All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (36 page)

We see all this at work in two titles written in the late 1930s, her
Susan and God
and his
The Iceman Cometh
. Characteristically, Crothers wrote hers for immediate production, while O’Neill wanted his held back till the war was over. Of course: she was creating out of what was in the air at the moment, while he busied himself with the long view.
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Indeed,
Susan and God
is made of a Big Idea in chitchat form—the Oxford Movement, as it was called, in which God becomes a kind of pal and faith consists of confessing everything to one’s friends. Susan is an American who has fallen under the spell of a Lady Wiggam—one of the cult leaders, one might say—who runs a sort of Sinners Anonymous at her country house in Kent. “It’s
thrilling
and
alive
and
fun,
” Susan declares. Taking up the cause, she wants to convert her set while neglecting her alcoholic husband and attention-starved daughter. In short, Susan is one of those people who can diagnose every personality problem except her own, all the while stirring up her own combination of maddening and enchanting. “The most intelligent
fool
I’ve ever known” is how one of her friends puts it. That certainly sounds like Gertrude Lawrence to me; and Crothers cast Osgood Perkins as her husband and sixteen-year-old Nancy Kelly as their daughter. During
Susan and God
’s tryout, Perkins died of a heart attack, and his understudy, Paul McGrath, went on while a replacement was sought, for while Lawrence was the production’s sole headliner, Broadway etiquette demanded that her immediate male support be of some stature. In the end, McGrath excelled himself, and opened the show in New York.

Conservative in her formatting, Crothers would naturally give Lawrence a star entrance. But Susan herself needs one, as the cynosure of her coterie and the sort of person—we all know a few—who tinkles in and out of gatherings uttering … well, lines. “You darlings!” Lawrence calls out, offstage. “You darlings! You darlings!” And there she is, arms flung wide to friends and public alike in, as Crothers specifies, “a new Paris creation.”
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It is when Susan begins to share her newfound spiritual mania that we realize how much Crothers is our contemporary. As Susan tells her friends of an encounter with one of Lady Wiggam’s servants, who had decided to shoot his wife, Susan relates how the gun failed to go off. Sounding like one of our modern zealots who refuse to utter a sentence without some evangelical propaganda somewhere in it, Susan says, “He knew it was the hand of God that stopped him.”

Of course, Susan being Susan, she lacks the vacuous commitment that marks present-day Pentecostal America. On the contrary, Susan combines the excitement of the collector of enthusiasms with the attention span of a television host—as witness Lawrence’s first exit, a tiny sermonette on how Susan’s latest craze will prove just the cure for “this awful emptiness.” Indeed, “it is the only thing in the world that will stop war.” Then, without skipping a beat, Susan tells her pal Irene as they pass through a doorway, “I’ve brought you the most ravishing panties.”

Can Susan be cured? is Crothers’ question. Can she be Saved: from taking up God as one samples canasta? Bless her heart, Crothers doesn’t pretend to know. She has a feeling that the meliorators of this world are as much a problem as a solution, so the playwright deliberately neglects the Big Idea and concentrates on her heroine—fleshing out the question, so to say.

O’Neill, on the other hand, sometimes creates characters out of generalities.
The Iceman Cometh
is peopled partly with types—the self-hating anarchist who Left the Movement and never stops talking about it; the Boer War veterans who are placeless in peacetime; the black obsessed with white racism. But then, part of O’Neill’s power lies in this very flaw: never will he “naturalize” his drama by cutting a Big Idea down to human size. He revels in grandeur. How many times, in
The Iceman Cometh,
does a character refer to “pipe dreams”—
this
play’s Big Idea, meaning the illusions about oneself that help the loser to survive. Crothers never errs so; she is a master of balance. Then, too, Crothers trusted her public while O’Neill thought his simple and distracted. Yet those “pipe dream” repetitions soon become risible; and there’s a fault in diction as well. It’s too pat a phrase for a concept that few comprehend, much less bother to name.

However, if we set
Susan and God
and
The Iceman Cometh
next to each other, we notice that the two treat the same theme: man’s desperate need to scare away “this awful emptiness” with “pipe dreams.” Crothers’ Susan and O’Neill’s Hickey, the two protagonists, both think they know what’s good for everyone else, and both are at least as troubled as those they would help.

