All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (31 page)

If Wilder’s artfully artless visuals sparked one of
Our Town
’s controversies, and if his dimensions, in which a small town represents life on earth, sparked another, the play is newly controversial. In an age when such words as “family,” “faith,” “Christian,” and even “atheist” have been hijacked by bigots of one kind or another, Wilder’s play now feels acutely critical of American life.
Our Town
was once a fond picture of it, even given the troubling vastness of Wilder’s use of the cycle of life and death. Yet the work finds itself suddenly caught up in the “values” war of present-day America.

Of course, when Wilder wrote, his terminology was, in effect, valueless. In the world Wilder conjured up, “family” isn’t a euphemism denoting a homophobic agenda: it’s something one is born into, with parents and siblings. “Faith” is a private matter, not something to be vulgarized for political advancement. A “Christian” isn’t someone with an enemies list, and “atheist” means the guy who skips the church picnic, not the one who initiates litigation at the sight of a Nativity Scene.

For decades,
Our Town
was a nostalgic classic on the Great American level, the kind of thing that, say, Richard Nixon might happily attend and completely misunderstand. Now it’s a rebuke of our bickering “culture of complaint” (in Robert Hughes’ phrase), less a sampler than a fantasy. We might even ask if there ever was a Grover’s Corners or even a Thornton Wilder. A gay man wrote our National Play, because in his day Americans regarded themselves as citizens of a nation. Today, many regard themselves as members of special-interest groups with a wrecking agenda. Romance usually ages better than satire, but
Our Town
is in danger of becoming an implausible curiosity. Its future public will be like the governor’s wife, walking out in Boston, baffled and angry.

Eight

We Are Not Here To Rehearse Your Play:

THE POLITICAL STAGE

I. J. Golden’s
Precedent
(1931) dramatized the Tom Mooney–Warren Billings case, in which the two men were convicted of throwing a bomb into a Preparedness Parade in San Francisco in 1916. To center his argument that, as some believed, the defendants were framed, Golden deleted Billings in favor of the more famous Mooney, but otherwise hewed closely to the original story, reset in fictional Queen City.

In Golden’s retelling, Mooney (renamed Delaney) is targeted because he tried to foment a strike of railroad workers. The bad guys are the railroad president and the district attorney, and the good guys are, mainly, a newspaper editor who reveals that Delaney was nowhere near the parade when the crime was committed. So, for once, an à clef piece was devoted not to the doings of Jeanne Eagels, Noël Coward, or Alexander Woollcott, but to a sociopolitical figure. Despite a cast of unknowns, the show moved from the Provincetown Playhouse to Broadway, ran 184 performances, and managed a respectable tour.

This is notable, for critics were not generally supportive of shows with left-wing politics, especially this early in the 1930s. John Wexley’s
Steel
(1931) ran two weeks after perhaps the worst reviews of its season—“so overwrought,” said Robert Garland of the
World-Telegram,
“so overwritten”; and John Mason Brown thought Wexley’s concept of Steel the Enemy of Man as irritating as O’Neill’s obsession with the “ole davil” sea in
Anna Christie
. Another unheralded cast (including future Hollywood heavy Barton MacLane and
Precedent
’s Delaney, Royal Dana Tracy) enacted the tale of another labor agitator, this one in “The Milltown of Ironton, U.S.A.” A
Sweeney Todd
factory whistle punctuated the action, and while Wexley troubled to avoid the propagandist’s easy diagnosis with a warts-and-all hero (who at one point seduces his sister-in-law), he capped his piece with an easy remedy: the hero’s sister shoots one of the cops who has come to arrest him. On opening night, someone in the balcony responded with “Bravo! Kill ’em all!”

Or consider Albert Maltz and George Sklar’s
Merry-Go-Round
(1932), on municipal corruption in a place that the public understood to be New York. Elisha Cook Jr., one year before he played the flaming youth of
Ah, Wilderness!
and later to be immortalized as the jittery “gunsel” Wilmer in John Huston’s
The Maltese Falcon,
appeared as a hotel bellboy who witnesses a gangland murder and ends up hanged in his cell. The “suicide” had been drawing attention to ties between crime and law enforcement.

