All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (32 page)

The chanting by solos and groups thanks the European avant-garde, and the pattern of simple words repeated in near-hypnotic emphasis suggests Gertrude Stein. By a historical irony, this approach strays from Soviet-approved “socialist realism” into Soviet-banned “formalism,” meaning “artistic experimentation.”

Lefty
’s experimental quality lies in Odets’ re-creation of a taxi drivers’ union meeting—the very theatre itself becomes the meeting hall—as pools of light allow the actors to portray various union members. Watched by their corrupt officials, including union president Harry Fatt, the rank and file enact playlets as if on a workers’ organization’s skit night, theatre within theatre. A third level is introduced in Odets’ “Notes For Production”: he based his dramaturgy on the minstrel show, with its suite of chairs and yes-men, its merry leaders Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, its specialty acts. These Odets transformed from amiable stereotypes into individuals learning to stand up to the vicious “leaders” who betray them.

How far from
Design For Living
can one get? As
Lefty
nears its finale, Agate, a union militant exhorting the members to walk out, is threatened by Fatt and his henchmen; other drivers have to stand around Agate to protect him. And now somebody runs up the theatre aisle to explain why the faithful Lefty isn’t present: he has been murdered. “Christ, cut us up to little pieces!” Agate cries. “We’ll die for what is right! put fruit trees where our ashes are!”

Then he turns to the rest of the workers—to
us
—and asks, “Well, what’s the answer?” And audiences of 1935 shouted “
Strike! Strike! Strike!
” right along with the players.

Odets released
Waiting For Lefty
nationally for free use by amateur groups and low fees to others, and it swept the land, winning prizes and getting banned from Boston to Los Angeles. Odets was famous in that overnight way that happens in America, and of course now
Awake and Sing!
was eminently produceable. But note that
Awake and Sing!
not only was written before
Waiting For Lefty,
but does not follow upon the belligerent and sloganizing
Lefty
stylistically. Having given agitprop its masterpiece, Odets now wanted to devote himself to “literary” theatre.

However, the hard left saw the political stage as its property. Though
Waiting For Lefty
treats workers fed up with not Amerika but their own corrupt oligarchs, Odets had become the most apparent of the young leftist playwrights, like his fellows to be sternly monitored by Party honchos and their avid stooges, such as the
Daily Worker
’s theatre critics. What they wanted was more good-versus-evil sagas, more villains like Harry Fatt, not to mention those gleeful capitalist enablers Cole Porter and the Lunts.

But the best writers don’t get told how to write; hacks do. Hacks enjoy following directions; it makes everything so much easier. Anyway, Stalin doesn’t like surprises. Is it possible that John Howard Lawson abandoned Broadway not for Hollywood’s financial security but because in New York he felt torn between Party obedience and the wish to create the unusual? Writing movie scripts cleared his mind of the conflict, though he ended as one of the Hollywood Ten all the same.

Odets had no such conflict. As soon as the Party tried to commandeer his art, he—as they liked to put it then—”drifted away.” And he drew further yet from Party theatre in
Golden Boy,
a modern tragedy in classic proportions and politically almost useless: the rise and fall of a young man cursed with fathers. It sounds sappy, like a B movie: Joe Bonaparte can be a violinist or a boxer—that is, he can use his hands for art or war. Still undecided, he breaks his hand in the ring, and opts for war. Then he takes his manager’s lover for his own, accidentally kills an opponent, then rides off in his gala new automobile with the lover and murders them both in a crash.

Of course, the Odetsian idiom of, here, immigrants and the rough crowd of the boxing racket distinguishes
Golden Boy
beyond the confines of its plot. But note that this time Odets actually constructs one, ever more tightly wound up against itself over the course of sixteen months in twelve scenes as Joe trades his natural father (music) for, first, a manager father (boxing) and then an eerie gun-toting promoter father (crime). And the eerie promoter, Eddie Fuseli, is Broadway’s only gay character in the whole Depression who isn’t a friend of Noël Coward; and the manager’s lover, Lorna Moon, is one of the decade’s most interesting heroines. Uneducated but intelligent, nurturing as well as tough, she transcends type. It’s Barbara Stanwyck, isn’t it? (And Stanwyck played the role in the film version.) A typical moment:

EDDIE:
(To Joe’s manager, of Lorna) This your girl?

