All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (30 page)

The domestic play, on American family life, may have been the hardiest genre of all at this time, and it produced two titles that shattered the concept of the popular success with unprecedented eight-year runs. No two families could be less alike than the Lesters of
Tobacco Road
(1933) and the Days of
Life With Father
(1939), but then most of my readers know how unalike are the works themselves, the one a mess of sensationalism appealing to the prurient and the other a gingerbread house of quaint nostalgia.

Or so everyone assumes—and this is easy to do, as
Tobacco Road
and
Life With Father
are two more of those famous titles that we never actually experience, like
What Price Glory?
. In fact, the pair accumulated those gigantic performance tallies because they are quite capable examples of that essential thirties genre, the folk play: in which language and mores define a culture and that culture defines its subjects, who foolishly believe themselves to be living in a state of liberty.

True, no one ever thinks of
Tobacco Road
or
Life With Father
as a folk play. The form’s standard titles—
The Green Pastures
and
Green Grow the Lilacs
—reveal its assigned venues, black America and cowboyland. But aren’t
Tobacco Road
’s rednecks and
Life With Father
’s Knickerbocker WASPs “folk” in the sense of a
kind
of people different from those in the auditorium?

Certainly,
Tobacco Road
’s folk are different. They revolted the critics in exactly the way that some of Edward Albee’s characters would do in the 1960s: too much honesty too vividly presented, too many pieties blasphemed. Most often, it was the outspoken political plays, all from the left, that would rile the critics in the 1930s. But
Tobacco Road
offended in a more basic way. Its people of the Georgia back country around Augusta are so poor they’re classless, so stupid they use language less to communicate than to kill time, and so wicked they don’t know the difference between religion and sex. Brooks Atkinson claimed that the piece “reels around the stage like a drunken stranger to the theatre.” Yes—and yet. Perhaps despite himself, Atkinson had to cite as well “spasmodic moments of merciless power when truth is flung into your face with all the slime that truth contains.”

Based on Erskine Caldwell’s novel, Jack Kirkland’s plotless script quite simply sets the Lesters before us in their day to day of going hungry, as father Jeeter (Henry Hull) lazily schemes to turn a dollar out of various daffy notions and mother Ada (Margaret Wycherly, the only other established actor in the original company) humphs and nags and cultivates a soft spot for only one of their seventeen children, the unhappily married Pearl. Another daughter, the harelipped Ellie Mae, flies into giggles and rubs up against available men. A son, the callous Dude, ends up married to Sister Bessie, a preacher of no known religion. (“I generally just call it ‘Holy,’” she explains.) In case the critics hadn’t already been alienated to the utmost, Dude is a mere sixteen when Bessie takes him; she has to throw a scene in the license bureau to make it legal.

Life With Father
is also an adaptation, from Clarence Day Jr.’s
New Yorker
stories about his childhood. These were so autobiographical that after securing the rights to Day’s writing producer Oscar Serlin and his authors, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, had to sign separate agreements with Day’s widowed mother and his three brothers for the use of their characters. (Day himself, the oldest of the brood, had died in 1935.) These tales look back to an authentic nineteenth-century upbringing—not just amid horsecars and icemen but in a house at Forty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue when the location was suburban. They moved there, says mother Vinnie, “to get out of the city!”

Employing little more plot than
Tobacco Road, Life With Father
runs on two throughlines: Mother’s wish to correct an oversight in Father’s background and get him baptized, and Jr.’s courtship of a visitor from the Midwest.
6
The throughlines mirror each other, for just as Father sees men as reasonable and women as flighty, Jr.’s experience with his light of love, Mary, actually bears this out.

In fact,
Life With Father
’s worldview, unshockingly amusing when the play was new, now seems downright genderist. We are supposed to see Father as tyrannical and insensitive, true. But we are supposed to notice as well that he is generally sensible and fair, capable of warmth in emergencies, and, most important, nonconformistically ahead of his time. It turns out that it was no oversight that Father was never baptized: his freethinking parents deferred the sacrament till their offspring were grown and could accept or reject it as they chose; Father thinks it’s unneccesary, even silly. In our own age of ever wilder encroachments on democracy by religion fascists, it’s refreshing to hear someone of the 1880s treating the spiritual as a part of life for the individual to control, not be controlled by, even if we hear it in a line of comic irony:

FATHER:
Vinnie, if there’s one place the church should leave alone, it’s a man’s soul!