Was
Merry-Go-Round
’s Mayor Manning an à clef portrayal of Mayor James J. Walker? Is this what goaded the city to treat the production to a real-life merry-go-round of harassment? Like
Precedent,
the play moved from the Provincetown to The Street, to the Avon (now demolished) on West Forty-fifth Street, one door west of the Imperial. On opening night, shortly before curtain time, the fire department arrived to padlock the house for an out-of-date license. This created a scandal, not least because plenty of theatres stayed open while waiting for license renewals; the Imperial was doing just that at the time. When the Producing Managers Association and the Dramatists Guild took on the case,
Merry-Go-Round
reopened, though the authorities vindictively insisted on enforcing another legal technicality, demanding pointless structural alterations to the auditorium. Oddly, all this publicity did not generate public interest in attending the play, and it lasted only six weeks.

Still, Maltz and Sklar, like Golden and Wexley, were heralds of a genre that could not in the long run be discouraged: the political play. Few established writers were keen; this was to be a young man’s métier. True, Elmer Rice moved from the compassionate
Street Scene
(1929), twenty-four hours in the life of a tenement, to the more imploringly progressive
We, the People
(1933), which expanded from
Street Scene
’s single outdoor set to twenty-one locales involving forty-four speaking roles. Both plays are humanistic “cross-sections,” but
Street Scene
has melodramatic tang while
We, the People
is a civics lesson.
Street Scene
played eighteen months,
We, the People
six weeks.

Of the fresh talent introduced in the political play, the most enduring yet underrated is Clifford Odets. (Others endure with a high rating, such as Lillian Hellman; others are underrated but cannot truly be called enduring, such as Irwin Shaw.) Odets’ very name is a summoning term for rather a lot of things, but the main one is Depression Drama. This medium is as essential as O’Neill’s experiments in the 1920s or the lyrical outpouring of Tennessee Williams in the 1940s and ’50s, and Odets left three major titles of the type: in agitprop (
Waiting For Lefty,
1935), in domestic social drama (
Awake and Sing!,
1935), and in tragedy (
Golden Boy,
1937).

Edna Ferber didn’t like him. With collaborator George S. Kaufman’s indulgence, Ferber wrote Odets into
Stage Door
(1936) as playwright Keith Burgess. Even as he enters the setting, a New York hotel for actresses, Ferber is damning him in the stage directions as “the kind of young man who never wears a hat.” You know, one of those who-cares-what-
you
-think? idealists:

KEITH:
Romance is for babies! I write about
today
! I want to tear the heart out of the rotten carcass they call life, and hold it up bleeding for all the world to see!

A year later, however, when he is on the rise through the heroine’s support, Burgess sells his next play—and “her” starring role—to a producer who wants a Name. Worse, Burgess is going Hollywood.

Indeed,
Stage Door
opened eight months after Odets left New York for his first of many trips to California, and one of the other things that Odets personifies is the Sellout. A wish for success, legend tells us, was Odets’ fatal flaw. Moneyfame, not social progress, was his god. Odets even married a movie star, that MGM Oscar-taker Luise Rainer, with her heartbreaking Telephone Scene, her delicately squashed peasant in Pearl Buck coolie-hat chic, her Great Waltz!

On the other hand, what’s wrong with a wish for success? Is writing for film automatically a sign that one has no interest in social progress? If one will marry, why not Luise Rainer? Another of the Depression Dramatists, John Howard Lawson, told one of the major Depression Producers, Harold Clurman, that Lawson found writing for the movies to be no more limiting and compromising than writing for Broadway: that “selling out,” in effect, meant doing the same thing for more money.

More important, why does Odets suffer this pile-on when no one blames all the other playwrights who at various times worked for the studios? Odets’ fatal flaw, in fact, was his lack of interest in narrative, the very machinery of playwrighting: plot. Odets worked entirely in character: dialogue without events. Another writer, an artistic relation of Odets, Arthur Miller, once summed up the plays that preceded Odets—the theatre of the 1920s—as a “happy deference to talent and the interesting rich.” This type of theatre was still vital in the 1930s, alongside Odets. It’s screwball comedy,
Jubilee,
S. N. Behrman, something with the Lunts or about Noël Coward, and if Gertrude Lawrence and the other celebrity eccentrics don’t attend opening night, they’ll entertain at the Party.