LORNA:
I’m my mother’s girl.

Odets directs her to deliver the line “pertly,” but that can’t be right. Lorna isn’t “impudent” or “saucy”: she’s informing a man that women aren’t men’s possessions. (Stanwyck speaks the words in a “you aren’t worth loathing” drawl.) In a way, all of
Golden Boy
is about the taking and giving of souls, and, being the only sensitive soul in the collection, Joe dooms himself ever more strongly with each personal transaction. No wonder the Party could not make use of Odets: he saw too rich a world to reduce it to stick-figure harangues.

Those willing to work in cartoon drama usually attached themselves to the hard-left theatre collectives that sprang up in the 1930s, though their low profile and limited audience made them little more than aggrandized skit nights. Indeed, a typical organization, the Workers Lab Theatre, made its name entirely on producing the most famous version of
Newsboy,
the very essence of the word “skit.”

The most prominent of the collectives was the Theatre Union, founded by an amateur, Charles R. Walker, in 1932. The plan was to graduate agitprop from
Newsboy
and its fellows to full-length plays in a Broadway-sized house, with tickets priced to accommodate a proletarian clientele. George Sklar and Albert Maltz, the authors of
Merry-Go-Round,
gave the Theatre Union its opening work,
Peace on Earth,
in 1933. It played the Civic Repertory Theatre, and when the company “put in” it found sets and costumes left over from Eva Le Gallienne’s last season. After that head start, however, there was nothing but bad press till the Union gave up in 1937, though it did enjoy a semi-hit in Sklar and Paul Peters’
Stevedore
(1934). Here was a piece of pure socialist realism, presenting the problem (white racism, on the docks of New Orleans, where a union agitator is singled out by the money bosses for a lynching) and the solution (whites and blacks unite against the System). Though the protagonist (Jack Carter, the original Crown in the Heywards’ play
Porgy
) is killed even so, the working class has discovered a heroic if implausible color-blind bond.

There was a small but eager public for this genre of blunt melodrama, even now when the economy had so dissolved that a balcony ticket meant skipping a meal. But there was no public as yet for the primary author of twentieth-century leftist theatre when the Union programmed Bertolt Brecht’s
Mother,
in 1935. Actually, Brecht entitled it
The Mother
(
Die Mutter
) on its Berlin premiere, in 1932, one year before Brecht, Weill, Lenya, Lang, Mann, Grosz, and the rest of the jazzband had to run for cover. Why Paul Peters’ translation deleted the article is anyone’s guess, for the noun by itself is meaningless. Brecht wrote a parable, universal and symbolic, about
the
apolitical mother of
the
political son. When the son is killed by the police, she is inspired to take up
the
revolutionary banner. The tale of
the
Mother.

It was not only the public but the Theatre Union itself that was unprepared for Brecht, because unlike the others named above, who were still in Europe, Brecht had got to America. He stank of bad hygiene, screamed at the slightest thwarting of his ego drive, and—surely to his hosts’ bemusement—dressed in a uniform of worker’s drag
tailored in leather and silk
. Though Brecht did everything he could to sabotage the production (as he always did when someone else was directing),
Mother
opened and ran a month, not a bad stay for a piece that is at once dreary and hysterical.

The Theatre Union’s use of Le Gallienne’s place recalls to us the matter of a national theatre, so often discussed at the time. It sounds prestigious, but a national theatre is simply a grandiose version of the nineteenth-century stock company, based on a permanent ensemble in rotating repertory: Monday’s Hamlet plays
Peer Gynt
’s Button Moulder on Tuesday (perhaps completely nude but for a white bedsheet held about himself), defies Fach as a bravely miscast Sir Lucius O’Trigger on Wednesday, goes Albee on Thursday, pastels into one of Anouilh’s
pièces roses
on Friday, tries Laërtes on Saturday, and so on.

I’m glad he’s having fun, but some ticketbuyers find it frustrating to need to consult a schedule to see a play. Yes, yes, it isn’t
that
hard—but, really, isn’t repertory prestigious simply because it’s so difficult for us to get it right? It works in Europe, where tradition makes perfect: the civic
nomyenklatura
held court in the local theatre, and it wouldn’t sit still for the same program night after night. Europeans have had a lot of practice in National Theatre; the Comédie-Française has been playing for 325 years.

