All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (35 page)

I have emphasized
1931—,
Men in White,
and
Johnny Johnson,
but the Group was so consistent in its beliefs that any of its entries is definitive. For instance, the bluntly titled
Case of Clyde Griffiths
(1936), from
An American Tragedy,
would appeal to the Group both for its social commentary and its experimentalist challenge. Dreiser’s story had already been staged (1926) and filmed (in 1931), but the Group’s version adopted the style of the ancient Greeks. Alexander Kirkland again played the lead, here as the boy who feels he must murder for success, and the technical challenge must have invigorated the troupe, as Morris Carnovsky took the role of Greek chorus and the Group stock company (including Kazan, Garfield, and Luther Adler) wound up avidly submerged in panorama. The adaptation was by Erwin Piscator (and his translator, Lena Goldschmidt), a towering figure in the experimental stage of Weimar Berlin, as of course was
Johnny Johnson
’s Kurt Weill.

Yet few think of the Group as sustaining links with experimental theatre, with the art of spectacle. Politics and the congested battles of affective memories sound the Group’s echo today. Robert Lewis complained of the Group’s failure to taste of “music, color, rhythm, movement—all those
other
things in the theatre besides psychology.” When the Group finally gave Lewis a chance to direct, however, it was one of the most
other
things imaginable, William Saroyan’s indescribable
My Heart’s in the Highlands
(1939). “The neatest surrealist crossword puzzle of the season,” Robert Coleman called it. Unfortunately, the Group turned down Saroyan’s one semi-classic,
The Time Of Your Life
(1939), which Lewis also directed—at first—but for the Theatre Guild.

The Time Of Your Life
is not as other as
My Heart’s in the Highlands,
and can even be described: in a saloon where eccentrics cut capers, a wild frontiersman—he is actually called Kit Carson—murders the cop who threatens everyone’s freedom. However, unlike our anti-fascist plays of 1939,
The Time Of Your Life
has a disconnected, otherworldly quality that soothes its own propaganda, bemusing some while offending others.

Indeed, the show’s New Haven premiere was a disaster. Lewis had tried to give
The Time Of Your Life
a Group presentation, not least in the stylized setting of Boris Aronson, a Group regular since
Awake and Sing!
. One of the rare designers who function as dramatists, Aronson gave
Awake and Sing!
sheer naturalism, from the wan tchottchkes to a central window that gave on a brick wall: a place full of life and short on fun.

But
The Time Of Your Life,
like all Saroyan, is a kind of dream, and Aronson gave its saloon a hallucinatory quality, as much a crazy living room as a bar. Saroyan hated it. He hated the Group, too—“a school of theatre,” he said, that could be described as “Hysterical Left-Wing.” Saroyan himself took over the direction of
The Time Of Your Life
(with lead actor and co-producer Eddie Dowling) in a new and firmly realistic set by Broadway regular (if onetime Group designer) Watson Barrat. Two minor players were replaced as well, by Gene Kelly and Celeste Holm, and
The Time Of Your Life
was a hit.

Does this rebuke the Group style?
The Time Of Your Life
was right up the Guild’s alley because, once again, the Guild would put on anything “arty.” The Group, so much more focused in its job description, nevertheless selected its plays more widely than is generally thought. It was Clurman alone who was selecting, however, because by 1937 both Crawford and Strasberg had resigned. The divorce was hostile, less to Clurman than to the actors, who had time and again challenged the triumvirate—on politics, on the choice of plays, on the hierarchy of talent among the actors that was bound to emerge even in a cooperative, and mainly because theatre is made by clowns throwing tantrums.

So in 1940 the Group ceased production; it was all over but the influence. “I don’t intend to be ashamed of my life!,” a line from
Golden Boy,
seems almost to warn the next generation of thespians away from … what? Too much
My Sister Eileen
or
Waterloo Bridge,
but also away from the ism theatre of professional scolds? If the Group’s artistic adventurism is forgot, so, often, is its humanistic view of theatre based on character rather than on agenda.
Johnny Johnson,
though pacifist in social “tilt,” is not about pacifism. It’s about this guy.