Beyond that, the plays have nothing in common. Crothers is central Broadway; so is O’Neill. But Crothers tailored her plays—to stars, to business as usual, to a public willing to be challenged
to a certain extent
. O’Neill wrote for himself, which is why Crothers has vanished and O’Neill is more popular than ever: we’re still trying to catch up to him.

Consider the first moments of contact between play and spectator. Crothers draws her curtain up on a familiar place, the terrace of a country house in summer. This one happens to be glass-enclosed, but it’s essentially an upper-middle-class leisure place with a grand piano, and those in the audience who didn’t have their own patios had seen plenty in plays like
Susan and God
. Populating the scene are couples returning from seasonal activity—horseback riding and tennis. It’s real life among the well-to-do.

O’Neill takes us to a barroom in a slum, the tables occupied by sleeping drunks and one conscious drunk, Larry Slade (the aforementioned self-hating anarchist). The men apparently live in the bar, their existence centered on maintaining a place in the alcoholic’s nirvana; and Slade is O’Neill’s spokesman. Known generally as “the old Foolosopher,” he is articulate and cynical, a very O’Neillian type—the Jason Robards role, though, as we’ll see, Robards’
Iceman
experience led him to a very different part. The saloon is the property of Harry Hope, a God of giving, for it is Hope’s booze that keeps these men alive. They dwell in a haze, literally a stupor but in effect a mess of dreams, the pipe dreams that we keep hearing of. But note that Slade sees Hope’s den as being
without
hope:

SLADE:
It’s the No Chance Saloon. It’s Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Café, The Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller! Don’t you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? That’s because it’s the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go.

Alcoholism is a supremely dreary subject, but
The Iceman Cometh
isn’t about drinking. The liquor that opens up the dream is a metaphor for success without achievement; or the phony denial of failure; or the sleep that is a rehearsal for death. It’s The End of the Line Café, all right. However, like another remarkable work of American theatre, the Stephen Sondheim musical
Follies, The Iceman Cometh
is not to be taken literally, even though—unlike
Follies
—it is absolutely naturalistic in its action. Also unlike
Follies,
it tells of people with no future where
Follies
is concerned with people with too much past.

There is as well the conjuring up of
Follies
out of the myths of show-biz America; O’Neill seems to have used
his
play as an autobiographical exorcism of some personal demons. There really was a Harry Hope’s, called Jimmy the Priest’s—note, again, the association of the saloonkeeper with a religious vocation, the “hope” of salvation or simply death. Like Hope’s place, Jimmy the Priest’s was a tenement rooming house with a bar on the ground floor, an entire world contained within a single room of comrades, prostitutes, and drink.

Amusingly, O’Neill gives his lead a star entrance, too. Like Crothers, he primes the pump with remarks
about
his hero before he appears, but in much grander tempo. Hickey’s first line—”Hello, Gang!”—doesn’t occur till page 76 of the printed text (of 260 pages), nearly one-third of the running time of a very long evening. Not that O’Neill believed that length was a proof of quality: but quality did mean richness of observation, development of throughlines, and skillful use of echo texture. Dudley Nichols, an O’Neill intimate, recorded that O’Neill feared that the skittery bits of media ambience—in radio spots, “capsule news and a nervous brevity in everything we do,” in Nichols’ words—made it all but impossible for theatregoers to accommodate the
largo
delineations of O’Neill’s Big Idea plays. Nichols particularly adduced Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat plugs and exposés to this diagnosis of attention deficit. And of course Winchell’s was the voice of Broadway. Was it entirely coincidental that O’Neill’s first whopper,
Strange Interlude,
came along in 1928, a few years after Winchell had conclusively imprinted his style upon the “word” that O’Neill lived in?