Father is just as independent and “modern” on biblical teaching:

FATHER:
You’d be in a pretty fix if I gave all my money to the poor.

Mother is not generally sensible. Father is dogmatic, but it’s really Vinnie who carts all the righteousness around. Third son Whitney is struggling to prepare for his catechism, and Vinnie truly believes that if he fails, Whitney will be denied his final Reward. Father knows best:

FATHER:
I’ll be there before you are, Whitney. I’ll see that you get in.

The play all but stinks of incense. Leaving Jr. alone with Mary, Vinnie tells them, “Remember, it’s Sunday”: as if these two teenagers even know how to sin in a living room.

It is Mother, ironically, who controls the family. Father only rules it, a show Windsor. Let him utter a thousand commands: it is Mother who gets her way. Opposite to her is Ada Lester back in
Tobacco Road,
because in a propertyless culture in which religion is opportunism rather than manners, there’s nothing to run, nothing at stake. In the propertied culture of the Days, there’s power in ownership: and Father owns everything but, again, Mother reigns over its disposition. She owns Father, too, so of course the play must end with Father getting baptized.

Given the two plays’ phenomenal runs—they are still Broadway’s straight-play record holders, at over 3,000 showings each—it is odd to learn that they were anything but shoo-ins.
Tobacco Road
was iffy because one could never tell when such a work might triumph on its notoriety or fail to become notorious. But
Life With Father
calls for one set and only sixteen players and is extremely enjoyable. Why did producer Serlin have the devil’s own time getting his capitalization? Why did every actor turn it down?: Walter Huston, Walter Connolly, Alfred Lunt (with Lynn, naturally, as Mother), Roland Young, John Halliday. Finally, co-author Lindsay stepped in, opposite his wife, Dorothy Stickney. Still, this play is larger than its actors, in its intimate panorama of a place where even the wholly independent man must accommodate the prevailing cautions or see his culture break apart. It’s a premise for Ibsen or Shaw, yet we find it here, in the second most taken-for-granted play in Broadway history.

Tobacco Road
is if anything smaller than its actors. Nor is it extremely enjoyable, though it is fascinating—that merciless power that Atkinson had to acknowledge. So little happens in it that the stingy little plot action in its final scene comes off as a chapter of Dickens. At that, the interesting part occurs offstage: reckless driver Dude runs over his mother in preacher Bessie’s new automobile. Dying,
Tobacco Road
’s matriarch finally commits an existential act, crawling into view to save daughter Pearl.
This
Father is planning to hand the helpless runaway over to her hideous husband; there’s a dollar or two in it, perhaps a sack of turnips. Ada is to say goodbye to Pearl, but when Jeeter drags the struggling girl near, Ada bites his hand and Pearl skedaddles. No turnips for Father. Alone on stage in the show’s last moment, he contemplates his nothing of a life as its objective correlative, a loose shingle, falls off the roof. It would raise a laugh today, but in the 1930s it was sound dramatic punctuation to three hours of the existence without content. And there the curtain fell.

Over at
Life With Father,
the final curtain dotes on the Days even while reinforcing the woman conqueror Mother. There’s certainly content in
this
existence: amid an unseen entourage of cultural controls and cautions, Mother escorts Father off to his humiliation:

FATHER:
I’m going to be baptized, damn it!

Off they go—but note a last statement of the theme of the woman in charge of the men. As Father stomps out of the house followed by the mistress of all she surveys, the curtain starts down slowly enough to allow Jr. to rush in to kneel at Mary’s feet in our last point of contact with the story. So the species will survive as this new young Mother learns in her turn the art of control; and by now the curtain is down.
7

Opening at the Masque (today the John Golden),
Tobacco Road
moved in its tenth month to the larger Forrest (today the Eugene O’Neill) to accommodate the ticketbuyer storm that lasted long after the average hit would have played its entire run.
Life With Father
was even more popular, and sold out for weeks in advance during some early portion of its six years at the Empire. Then it, too, moved, to the smaller Bijou (now demolished), to make way for Mary Chase’s dire “you can’t outwit fate” melodrama
The Next Half Hour
(1945), which lasted a week.