It took the 1930s to create a Group Theatre. The organization would have been impossible earlier not only for its emphasis on working-class reality but—however ironic this may seem—for the power of its actors. Imagine if the climactic scene of
Merton of the Movies,
when the hero falls to pieces in shame at the feet of his light of love, had been played, in 1922, with the chthonic world-scream that Strasberg would have pulled out of a Group performer. (Affective memory: go back to when you were four and helpless, and someone shot your pet fawn, Scamper.) The result would not have enlightened but shattered
Merton
’s audience: most theatregoers like innovation only after they’re used to it.

There were actors with this power in the 1920s, but just among the stars. So Broadway could appreciate John Barrymore in
The Jest
or
Hamlet,
but not a stageful of powerful actors that Broadway hadn’t heard of. The 1930s and the Group taught Broadway how the Group needed to perform—but also what the Group needed from
writers
. This explains why, when the theatre-struck David Merrick first met Arthur Miller in the company of Mrs. Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Merrick kept staring helplessly. Not at Monroe: at Miller. Because Arthur Miller was a playwright in the Group tradition, and Miller didn’t intend to be ashamed of his life.

Harold Clurman went on to become a freelance director and all-around theatrical guru. Cheryl Crawford, we know, set forth on her exhibition of the good, the bad, and the closed in Boston. As well, she joined with Kazan and Lewis in founding the Actors Studio—an offshoot of the Group, you notice, just as the Group, in a different way, was an offshoot of the Theatre Guild. Lee Strasberg came along soon enough, and thus his Method became institutionalized, useful to actors even when not preparing a role for production. We are not here to rehearse your play. It’s another of the Group’s achievements, really: the expansion of the profession of actor from entertainer to student.

Despite some very intense resentments in the Group’s final years, most of the communicants came to realize that they had in fact shared the time of their lives, and this promoted great loyalties in a way that the Theatre Guild never did. When producer Herman Levin was looking for a director for
My Fair Lady,
his authors, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, recommended Robert Lewis because their mutual experience on
Brigadoon
had been so happy. Lewis turned Levin down, because he had already agreed to direct Crawford’s production of
Mister Johnson,
going up exactly when
My Fair Lady
was to go up.

He turned down
My Fair Lady
! Lewis was a gent, and his word was contract. But isn’t there also a feeling in this tale that Lewis and Crawford were pursuing Group ideals in
Mister Johnson
? Norman Rosten’s adaptation of Joyce Cary’s novel, it tells of a young African (Earle Hyman) who is destroyed by the white colonial culture that he admires. It was exactly the kind of thing the Group might have done; how could Lewis have refused? He was so involved with the project that he was listed as co-producer. His very being lay in this show, because the Group was our national theatre. So Moss Hart directed
My Fair Lady
and Robert Lewis directed
Mister Johnson,
which ran for 44 performances.

Nine

Woman and Man:

SUSAN AND GOD
AND
THE ICEMAN COMETH

Among Broadway’s women dramatists of the Golden Age, Lillian Hellman enjoyed the most successful career and is the only one to remain prominent after death. In fact, Hellman’s fame depends less on playwrighting than on escapades—her love affair, her defiance, her lawsuit. Of other women writers, we have met Zoë Akins, Zona Gale, Anita Loos, Michael Strange, Sophie Treadwell, and a few others less well known. The most important of all now joins us: Rachel Crothers, a genuine trailblazer. Hellman excelled in forms others were already working in; Crothers created a form. Hers was the
pièce à thèse
disguised as boulevard comedy, and she may have been the first famous American to be called a “radical feminist,” decades before the term became current.

Like so many “radicals,” Crothers was simply an original. A midwesterner, born in 1878, she made it to Broadway at twenty-one when teaching at the Stanhope-Wheatcroft Drama School, in a special performance of Crother one-acts by her students at the Madison Square Theatre. Her official Broadway debut occurred in 1906, with a hit called
The Three Of Us,
and already Crothers had laid out the pattern she was to follow with little variation for over thirty years: a contemporary setting (one act takes us to a Nevada mining camp), a vivacious heroine more able than men (in this case her two brothers) to conquer adversaries, a popular rather than arty star in that role (favoring for instance Maxine Elliott, Estelle Winwood, and, as we’ll see, Gertrude Lawrence), and a critical eye on how American culture views the two genders.