Pursuing our comparison of O’Neill and Crothers, let us consider titles.
Susan and God
sounds, all at once, like a worry (could Susan be partly right?), a sarcasm (and Susan gets top billing), and a hit.
The Iceman Cometh
is another of those poetic O’Neill titles, though this one carries some baggage. Do you know the old joke? Clancy calls up from the street to his wife on the fourth floor, “Did the iceman come yet?” “No,” says the missus, “but he’s just now reached the shoutin’ stage.” Literally, the title refers to Hickey’s wife’s infidelity. Symbolically, we look to Matthew, chapter 25, the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Verse 6 includes “Behold, the bridegroom cometh,” and verse 19 “The lord of those servants cometh,” and we ultimately learn who will get into “life eternal” (the generous) and who into “everlasting punishment” (the selfish). True enough, Harry Hope’s is a kind of antechamber of Judgment; as Slade says, “there is no farther they can go”—in this life.
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Drink postpones Judgment—but Hickey interferes with this Gorkyan lotus eating by making each of Hope’s crew face up to and conquer his unique delusion. His pipe dream. To what end? Like Rachel Crothers’ Susan, Hickey is the problem, not the solution. Following along with Matthew, Hickey is the bridegroom (albeit one who kills his wife) and Harry Hope is the lord of those servants. As the Parable of the Ten Virgins was well known in the America of O’Neill’s youth, there does seem to be some connection between play and parable. The now irascible, now jesting Hope makes an interesting God, but, moving into heathen mythology, Hickey is a kind of Prometheus: he offends God with arrogance.

So does Susan, of course, but a comparison of final scenes reminds us how much separates Crothers from O’Neill. The tidy
Susan and God
confronts Susan with
her
arrogance, allowing the audience to forgive her when she starts forgiving everyone else, starting with her husband. The two are alone in her room at that country house, moving toward reconciliation till we hear a line that unmistakably warns the stagehands to prepare for the final curtain and the calls:

SUSAN:
I want to be so much more to you than I’ve ever been before. Please let me try again.

She goes to him, begging for an embrace and getting one, to our approval. Now the last line, with the merest hint that Susan fears that her busybodying days are not entirely over:

SUSAN:
Oh,
dear
God—don’t let me fall down again.

It’s a satisfying conclusion in the “well-made” play sense, but also in Crothers’ giving her star a provocative yet oddly conclusive last word. Still, that last scene is not star flattery but realistic character writing for a dysfunctional but not unloving marriage. And one Big Idea that Crothers is willing to tackle is God. He is not “something out there … to pray to,” Susan finally realizes, like some “faith-based” fashion accessory. God is a mystery, indefinable and unknowable, and like L. Frank Baum’s Oz He appears differently to each one who regards Him.

He was electricity to O’Neill (at least in
Dynamo
). However, it is not God but Man whom O’Neill regards here, and with all his themes and throughlines to put in order, and his opposition of Hickey and Hope to conclude,
The Iceman Cometh
takes its entire fourth act to do what Crothers does in five minutes. The spine of this act is The Long Speech, Hickey’s account of
his
truth, the evaporation of his own pipe dream after he has tried to dispel everyone else’s.

The Long Speech is a play in itself, for though most theatregoers recall it as a monologue, it is constantly hectored by outbursts from others on stage.
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The entire cast is on hand, including two characters used in this act alone whose entrance O’Neill deliberately does not specify. The stage directions state only when they “come quietly forward.” Moran and Lieb by name, they “look ordinary in every way, without anything distinctive to indicate what they do for a living.” They are police detectives, here to witness Hickey’s confession and arrest him. Dei ex machina, these faceless men free the residents of a place called Hope—and you in the audience—to live again. In your dreams.

O’Neill of course has yet more to close down before dropping his curtain. Even after Hickey is taken away, fifteen pages of text must be heard, with supporting lead roles to top off, one plotline to conclude, and something to fix all the play’s thematic content for us—a fade-out close-up on some essential view of this palace of lying bliss. The plotline’s conclusion is perhaps the most macabre moment in all O’Neill: the suicide of a young man, in expiation of his sin of ratting on his mother, a stalwart of the Movement. This is Don Parritt, the work’s sole part (of sixteen for men) that can be cast with a
jeune premier
. (The young Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges have each had a go at him.) What makes Parritt’s end so spooky is that Larry Slade briefly departs from his emcee’s activity sheet to await with angry eagerness Parritt’s jump to his death from the top of the building: