1940: Drama

Long-Run Successes.

In the first week of 1940, Pins and Needles, occasionally freshened with new skits and tunes, seemed good for an indefinite run; and so did Tobacco Road. The Little Foxes and The Philadelphia Story had almost achieved their one year's run, and Saroyan's wayward dialogue was to hold The Time of Your Life on the boards until late Spring, together with Margin for Error. Most of the other entertainments which managed to survive into the new year did so by old and tested means; tunes and lyrics a little smarter than the average, Too Many Girls; bawdy humors expensively dressed, Du Barry Was a Lady; vaudeville antics, Hellzapoppin; farce situations as old as farce itself, See My Lawyer; mockery at the expense of an identifiable celebrity, The Man Who Came to Dinner; nostalgia for the good old days, Life With Father. One and all, these shows outdistanced their competitors by some twist of originality in plot, by fresher-than-average dialogue, or by comedians of superior talent like Bert Lahr, Howard Lindsay and Monty Woolley. Meanwhile, Key Largo died in February, and even before that, Helen Hayes' charm and intelligence failed to compensate for the brittleness of Ladies and Gentlemen. Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make deserved better than eighty performances, and was to reappear between covers when Burns Mantle published, in abbreviated form, the ten best plays of the 1939-40 season.

If any one doubts that the majority of Broadway's offerings are intended to help audiences forget their troubles, let him observe that in January, 1940, one-third of the current productions were 'musicals,' one-third were farces and comedies of light texture, and the remaining third, plays to be described as 'serious'; and let him further note that in December of the same year, the proportions were roughly the same.

Musical Shows.

Even among musical shows, the mortality rate was high during 1940. Earl Carroll closed his Vanities after twenty-five performances, despite 'the most beautiful girls in the world.' Dwight Deere Wiman produced Higher and Higher, with lyrics and tunes by the nearly infallible Rodgers and Hart, and with eye-filling scenery by Jo Mielziner. The comic Jack Haley disported himself in it, as did a trained seal; yet all these talents, human and animal, failed to make the show a success. Lee Shubert's Keep Off the Grass was relatively short-lived. Those who did see it were charmed by the variety of talents its dancers revealed. — Betty Bruce, Jose Limon, and the incredibly agile Ray Bolger. Balanchine devised the dances, Nat Karson the sets and costumes, and Jimmy Durante moved in and out of the scenes with his hoarse, rough-edged humors. For Walk With Music, Anton Dolin directed the dancers; a musical version of Three Blind Mice, it played just long enough to reveal the talents of a new dance team, Alice Dudley and Kenneth Bostock. Nancy Hamilton's Two for the Show repeated the small-scale, charade-like good humor of her One for the Money. Richard Haydn again played Mr. Carp, and John Murray Anderson exquisitely staged the intimate show. Another sequel was Reunion in New York, made tolerably amusing by the combined abilities of the same Austrian refugee group who, the season before, had produced From Vienna.

Only five shows-with-music won real success. The first in point of time was Louisiana Purchase, whose 'book' was written by B. G. de Silva and Morrie Ryskind, and whose songs were written by Irving Berlin. None too respectful of the historical events in New Orleans suggested by its title, the authors gave Victor Moore a part tailored to his inimitable skill — the querulously pathetic Senator Oliver P. Loganberry who successfully resisted the siren wiles of Vera Zorina and Irene Bordoni. The cast also included William Gaxton, and the ballets as conceived by Balanchine were both beautiful and witty. With top-notch talents in so many fields, small wonder that Louisiana Purchase, produced in May, was still turning customers away in December. Hold On to Your Hats brought back to Broadway — always a risky venture — a comedian long since identified with the movies. Employing those hearty, man-to-man exhortations, those unashamed sentimentalisms to which one would have expected to find less response now than in his 'Mammy' days, Al Jolson captivated a new generation. His impersonation of the radio bandit who is, away from the microphone, a shy and timorous creature, was one of the comic triumphs of the year. Bert Gordon and Martha Raye helped him to stop the show with a burlesque broadcast, and Raoul Pene Du Bois maintained his high reputation as designer of scenes and costumes at once opulent and delightful.