Repertory is expensive. Who pays for it? The first time it was tried, rich people supported it—the aforementioned New Theatre. The second time, Eva Le Gallienne struggled with her Civic Repertory Theatre for six seasons before folding it. As we know, she was to try and try again—literally, with two more tries—but our third national theatre is what concerns us here.

This one lasted four seasons, from 1935 to 1939. Taxpayers supported it, and where the New had tone and the Civic dedication, this national theatre put on anything: classics and new work; experimental shows and ancient melodrama; musicals; puppet shows; shows in languages recent immigrants spoke; Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan fiddled and straight; the simultaneous opening in twenty-one cities of an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ vision of a fascist America,
It Can’t Happen Here;
propaganda for the youngsters on a Marxist uprising in Beaverland,
Revolt of the Beavers;
Orson Welles unleashed; T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral;
“dance dramas” based on
Candide
and
The Trojan Women
(with Helen Tamiris as Cassandra and music by Wallingford Riegger); revivals of everything from
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
to
Processional;
and a hit children’s musical based on
Pinocchio
. President Roosevelt ran three relief programs—for writers, for painters and sculptors, and this one: the Federal Theatre Project.

The program’s virtues are obvious: if hard times contract the theatre industry, it might not spring back to its former size later, because veterans will have found other work and potential newcomers will have been shy of the risk. Then, too, throwing literally every imaginable kind of theatre at the population all over the place at universally low prices might actually expand theatregoing, thus enriching the culture. As well, the Federal Theatre naturally created some “Negro Units,” which guaranteed a steady wage in the precarious employment schedule of the black performer—and, lo, Federal Theatre audiences were racially desegregated, a rare occurrence at the time.

So who would be against the Federal Theatre, besides the customary anti-intellectual politicians, who loathe all arts as tending to promote independent thought? Oddly, there was deeply felt (though largely unspoken) resentment among theatre pros, who had to soldier on in a Depression without governmental subsidy while, in New York for instance, the Craig, the Ritz, and Maxine Elliott’s Theatre
1
were handed over to … well, freeloaders. Still, the Federal Theatre’s chief, Hallie Flanagan, thought she had the job of the century: making every kind of theatre possible on a heretofore unthinkable scale, even inventing new kinds of theatre with which to invent a new audience.

Alas, Flanagan’s job really consisted of a constant diplomatic shuttle between D.C. and the controversies invented in the project’s very center, the New York chapter. It was a fight a day, not least because of the Living Newspaper, epic-theatre documentaries put together as journalism is: by editors, writers, and fact-checkers. The Living Newspaper was like a revue without music, a guided tour in the form of a harangue,
Waiting For Lefty
as a science project. It drew on a broad miscellany of theatre forms from monologue to mime, now recalling the intensity of the workers’ skits and now the grandeur of Elizabethan chronicle plays. It was a genre of data and passion: how was one to know fact from opinion in such entries as
Ethiopia
(1936), on Italy’s African invasion, cancelled before the opening at the State Department’s insistence, which led directly to the resignation of Elmer Rice, head of the New York Unit? No less confusing was
1935
(1936), looking back on the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, Dutch Schultz, Barbara Hutton, Huey Long, and the rest of the American crime-and-show-biz grab bag; and
Injunction Granted
(1936), on the bosses’ war on unions; and
Spirochete
(1938), on medicine’s war on venereal disease; and
“… one-third of a Nation…”
(1938), on the housing crisis, the title quoting one of the President’s fireside chats on radio.

The Living Newspaper’s mass authorship was a novelty, and while established names toiled away as before on their Broadway, the Living Newspaper’s credits were introductions. Who were director H. Gordon Graham, designer Hjalmar Hermanson, composer Lee Wainer? Unfortunately, as many in D.C. saw it, the Living Newspaper’s true authors were éminences grises: Stalin was the editor, Brecht the writer, and La Pasionaria the fact-checker. However stridently so, the Living Newspaper actually favored FDR’s policies—but that was issue enough for Washington Republicans; and it was an open secret that the typical liberal indulgence of Communists had allowed the Federal Theatre generally to swell with them. Flanagan simply would not keep a clean house.