All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (40 page)

A witch boy from the mountain came

A-pinin’ to be human.

For he had seen the fairest gal,

The blue-eyed Barbara Allen.

With a setting in the Great Smoky Mountains, characters from the spirit and human worlds, a free use of folk song, incidental music, and dance,
Dark of the Moon
was rich in atmosphere, helped by the vernacular succotash of the script, as when the witch boy tells the Conjur Woman of his first meeting with Barbara:

JOHN:
I were on my eagle, and I sailed low fer to see her. She look up kinda skeered like, but then she smiled and waved.

As all the fantasies tell, marrying out of your species never works out. There’s a catch to the union of John and Barbara: she must remain faithful to him for a year, or he goes back to witchland and she dies the death. So far, so good. But when Barbara gives birth to a witch child, the neighbors kill it and drag her—on the last day of her trial year—to a prayer meeting at which she is raped. The spell broken, John leaps back onto his eagle and Barbara dies.

In a reversal of the usual procedure, the tryout stops saw a more blatantly erotic piece than New York did, with the rape scene presented with daring clarity. As it was, the critics all agreed that the staging had tone but the work was a little empty. It had in fact been rejected by every New York producer till it had a successful little run at the Brattle Hall Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Richard Hart and Carol Stone in the leads. Hart was unknown, but his co-star was one of Fred Stone’s daughters at a time when Stone and his family were royalty. The show even got a spread in
Life
magazine, which guaranteed the New York staging, by the Messrs. Shubert, at the 46th Street Theatre (today the Richard Rodgers).

This was a plum booking, especially given the wartime playhouse crunch. At 320 performances,
Dark of the Moon
proved a big hit after all, and the title remained famous, though the show was seldom seen. It turned up in New York in 1970, during that odd period just after the Stonewall Riots when, for two or three seasons, a lot of little shows appeared—mostly but not entirely on off-Broadway—whose defining feature was gratuitous nudity. A folk play might seem an odd choice, but the original had included a dance sequence for the witch boy and some witch girls, so here was an opportunity, especially with the addition of a few extra witch boys.
After Dark
fave Chandler Hill and Margaret Howell played the leads, and Rue McClanahan appeared as one of the folk.

That old question of a national theatre got yet another answer—of a sort—on West Fifty-fifth Street in 1943. Mecca Temple, built in 1924 for the Masons, was seized by the city in lieu of unpaid taxes and, on order from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was reinvested as a municipal auditorium, the City Center. Seating nearly three thousand, the house was really too big for anything but opera. No matter: it was there and it was available, and a “popular-priced” ticket scale allowed capacity crowds to enjoy limited runs of revival theatre, alternating with opera and dance by the companies that eventually became the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet.

The whole shebang opened with a New York Philharmonic concert, featuring Lawrence Tibbett and Bidu Sayão under Artur Rodzinski; two nights later came
Susan and God
in its original staging with its original Gertrude Lawrence. Dancer Paul Draper and harmonica wizard Larry Adler shared one evening, a program of American folk music occupied another, the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo paid a visit, the opera company bowed in with standard rep featuring Dusolina Giannini, Jennie Tourel, and Dorothy Kirsten, and the other plays were
The Patriots, Our Town
(with Montgomery Clift joining the original’s Martha Scott as George and Emily, to the Stage Manager of Marc Connelly), and
Porgy and Bess
(in the Cheryl Crawford version, using spoken dialogue), so beloved by this 1943–44 season that
Porgy
had to extend the customary City Center two weeks by another six. Succeeding seasons hosted such events as an Eva Le Gallienne
Cherry Orchard, You Can’t Take It With You
(with Fred and Dorothy Stone and Dorothy’s husband, Charles Collins), the Paul Robeson
Othello, Carmen Jones, Bloomer Girl,
and
Up in Central Park
. All the plays represented, like
Susan and God,
resuscitations of the original staging or (as with the last three titles) that very staging itself, concluding the national tour.

