All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (49 page)

If Williams’ plays seemed to form a genre all their own, the genre most opposite to Williams would be plainspoken working-class realism, in, for instance, Michael V. Gazzo’s
A Hatful of Rain
(1955). The tale of a junkie hiding his addiction from his family, the piece offered Ben Gazzara, Shelley Winters as his wife, Anthony Franciosa as his brother, and Frank Silvera as his father, all in a mean-streets realism right down to the grubby clothes in which Franciosa kept house. Kronenberger took this one in his stride: “more a scare piece than a serious study.” It was indeed scary, in the scenes involving pushers Mother (Henry Silva), Apples (Paul Richards), and Chuch (Harry Guardino), spreading beat lingo of the kind usually heard only on off-Broadway. Frank Corsaro was the director, and the piece ran 398 performances, long enough for Steven (so billed) McQueen and Vivian Blaine to take over the leads.

If
Hatful
typifies the gritty new naturalism,
Look Homeward, Angel
(1957), by Ketti Frings after Thomas Wolfe, gives us that old standby the literary adaptation. This presumably autobiographical treatment of a southern boy breaking away from the bad parenting of a drunken idiot father and a busily ungiving mother offered a new star as well. Osgood Perkins’ son Anthony made his Broadway bow replacing John Kerr in
Tea and Sympathy
(Joan Fontaine took over for Deborah Kerr), then went to Hollywood. His return as Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant lent PR ballyhoo to the event, but in fact director George Roy Hill had a superb cast all around in parents Jo Van Fleet and Hugh Griffith and in Arthur Hill (later the original George in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
) as a beloved older brother who dies of tuberculosis. The background, Van Fleet’s boardinghouse, kept the action peopled and lively, and Perkins was born to play all the hesitations and wistfulness and humiliated almost-said-itism of Wolfe’s alter ego, so hungry for love from his mother yet so absolute in his “drop dead” farewell to her. He’s not ungrateful, mind you. He thanks her “for every hour of loneliness I’ve had here, for every dirty cell you gave me to sleep in, for ten million hours of indifference, and for [the last few] minutes of cheap advice.”

Realism, the literary classic … but what was Paddy Chayefsky’s
The Tenth Man
(1959)? An unsigned
Theatre Arts
review of
Middle of the Night
dubbed Chayefsky “the poet laureate of the romantically underprivileged” for his habit of assigning love plots to the likes of Edward G. Robinson, not to mention Martys Rod Steiger and Ernest Borgnine. In
The Tenth Man,
Chayefsky assigned the love plot to a young woman possessed by a dybbuk, the displaced soul of one of the undead. Yet the format was comedy.

Chayefsky set the action in a moribund Jewish synagogue way out on Long Island, where widowers hold an informal social club, cursing their daughters-in-law and bragging about the cemetery plots they have picked out. One of their number hides his granddaughter—the possessed girl—on the premises, and into the middle of all this blunders a young man with ills as modern as the girl’s are Old World. He is neurotic and miserable because … well, who isn’t? Lovingly balancing legend with contemporary life, Chayefsky constructed a one-off, a mystical folk play with a serious theme but told in jest. There’s one more generic layer: the girl really
is
possessed. Interrogated by a cabalist, she replies, “You yourself will be dead before the prayers for the new moon,” and such is the authority of her schizoid babblings that we have no doubt of her knowledge in this matter.

How can the work climax but in an exorcism, as the cabalist directs the blowing of a ram’s horn before the necessary ten men? Yet when the demon is commanded to leave its host body, the young woman stands senseless but the young
man
falls to the floor with a bloodcurdling scream:

ONE OF THE WIDOWERS:
I think what has happened is that we have exorcised the wrong dybbuk.

The fine cast was very much what one might have expected, with kibitzers Lou Jacobi, Jack Gilford, George Voskovec, and Jacob Ben-Ami and young couple Donald Harron and Risa Schwartz (granddaughter of the Second Avenue headliner Maurice Schwartz). Yet the director was the English Tyrone Guthrie, known primarily for the unusual, such as Thornton Wilder’s stuffed-with-eccentrics farce
The Matchmaker
(1955) and the musical
Candide
(1956). But who better to keep Chayefsky’s warring rhythms of ancient and modern as married as the Lunts?
The Matchmaker
may sound conventional, as the source of
Hello, Dolly!
(1964), and it is conventional—in a form that went out of style shortly after Feydeau. (Indeed, speaking of rhythms, some of
The Matchmaker
is deliberately verbalized in the style of Molière.) And, true,
Candide
failed, but more because it was so unexpected than because of Guthrie’s staging.

Certainly,
The Tenth Man
is far more interesting than the boulevardier exhibits still very popular. Samuel Taylor’s
The Pleasure of His Company
(1958), written “with Cornelia Otis Skinner,” is typical. It has none of the originality or wit of Chayefsky, but doesn’t need to. This play is a pastime, agreeable rather than imaginative. A bauble about the ruin of a society wedding by the sudden return of the bride’s long-lost father, it shows the middle-class theatregoer how the rich live, as if we were back in the 1920s.

The setting is San Francisco, and the cast was headed by Cyril Ritchard as the bad-boy father, Skinner as his ex-wife and the bride’s mother, and Dolores Hart as the daughter in question. (George Peppard played the groom.) It was the kind of piece that happily started one scene with grandfather Charlie Ruggles playing (and slyly cheating at) solitaire—a specialty bit. There was a tiny idea at the center of the work, that Hart might be too wonderful to be allowed, as Congreve’s Millamant puts it, “to dwindle into a wife” without having seen the world first. And Hart actually closed the action by running off with Ritchard, risking the eventual loss of the affronted Peppard.

Tennessee Williams, working-class realism, the literary adaptation, the odd item, and a boulevard comedy: the only item missing from this précis of mainstream Broadway attendance is the English show, performed with the West End artistes. Most of the cast of Broadway’s view of Terence Rattigan’s
Separate Tables
(1956) had played this interrelated double bill in London. It is Rattigan’s most ingenious concoction: one set (the public rooms of a residential hotel in Bournemouth), one team of support (management and guests), and two stars playing completely different roles in each of the two plays. Thus, the headliners must not only create entirely different portrayals on either side of the interval, but effect spectacular visual changes on their second entrances. The pair were Eric Portman and Margaret Leighton as, first, former lovers, he a disgraced ex-politician; and, second, a molester of women in cinemas and the terrified spinster who defies her tyrant mother to defend him.

Peter Ustinov’s comedy
Romanoff and Juliet
(1957), set in one of those Lichtenburgs, didn’t need a full West End cohort supplying English atmosphere, and thus came over with only its star, Ustinov himself, under George S. Kaufman’s direction. The show spoofed Cold War gamesmanship in a romance between a Russian boy (whose family is forever denouncing and spying) and an American girl (whose family is diplomatic fluff). Suavely moving in and out of the action to play emcee to the public, Ustinov brought to Broadway a figure our native drama utterly lacks: the brilliant charmer with the dry wit and the deceptively soft attack.

But the big news was another visit from the Old Vic, in 1956, in nothing but Shakespeare for three months at the Winter Garden:
Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth,
and Tyrone Guthrie’s
Troilus and Cressida,
reset in Edwardian England. It made a sensation, with the Greeks turned into Prussians, and plenty of entrances and exits through the orchestra aisles, very rare at the time. Paul Rogers, Coral Browne, John Neville, and Claire Bloom headed the bills; the first two were the Macbeths and the second Romeo and Juliet. There was no
querelle des acteurs,
for American acting was now a thing in itself, and local pride could afford to be generous.

Besides, even bigger news was the Angry Young Man theatre of John Osborne.
Look Back in Anger
(1957) was the position paper, though it now seems tame next to Osborne’s contemporary open letter entitled “Damn you, England.” Those scathing sentiments found a home in Osborne’s
The Entertainer
(1958), with Laurence Olivier in an extraordinary turn as a seedy music-hall performer in gray suit, bowler, and bow tie, with a cane, apelike eyebrows, and a lurid gap in his front teeth. Author and star together reveled in the ghastly hokum of the song-and-dance comic who goes on and on without getting a single laugh. “I’ve played in front of them all!” he crows. “‘The Queen,’ ‘The Duke of Edinburgh,’ ‘The Prince of Wales,’ and the—what’s the name of that other pub?” Riding right over the silence, he adds, “Blimey, that went better first house.” Also, unlike
Look Back in Anger
’s sedate construction,
The Entertainer
’s was broken into two formats, scenes of the entertainer’s family life separated by the music-hall turns. It was virtually an anticipation of the musical
Cabaret,
the whole designed to portray England as corrupt and crippled.

Both Osbornes were seen in their original productions with most of the original players, and the credit for that goes to the man who got a lot more fame than Osborne out of it, David Merrick. The last of the picturesque managers creating theatre wherever they go (and not just in playhouses), Merrick honed his expertise in PR into the art of the unthinkable. Boosting
Look Back in Anger,
he hired a woman to erupt out of the audience onto the stage to smack the ranting Kenneth Haigh in the face.

Merrick put on plenty of native work, but he seemed most characteristic in buying up West End hits.
The Entertainer
wasn’t just brought over: it was
brought over,
by Pan American, sets and all, from closing night at London’s Palace Theatre to the Shubert in Boston, to reopen exactly ten days later.
1
Merrick’s Europe stopped at the Channel; when he got to French or German work it was usually in their West End stagings—
Irma la Douce
(1960) and the so-called
Marat/Sade
(1965), for example, both directed by Peter Brook. Merrick did mount his own production of Jean Anouilh’s
Becket
(1960), this also with Olivier, first as the Canterbury cleric opposite Anthony Quinn’s Henry II, then, in a return engagement after the tour, trying out Henry to Arthur Kennedy’s Thomas.

Nevertheless, Broadway’s Anouilh in the late 1950s was the work of other producers, from
The Lark
(1955) to
The Fighting Cock
(1959).
The Lark
was Julie Harris’ aforementioned turn as Saint Joan, and Rex Harrison led
The Fighting Cock
—
L’Hurluburlu
in French—as a reactionary general. Off-Broadway helped out with less well-known Anouilh:
Ardèle
(1958) and
Legend of Lovers
(1959), originally entitled
Euridice
.
The Lark
is the greatest work in the group, and scored Anouilh his biggest Broadway success. Lillian Hellman wrote the adaptation, given a splendid staging under Joseph Anthony. Especially helpful were Jo Mielziner’s projections backing a steep rake of platforms, thus to flash back from Joan’s trial to the places of her life. Following Joans of various versions Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Ingrid Bergman, and Uta Hagen (in a 1951 Theatre Guild revival of the Shaw), Harris persuaded critics who had seen them all (or all but Lenihan) that she was the best. Typically, Harris combined fragility, power, and grace; she was radiant.

Yet another splendid staging outfitted Anouilh’s
Time Remembered
(1957), originally entitled
Léocadia,
after the deceased beauty who haunts the action. This one was adapted by Patricia Moyes, and offered Helen Hayes as a dotty duchess; former matinée idol Glenn Anders as her stooge, Lord Hector; current matinée idol Richard Burton as her nephew, in mourning for Léocadia; and Susan Strasberg as a milliner hired to impersonate her.
The Lark
had enjoyed an incidental score by Leonard Bernstein, and
Time Remembered
called upon Vernon Duke for not only orchestral continuity but the last new Duke vocals heard on Broadway. Hayes had the role she was born to play—dithering yet logical, snobbish

DUCHESS:
In the war, I signed on in the nursing reserve without making any stipulation whatsoever about the social status of my patients.

yet endearing, as when she brings up a relative she loathes, one Patrick Troubiscoi:

DUCHESS:
(To the milliner, perfectly naturally) You may have met him?

MILLINER:
No, Madame.

DUCHESS:
You amaze me. One meets him absolutely everywhere.

Oliver Smith was the designer for this semi-fantasy, creating
avec charme
the park in which the Duchess has kept on retainer the sights and people that Burton associates with his three days of love. Albert Marre directed this most French of pieces, so sprightly and daffy while centering on a death. “The mood is mellow,” purred Walter Kerr.

By contrast, Samuel Beckett’s
En Attendant Godot,
in Beckett’s own translation as
Waiting For Godot
(1956), baffled one and all and closed in seven weeks, though it boasted Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall as the merrily depressed tramps of modernism’s prison of nowhere. On the other hand, seven weeks is not bad for a piece so full of … well, emptiness; the very delightful
Time Remembered
was Anouilh’s biggest New York hit, yet it only lasted thirty-one weeks. Further,
Godot
was out of place on The Street, when off-Broadway so obviously beckoned; Brooks Atkinson, arguably the voice of the Rialto, thought it a blend of Joyce (“pungent and fabulous”) and Sartre (“black, dark, disgusted”). This is not what they call a Money Review.