In Panama Hattie, another comedian changed the title but not the nature of her vehicle. The same Ethel Merman who was Katy from Haiti in Du Barry Was a Lady, became Panama Hattie to the words of de Silva and Fields, and the music of Cole Porter. The much-demanded Raoul Pene Du Bois created the scenery for this musical.

Departing from formula, Cabin in the Sky is a Negro musical fantasy superior to its white rivals in originality, in beauty and in unity. Brimstone and Paradise wage battle for the immortal soul of Joe Jackson, whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak. Something of the folk quality of Green Pastures comes through the acting of Todd Duncan, the glowing voice of Ethel Waters, the Lucifer of Rex Ingram, the exquisite choral singing of J. Rosamond Johnson's choir, Boris Aronson's deeply imaginative settings, and the dances which Balanchine devised, and Katherine Dunham and her group performed, Lynn Root wrote this 'musical,' and Vernon Duke composed its songs. Cabin in the Sky is rare entertainment and something more than entertainment.

Pal Joey revolved about the master of ceremonies in a Chicago night-club, a character too sinister for musical comedy, despite songs by Rodgers and Hart, dances by Robert Alton, and settings by Mielziner. All In Fan, with that supreme tap dancer, Bill Robinson, cost its producers $125,000 and played four Broadway performances. Meet the People, a revue in the manner of Pins and Needles, came East under the auspices of The Hollywood Theatre Alliance, and proved its superiority to more expensive but less intelligent rivals.

Most years provide at least one spectacle for the huge spaces of Center Theater in Rockefeller City. Norman Bel Geddes, brilliant modern designer, produced It Happens on Ice, and evoked original patterns in movement, line, color and light in this ballet-on-ice which also enlisted the choreographic skill of Leon Leonidoff and Catherine Littlefield. Joe Cook, popular clown of past shows, found himself not at home in these spectacular but chilly surroundings.

Comedies.

That one-third of the year's offering which falls within the term 'light entertainment,' can be quickly summarized. Oblivion rather swiftly caught Lee Tracy's crude vehicle, Every Man for Himself, by Milton Lazarus, and the brittle idyll by Robert Keith, entitled Romantic Mr. Dickens. That droll comedienne, Molly Picon, starred briefly in a comedy with incidental music, Morning Star, which was both light and serious in its portrayal of Jewish middle-class life, and for which Howard Bay employed his unusual gifts as scene-designer. A comedy taking place in a Yorkshire village wasted the talents of Tom Powers, Estelle Winwood, Alison Skipworth and J. C. Nugent: it was called When We Are Married, and its author was J. B. Priestley. Horse Fever had Hollywood briskness because it was in part written by the author of innumerable movie skits, Eugene Conrad. The psychoanalyzing of a balky horse was its theme, and Ezra Stone played a leading role. Jimmy Savo, inimitable pantomimist, gathered together an evening of his familiar short turns, in Mum's the Word. That urbane exile from Budapest, Ferenc Molnar, chose a delicatessen in Switzerland as the locale for a slight piece whose underlying theme was triteness itself. Edna Best graced the few performances which Delicate Story was encouraged to give. A George Abbott farce, The White-Haired Boy, with settings by Oenslager and script by Beatrice Kaufman and Charles Martin, appeared and disappeared without critical commotion. Marjery Sharp made farce-comedy of her novel The Nutmeg Tree, and Gladys George played what has become a theatrical stereotype, the aging ex-chorus girl whose daughter lives in the lap of luxury, and who comes nobly to the rescue. Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall essayed rather bawdy folk-comedy in Susanna and the Elders, and failed. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt of Allan Wood, in The Weak Link, to combine mystery with humor. The authors of Beverly Hills — Lynn Starling and Howard J. Green — tried to recapture the acidulous humors of Claire Booth's The Women, by maliciously gossiping about Hollywood, but this time the formula refused to work. Toward the end of the year, a forty-eight year old laugh-machine proved more sturdy than most modern comic inventions, when José Ferrer played Lord Fancourt Babberly in a revival of Charlie's Aunt produced by Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner. One more dramatization of modern bewilderment was contrived, with some degree of wittiness, by Irwin Shaw, and captioned Retreat From Pleasure.