Within a decade, the City Center limited its theatre work to four musicals every spring.
Show Boat
and
Porgy and Bess
were perennials, along with certain fifties titles such as
Guys and Dolls
and
Wonderful Town
. But the bulk of the repertory took in forties titles, because that decade proved a treasury of classics from
Pal Joey
to
South Pacific
. However, note that for all the comedy hits in the early 1940s, there are few
classic
comedies. In fact, we can complete our précis of the form with but two more shows, Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin Of Our Teeth
(1942) and Mary Chase’s
Harvey
(1944).

Skin
is downright apocalyptic, but we find some unusual things in even the self-effacing
Harvey
. Elwood P. Dowd, the leading role, has for a best friend a six-foot rabbit, the title role, invisible to all but Dowd, including the audience. Astonishingly, this fantasy argues in favor of alcoholism: Dowd relentlessly tipples. True, he’s not a violent drunk, just a trader in whimsy, one of Broadway’s least favorite things. That may be why so many stars turned the play down when it was under option. Or maybe it was the drinking, or the rabbit.

Could it have been the almost absolute lack of plot? Virtually nothing happens in Act One, and little more than nothing in the rest: Elwood’s sister (Josephine Hull) wants to put Elwood away, then changes her mind.
4
Chase’s point is that … well, what’s wrong with having an invisible friend? Chase must have been onto something, for as the first Elwood, Frank Fay—a former tippler himself, with the airy charm of a con man who won’t take your money—gave way to Bert Wheeler, James Stewart (who made the movie), the English Jack Buchanan, second ex-tippler James Dunn, and Joe E. Brown,
Harvey
stayed for 1,775 performances.

The Skin Of Our Teeth
is the optimistic counterpart to
Our Town
. In Wilder’s earlier play, only the dead understand life;
Skin
tells how mankind has to keep surviving because life is all there is. Oddly,
Skin
had as much trouble getting on as
Our Town;
folks just never stop being bewildered by the unconventional, do they? At least, this one has sets, though one of them wobbles and in part falls over, to suggest the precarious nature of life on earth. After all, there was the Ice Age (in progress as Act One ends), the Flood (Act Two, set on an Atlantic City boardwalk during various conventions of the Wings, the Fins, the Shells, and the Humans), and war (Act Three), with father and son on rival sides.

Father was Fredric March, Mother was his wife, Florence Eldridge (a recurring but not invariable stage partner), their children were Montgomery Clift and Frances Heflin … and there was a maid, Father’s harlot. This was Sabina, played by Tallulah Bankhead in one of her most famous roles and one of the most famous cases of unprofessional conduct ever to wag Broadway tongues. Florence Eldridge kept asking the director, “When are you going to do something about Tallulah?” She was speaking to Elia Kazan, hardly more advanced in his directing career than when we last saw him, staging
Café Crown
.
5
Skin’s producer was the tyro Michael Myerberg, and Wilder himself was away on war duty. So, really, the “muscle” in the production was Bankhead. And Bankhead, like Sabina, was out of control.

We should pause a moment to consider Bankhead, for she is one of names of the age to have survived intact—and that without a great deal of notable film work. Katharine Cornell is known vaguely as one of those Actresses of Yore, and Jane Cowl is as forgotten as Rollo Peters. Bankhead has something they didn’t: a scrappy, boozy, bisexual type-portrait. Legend calls her unreliable; she wasn’t. Legend says she overplayed in caricature; she did so only to goad a sluggish house into responding. Legend tells that she aimed her portrayals at her gay fans; it was they who assumed control, reportedly queening it up at the slightest textual reference to the erotic, forbidden, or “different.”

The truth is that Bankhead was the typical diva who can’t seem to get along without making a stupid noise about trifles, getting nervous for the purpose of getting nervous, cultivating feuds, playing favorites, loving and hating without cause or transition. However, Bankhead was also passionately committed to the roles she undertook, and she got reviews as good as those of any other actress of her day. The difference between Tallulah Bankhead and, say, Helen Hayes is not that Bankhead was a joke and Hayes wasn’t. It is that Bankhead created a personality that was even bigger offstage than on.