Carlotta Nilsson was the star of
The Three Of Us
in New York; in London a year later, Ethel Barrymore claimed the part and Crothers herself staged the show. Of course, dramatists frequently served as their own directors—but not the women. Crothers was original also in her acting ability, although she played in emergencies only. During the tryout of
He and She,
in 1920, its star, Viola Allen, expressed unhappiness with her part and left, so Crothers took over the role and led the company to Broadway.

Note that title. Originating as
The Herfords
in 1920, when it closed on the road,
He and She,
the unsuccessful revision, points up the salient Crothers theme, that the sexes are not equal and are never going to be. This, she says, is partly because of the male’s fear of competition, but mainly because the female is biologically destined to keep society whole through the sacrifice of her egotism. That is, it is not a male-centered culture that limits women but women themselves, because of a bloodstream cocktail of compassion, pacifism, and nesting instincts.

Thus, the Herfords of
He and She
are sculptors whose marriage is threatened when she wins a competition that both have entered and he goes bad sport on her. In the end, Mrs. Herford must turn meek and self-effacing to avoid a dangerous tipping point in her life. As
Theatre
magazine commented, “a woman of genius [should be able] to follow that genius; but … the genius of most women lies at home.”

So Crothers may let today’s feminists down; and theatre historians regret a sentimental streak in her writing. But Crothers truly was tackling difficult issues. When
He and She
was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 1980, the mixed reviews included
Variety
’s observation that some of the play was “as strong as anything in Ibsen.” Perhaps Crothers’ greatest quality was her complete lack of interest in the places and things of her day, those list songs of shops, products, and people that date so many old scripts. Crothers listed ideas. In the
New York Post,
Marilyn Stasio called 1980’s
He and She
a “brand-new feminist play that happens to be seventy years old.” And consider this: “Entire lines from this play,” Stasio went on, “are probably being spoken at this very moment at Weight Watchers meetings, in the dressing rooms in Bloomie’s, in the checkout lines at Zabar’s.”

Besides her central gender issue, Crothers also looked at the generation divide, especially among women.
Mary the Third
(1923) got by with the uncelebrated Louise Huff in what should have been a star’s parade as Mary, her daughter, and
her
daughter, one after the other. (Later, when Crothers cuts to the present day, Huff maintained the title role while different actresses portrayed her elders. It wrecks the stunt.) Ever daring in her unimposing way, Crothers questioned the very concept of marriage, as Mary the Third decides to try the flapper’s virtual reality by living in sin with her fiancé. Her seniors are scandalized—and what did Crothers’ public think?

Yet Crothers commanded such respect that when five of the top playwrights were asked to speak at the University of Pennsylvania, Crothers was one of them, and another was Eugene O’Neill. This is prestigious billing and Broadway in a nutshell, for as Hollywood took over the theatre’s trade in the various gadget genres such as the crook and prizefighter play, what remained was O’Neill and Crothers. Highbrow and midcult.

Thus, these two writers are nearly precise opposites. A rapt visionary nourishing his own doom, O’Neill was the Great Man but not the great man of the theatre. At Provincetown, making a gesture toward communitas, he acted a tiny bit and helped on the tech, but by the time he got to Broadway he was a dramatist only. Crothers, we know, directed and (when necessary) acted: a trouper. O’Neill devoted his output almost entirely to idealistic managements, moving from the Provincetowners to the Theatre Guild with a handful of commercial producers along the way. Crothers wrote for the Shuberts, Sam H. Harris, and such. O’Neill’s form was tragedy, with side excursions. Crothers wrote comedy. O’Neill preferred the relatively recent past for his settings. Crothers liked nowadays. O’Neill wrote autobiographically. Crothers guarded her privacy. Most important, O’Neill wrapped himself in myth and eternal verities, while Crothers invaded faddish situations to analyze the culture of the everyday. She taught us how to live. He taught us how to die.