
Dear Jane,
at Le Gallienne’s Civic downtown, someone else at the
Sun
signing as W. B. noted how obediently
Singapore
bowed to the clichés of its kind: “The faithful little native girl, the comedy Chinese houseboy, the wise Englishman [who] warns you what to expect, the nice young Englishman.” It sounds like
White Cargo
with a sweet instead of scoundrelly Tondelayo.
Singapore
brought forth also a mean young Englishwoman—the nice one’s wife—who takes an interest in the local sultan, tries to lose her husband through snakebite, and meets her own doom thus instead. In short, to return to W. B., the show had “all the properties that make a big hit when an Ohio River showboat comes to town on Saturday night.”

It was not only corny but messily so, because on its tryout a completely different author, Harold Woolf, had been credited. The climactic scene with the snake, a cobra, also involved a great deal of suspense and a taste of the classy New Dance laid out by Ruth St. Denis. (A few of les girls were topless, though way upstage in darkness.) “The snake,” said W. B., “was swell.”

The mystery play seemed to fare best in English hands. A West End hit by Edgar Wallace called
The Case of the Frightened Lady
came over in 1932 as
Criminal At Large
complete with shady footmen, a comic sergeant, poisoned drinks, a telltale scarf, a sleepwalker, a woman in the audience who screamed on opening night, and a program note asking the public to keep the ending secret. Emlyn Williams repeated his London role of a kind of Lord Verisopht, then finessed this into the charming psychopath in his own
Night Must Fall
(1937), a two-month disappointment here after 435 performances in London. But MGM got a hit out of it, with Robert Montgomery breaking free of his debonair merrymaker Fach in Williams’ role, Rosalind Russell as her then usual Haughty Miss, and a handful of the stage support. The movie reestablished the piece in the U.S., and it became a favorite of amateur groups looking for something twisty with which to enliven their season of
Merton of the Movies
and
The Torch-Bearers
.

If not in mystery, the American playwright’s strength lay in farce, especially in the wisecrack mode populated by eccentrics. Skipping a bit into the next decade, we note Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s
My Sister Eileen
(1940), drawn from Ruth McKenny’s
New Yorker
stories; or Joseph Kesselring’s
Arsenic and Old Lace.
These were huge successes in the new style of the really long run, 864 and 1,444 showings respectively. Earlier,
Lightnin’
and
Abie’s Irish Rose
derived their fame mainly because they played more than a season; this was very rare in the 1920s. But by the late 1930s, in the ebb of Depression, a hit routinely ran a year and a smash considerably longer.

My Sister Eileen
and
Arsenic and Old Lace
are both farces set in New York, but they delineate their fun very differently. McKenny’s eccentrics are Village bohemians: the flamboyant painter-landlord Mr. Appopolous (another dazzling tour de force for Morris Carnovsky), the out-of-season athlete known as The Wreck, the brash newspaperman trying to make the pretty sister, and also a non-Village character, the dorky manager of a drugstore.

Arsenic and Old Lace,
on the other hand, tells of genuinely crazy folk, not just scenic local types strolling around. These people are either housebound (Mortimer’s aunts, who poison friendless old men out of sympathy; Mortimer’s brother, who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt) or fugitives (Mortimer’s other brother and his partner in crime, the brother played by Boris Karloff as a kind of lively Frankenstein’s Monster). More important,
Arsenic and Old Lace
has no core of reality to it, no emotional foundation; the romance between Mortimer and a local girl is so perfunctory that the movie version had to build it up even while keeping it secondary.
My Sister Eileen,
however, gets a lot of feeling out of its two young Ohio women (Shirley Booth, Jo Ann Sayers) trying to make something of themselves in the metropolis, which is why the play translated into a classic musical,
Wonderful Town
(1953), while
Arsenic and Old Lace
has nothing to sing about. Musicals give us people with needs and plans. The only character in
Arsenic and Old Lace
with a need is the serial-killer brother, whose professional pride is mortified that his aunts have murdered as often as he: twelve times.

Nevertheless, the two shows are equally expert in finding the fun latent in their drivelines—conquering New York (to borrow a title from
Wonderful Town
) and neutralizing one’s homicidal clan. More important, the two shows
played
extremely well: because wisecrack comedy became acculturated just when the mastermind director of comedies materialized. Comedy wasn’t only funnier than it used to be; it was now composed of writing and performing in a tight unit.

Historians call this the George Abbott Style, though it may well be as much the School of George S. Kaufman. Both men moved into directing and writing (from writing only) at about the same time, and both shared a skills set based on pacing and clarity, with superb instincts about where to cut a lame quart d’heure. Oddly, both worked frequently in the musical despite tin ears and, in Abbott’s case, a lack of consistency in character development that never affected his work in the straight play.

It was Kaufman who staged
My Sister Eileen
(and Abbott, in a nice parity, who staged
Wonderful Town
), and we can get a taste of the Kaufman-Abbott mode in
My Sister Eileen
’s three act finales, each a sort of spoken musical number made of a crescendo of jests leading to a cymbal crash of a tonic close. One of
Eileen
’s running gags is the girls’ Village basement apartment itself, because of the constant blasting for a subway line and formerly the haunt of a prostitute named Violet and thus the bane of the beat cop. It is he who launches the show’s most Feydeauvien moment when he encounters The Wreck, who runs around in tank top and shorts and is obviously “a sex nut,” as the cop puts it. The two leading men interested in Eileen are also present, and as the cop gets nosy one of them tries to reason with him while the other runs into a closet—and suddenly a gigantic Cossack bursts in, carrying in his arms the limp form of … well, who else? It’s Violet, and the Cossack is the doorman of a Russian nightspot. As he deposits Violet on the bed—“She’s early tonight!” the cop notes, checking his watch—Ruth brings down the first-act curtain. Try to hear the line in that incomparable blend of smart alec and baby doll that Shirley Booth brought to her comic roles:

RUTH:
Well, for a place with a bad location and no neon sign, we’re doing a hell of a business!

The second act ends with the entire Village erupting in an epic conga line, and the third with a driller pushing up through the girls’ apartment floor: “Hey, Pete, it looks like we didn’t judge the distance right!”