That’s lovely theatregoing, and while the school of Odets didn’t sweep it all away, it did successfully propose as subjects those without talent or money: without veneer. Without, even, the Stage English of the Barrymores or the colorful patois of twenties wisecrackers or of the dialect comics. Even musical-comedy heroines gave elocution lessons; Marilyn Miller looked for the silver lining “whene’er a cloud appears in the blyoo.”

Odets breaks with all this by writing the dialect of real life, as chewy as penny candy yet poetic because the challenge of capturing reality inspires Odets, exalts him. Playwrights from the Greeks on have asked what life is made of; Odets asks what it sounds like. His words are an actor’s delight. “There’s a snap! crackle! pop! to them,” Jack Klugman recalled, many years later. It was “wonderful to roll them around in your mouth.” Here’s a sample of
Awake and Sing!,
as the Berger family of the Bronx finishes dinner:

RALPH:
Where’s advancement down the place? Work like crazy! Think they see it? You’d drop dead first.

…

     Just look at Eddie. I’m as good as he is—pulling in two-fifty a week for forty-eight minutes a day. A headliner, his name in all the papers.

…

     Didn’t I want to take up tap dancing, too?

BESSIE:
So take lessons. Who stopped you?

RALPH:
On what?

BESSIE:
On what? Save money.

RALPH:
Sure, five dollars a week for expenses and the rest in the house. I can’t save even for shoe laces.

BESSIE:
You mean we shouldn’t have food in the house, but you’ll make a jig on the street corner?

…

RALPH:
I don’t know.… Every other day to sit around with the blues and mud in your mouth.

This is the very opposite of the celebrity of eccentricity, what Italians refer to as “i soliti ignoti,” generally meaning “the usual suspects” but literally “the usual unknowns”: traditionally unsuitable as subjects for art.
Awake and Sing!,
finds no adventure in the Bergers, but rather presents them in the middle of their real lives, as young Ralph seeks more
something
than subsistence, and his unmarried sister Hennie deals with pregnancy and an impossible future. Their grandfather Jacob provides what little event the play has by playing God, arranging his suicide to look like an accident so he can create that
something
for the idealistic Ralph. “Let me die like a dog,” Ralph cries out, about fifty seconds before the final curtain, “if I can’t get more from life.” Having made a voyage of self-discovery, he now wants to get into not show biz like the hoofing Eddie but progressive politics. Isaiah 26:19: “Thy dead
men
shall live,
together with
my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.”

Authenticating the Berger family through the documentary imagination of his dialogue, Odets gives them stature. The intricate character interplay in a show without a plot reminded some of Chekhof; Harold Clurman thought Sean O’Casey a fitter comparison for the Irishman’s “tenement tenderness” and a vigorous treatment of everyday matters, till it is “almost impossible to differentiate between ‘high’ and ‘low,’ ‘important’ and ‘trivial,’ ‘essential’ and ‘incidental.’”

True, the politically energized Odets was bound to compose fanfares for the common man. In effect, he spent the 1930s touring the building Elmer Rice invented for
Street Scene,
getting a play out of each apartment. There’s little joy in this world;
Awake and Sing!
’s original title was
I Got the Blues
. This sounds like the Bergers, perhaps too much so: honest and unpromising. But
Waiting For Lefty
sounds like
action;
the class that a Lefty hails from doesn’t wait patiently.

So
Waiting For Lefty
would be Odets’ first produced work. It uses Berger-like people in a completely different form, a frame of flashbacks, raw and tense, with a good-versus-evil throughline. We actually see the bad guys, and the evening ends as no American play ever did before, with virtually everyone in the theatre on his feet, shouting. Yes, the audience, too.

Agitprop. Coined from “agitation” and “propaganda,” agitprop was the ultimate political theatre, an attempt to rouse its public to, if not outright revolution, at least a revolutionary point of view: a pep rally. Yet from the start, even the most primitive examples of agitprop borrowed techniques from the experimental stage. The classic agitprop sketch—the form worked best in short bursts—was a piece of mass authorship called
Newsboy,
based on a poem by V. J. Jerome. All that happens is the exposure of the title character as a stooge of capitalism, with his “Love nest raided on Park Avenue!” and “Yanks take Dodgers 3–0!” Soon enough, we learn the only source of genuine news:
The Daily Worker
. “Time to revolt!” cries one chorister.