Our Town
did, too: in Boston. Following a reasonably successful one-night stand in Princeton, New Jersey, the piece so offended New Englanders that the wife of the governor of Massachusetts led a resistance of walkouts on opening night, and
Our Town
’s producer-director, Jed Harris, had to close down with no viable Broadway house in the offing. Desperate, Harris phoned Gilbert Miller, who was out of town with an Ina Claire comedy, Frederick Lonsdale’s
Once Is Enough
. This was to open at Miller’s own theatre, temporarily dark in waiting for Claire. Miller let Harris bring
Our Town
in for a week’s showcase, and while the critics gave it a mixed greeting, Brooks Atkinson was so partial that the Morosco, till then mysteriously unavailable, took
Our Town
for a New York total of 336 performances.

One wonders why this play so angered Boston; it is, after all, set in New England, in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. It is also set in—to quote one of its lines—“the mind of God.” Perhaps that peeved the mind of Boston, where church is an experience not of spirit but of class. Then, too,
Our Town
’s extravagantly basic presentation, with its bare stage, address of the audience, and dead men walking, was a beloved element of American theatre history only after audiences got used to it. In 1938, the plainness of the staging and the fancy ring in the writing struck some as bewildering or even irritating, cheap and grandiose at once. Why bring God into it, and why no sets? Because
Our Town
’s author, Thornton Wilder, wanted to strip away all life’s decoration to reveal what life is: which, apparently, is nothing plus God. That awesome notion is why
Our Town
is the
first
most taken-for-granted play in Broadway history.

This misapprehension mistakes the show’s simple look for a simplicity of theme. Wilder views a cross-section of small-town life to reveal people with just enough property and social culture to be free. But, says Wilder, they can’t use their freedom, because it’s such a big idea that we can’t comprehend it till we’ve lost it. Clarence Day’s Father knows what freedom is, because marriage, church, and etiquette fetter him. Jeeter Lester is too stupid to contemplate an abstraction like “freedom.” It’s worse, though, for the folk of Grover’s Corners, because they live in a useless freedom, having it without knowing they have it: they are born, they mate, and they die not out of individual lives individually created, but because He wills it so without ever explaining why.

This is a demoralizing lesson even for the believer, and may be why this classic of classics bothered some critics and theatregoers in its first years. Even the casting of the longtime favorite playwright, actor, and Boston native Frank Craven as Wilder’s Stage Manager—obviously designed to welcome us into unfamiliar theatre with an intimately familiar figure—did not avail. People who didn’t like
Our Town
didn’t just not like it. This play was hated.

Actually, Wilder himself thought Craven too folksy and gentle, very sympathetic to Grover’s Corners where Wilder had conceived of the Stage Manager as neutral, a tour guide or so. Yet it must be difficult to play the role thus, for it is written as a kind of philosopher’s pastoral, doting upon the innocence of the living and then harrowing the spectator with the news of his own death. Indeed, it may be Craven’s moist approach that protected
Our Town
when it was vulnerable, tempering Wilder’s brutal neutrality with the warmth of a sampler.

For
Our Town
is one of those rare plays that has the power to dwarf its audience, most uplifting if one doesn’t follow it closely and most appalling if one does. “They don’t understand very much, do they?” asks one of those buried in the town churchyard of another, about those still living. It’s sympathetic in a callous way: because the speaker is Emily (Martha Scott), who died young, in childbirth, and she is referring to her husband, George (Frank Craven’s real-life son John). Worse, Emily asks this question of Mrs. Gibbs—George’s mother—and
she
replies, “No, dear, not very much.” Worst, the two are more or less gazing upon the one’s son and the other’s widower, who is so stricken with grief that he has thrown himself on Emily’s grave.