To review most of the above plays is to write their deserved obituaries. Perhaps Saroyan's irresponsible comedy, Love's Old Sweet Song, deserved more than its month on Broadway. It had the benefit of joint production by Eddie Dowling and the Theatre Guild; it had a stage family, no less than sixteen Yearlings from Oklahoma; it had Walter Huston to play the pitchman. Inferior plays survived it, among them Separate Rooms, in which Alan Dinehart evoked what humor was possible from the theme of Winchellesque blackmail. Falling below their accustomed level of originality and sustained fun, Kaufman and Hart contrived George Washington Slept Here, and cleverly cast Ernest Truex as the city man who acquires an ancient farmhouse in the country, together with innumerable problems; his wife was played by that virtuoso of the terse and crackling, Jean Dixon. The best of the season's crop was Elliott Nugent's and James Thurber's The Male Animal, because its antics did not evade thoughtfulness. A college professor finds himself defying the stadium-building alumni and trustees, and at the same time is impelled to become the male animal fighting to keep his mate. Herman Shumlin as director made the most of his opportunity for extravagantly comic business, but did not sacrifice the more serious implications of characters and situations. My Sister Eileen was dramatized by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov from Ruth McKenney's tale of two sisters to whose basement room in Greenwich Village come New York's maddest and most amusing characters, keenly observed and pungently acted. Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson drew less comedy than might have been expected from the domestic affairs of a family of trapeze performers, in The Flying Gerardos.

Several plays each year depend for success on the abilities of a single performer, preferably a star with a following. Ruth Chatterton, who long ago established a reputation for charm, spent that quality vainly on John Van Druten's Leave Her to Heaven. Elmer Harris' melodrama, Johnny Belinda, staked everything on the performance of a young actress, Helen Craig, whose playing of a deaf mute was the only thing afterward remembered. Grace George, one of the dependably mellow of our older actresses, revived Kind Lady. Vincent Sheean wrote An International Incident for Ethel Barrymore; its closing after fifteen performances left Miss Barrymore in search of a more sturdy vehicle. In November, she found Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green more acceptable as a play and more suitable to her ripe style of acting. The author has told of his own youth in a Welsh mining village, and out of his gratitude toward the modest schoolmistress who set his feet on the path to personal, social and artistic success he has written with warmth and substance. The play is essentially a character-study of Miss Moffat, and, under the masterly direction of Herman Shumlin, Ethel Barrymore plays Miss Moffat to perfection. In the meanwhile, audiences prefer to forget My Dear Children, in which John Barrymore, once a distinguished actor, slapsticked and mugged his way through a tasteless farce which Catherine Tunney and Jerry Horcoin had concocted, its ingredients being the least creditable episodes in the life of the actor himself. John Van Druten's Old Acquaintance provided a vehicle for two stars, Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood, whose combined talents enlivened some but not all of its dull conversational stretches.

Revivals.

No year passes without its revivals either of classic masterpieces or of modern plays which have withstood a few years' testing. Among the latter, Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is a modern masterpiece of tragic-comic character. From January to April, New York was able to renew its acquaintance with Captain Johnny Boyle and his long-suffering Juno, as Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood played them in a cast which included Effie Shannon and Arthur Shields. Robert Edmond Jones made one of his infrequent appearances as scene-designer for this revival. Burgess Meredith revived Liliom, with Ingrid Bergman as Julie, to discover that Molnar's fantasy had lost some of its hold upon our imaginations. The Players' annual classic revival was Congreve's Love for Love. Its staging was by Robert Edmond Jones at his most distinguished. Its all-star cast included Dudley Digges, Romney Brent, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Dorothy Gish, and Violet Heming. Talented English performers kept Shakespeare alive in the theater with revivals of King Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet. Maurice Evans brought Richard back to Broadway for a brief return engagement in April. In November, he appeared with Helen Hayes in Twelfth Night, a production sponsored by Gilbert Miller and the Theatre Guild. Stewart Chancy, who designed its whimsical settings, and Margaret Webster who directed the performance, emphasized the informal, the light-hearted, the playfully comic elements in the play. Within this atmosphere, Helen Hayes was pertly charming, and Mr. Evans presented a crisp Malvolio. When Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh planned their version of Romeo and Juliet, they attempted a youthful, rhapsodic interpretation. In actual performance, under Mr. Oliver's direction, the movement seemed hectic and confusing, the youthfulness rather strident than deeply poetic. Dame May Whitty was, as might have been expected, the perfect Nurse.