She was particularly big with Kazan on
Skin
. He allowed it at first, because Kazan was exploring a theory he was to work with throughout his career: actors’ personal relationships will determine the way they play with each other onstage. In other words, human nature will overwhelm professionalism. It worked well that Bankhead and Eldridge disliked each other; so do their characters. It even worked well that Bankhead’s shenanigans were disrupting rehearsals: the Sabine Woman disrupts civilizations. (This makes Wilder’s own choice for Sabina, Ruth Gordon, puzzling. What did Ruth Gordon ever disrupt besides Garson Kanin?)

Still, by the time the show was running, Bankhead was simply driving everybody crazy. At one point, she took to combing her hair upstage during Eldridge’s most significant speech; so March, whose throat was vexing him, decided to take his medicinal gargle in the wings during one of Bankhead’s big scenes, timing his
ronron
to her best lines; so Bankhead dropped the hair combing but started tonguing March during their big kiss; and so on.

At length, Kazan stood up to Bankhead in the traditional screaming match. But Bankhead could not be tamed. She was waterfall, rainbow, earthquake all at once. Who but this lavish fiend could conceivably break character, lean over the footlights, and complain to the audience about the play? This is what Wilder has her do, and surely he hoped that, at least for a few moments, the public would fear that Tallulah had really lost it:

SABINA:
I hate this play and every word in it.… All about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you. Besides, the author hasn’t made up his silly mind as to whether we’re all living back in caves or in New Jersey.

Much later, Bankhead told an interviewer that she truly was taken aback by the odder aspects of her part. “I’d never done such a thing,” she said, referring to those sudden eruptions at the spectators. “It was like being in vaudeville.”

“A fantastic comedy” is how Wilder billed the piece, and while it is no vaudeville it does game with conventional expectations. Some were offended enough to walk out; and two academics caused a scandal by claiming that Wilder had stolen
The Skin Of Our Teeth
from another writer.

The two were Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who had been collaborating on a trot to James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
. Though their work was not to be published till 1944, two years after
Skin
opened, they nevertheless were able to cop a page or two of the
Saturday Review
to discern in
Skin
“important plot elements, characters, devices of presentation, as well as major themes” of the
Wake
. In fact, Wilder—one of the few educated enough to get through Joyce’s polylingual metamythomaze—thought it amusing to decorate his play with
Wake
hommages. They were prim little echoes at most, and Edmund Wilson answered for Wilder in
The Nation,
pointing out that Wilder made his Joycean references “plain as anything of the kind can be.”

The play won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to evergreen appeal to high-school and college groups. A 1955 television special starred Mary Martin, George Abbott, and Helen Hayes, though a perfunctory Bicentennial mounting with Elizabeth Ashley, Alfred Drake, and Martha Scott under José Quintero despoiled the work’s reputation. Should it have gone musical? Leonard Bernstein, with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, couldn’t make it sing; and while John Kander and Fred Ebb completed their
Skin
adaptation, it has yet to be heard in New York.

Even so, amid other classics such as
Mourning Becomes Electra, The Little Foxes, The Philadelphia Story,
and
The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Skin of Our Teeth
holds unique status as the Extremely Bizarre Play. We have seen the 1920s launch the Golden Age, with new subject matter (even in old genres), with new voices (especially that of O’Neill), and the division of the theatregoing population into highbrow, midcult, and prole (uniting for, say,
Rain
but otherwise breaking into Theatre Guild subscribers, Ethel Barrymore supporters, and those who saw
Abie’s Irish Rose
). The 1930s emphasizes social drama and introduces the naturalistic acting revolution. And the innovation of the 1940s is the acculturation of genuinely breakaway styles of writing, so that such different energies as Tennessee Williams on one hand and modern French dramatists on the other are made welcome in an ever Newer Broadway. “When the breath of creative imagination blows through the theatre,” wrote Rosamund Gilder in
Theatre Arts,
of
The Skin Of Our Teeth,
“what refreshment to the spirit! Doors may bang and scenery fly about; audiences may be outraged, infuriated, delighted, but the theatre is once more alive!”