Melodrama.

An increasing vogue for melodrama was indicated by Grey Farm, whose leading character, played by Oscar Homolka, struggled against a desire to strangle his own son; the authors were Terence Rattigan and Hector Bolitho. Melodramatic also were the hate-ridden characters and plot of Cue For Passion, by Edward Chodorov and H. S. Kraft. A grisly and pathological story by H. B. Irving came to the stage in a dramatization by Edward Percy and Reginald Denham, in which Estelle Winwood and Flora Robson helped Ladies in Retirement to play for several weeks. In Suspect, with Pauline Lord playing a hatchet murderess, not even the great skill of a fine actress could compensate for the mixture of horror and dullness for which the authors, Reginald Denham and Edward Percy, were responsible.

Serious Drama.

Of plays thoughtfully written on themes of more than temporary or private importance, the chronicler of 1940 finds fewer than usual. Only two playwrights concerned themselves with War — Ernest Hemingway and Robert Sherwood, the former in The Fifth Column, the latter in There Shall Be No Night. Both plays had this in common: the dilemma of the fine spirit who finds noble causes translated into bombs and bloodshed. Sherwood's Dr. Valkonen is torn from his secure intellectual life by the invasion of his homeland; Hemingway's Philip Rawlings recoils from the brutalities of the Spanish conflict; both in the end resign themselves to the role which other forces and other men have assigned to them. The Theatre Guild and the Playwrights Company produced There Shall Be No Night, with scenery by Richard Whorf, and with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne playing the chief parts. Howard Bay designed the extraordinary settings for The Fifth Column — also produced by the Theatre Guild — and Franchot Tone admirably expressed the torment of Rawlings, with Lee Cobb's superb Max as a foil.

Both Clifford Odets and Elmer Rice have long since demonstrated their insight into city life, their power to characterize men and women who struggle to live decently in Metropolis. In both plays, a girl and a boy find themselves almost but not quite defeated by New York; in both, plot is less important than the response of youth to the brutalities, the betrayals, the challenges of the environment. For Rice's Two on an Island, an offering of the Playwrights Company, John Craven and Betty Field played the boy and girl, while Luther Adler was the Chorus to their hopes and disillusions. Kurt Weill composed incidental music, and Mielziner's 'skeletonized' sets reduced subway trains and beaneries to stark, essential form. The cast of Odets' Night Music included such Group Theater veterans as Art Smith, Philip Loeb, Elia Kazan, Roman Bohnen, Sanford Meisner and Morris Carnovsky; Modecai Gorelik gave his characteristically mordant accent to the backgrounds. Neither play matched such previous works by the same authors as Awake and Sing and The Adding Machine.

Two other plays were American in theme. Medicine Show applied the Living Newspaper technique to the problem of socialized medicine. It was written by Oscar Saul and Hoffman Hayes, and had incidental music by Hans Eisler. Whether through public indifference or because it failed to do dramatic justice to an important theme, it closed at the end of a month, as did Albert Bein's Heavenly Express, in which the author of Let Freedom Ring fused reality with fantasy, and a dead hobo mingled with rough and flavorsome tramps and railway men as the Agent of Death. Boris Aronson's strange settings for this play deserved to be seen by more than a few audiences, as did the acting of John Garfield, Aline MacMahon, Philip Loeb and Russell Collins.

Big White Fog introduced Broadway to a new producing group, The Negro Playwrights Company. Among its sponsors are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Paul Robeson; its purpose is to promote race harmony and to interpret the Negro as he is, not as revues and night clubs have portrayed him. Theodore Ward wrote this tragedy, but with less dramatic skill than the occasion demanded. A stirring idea was left in search of the skills needed to impose it upon an impatient and jaded public.

Elmer Rice more than compensated for the weaknesses of Two on an Island by writing and directing Flight to the West for the Playwrights Company. On a westbound Atlantic clipper, half a dozen vigorously characterized men and women discuss the most crucial issue of our time: a Nazi diplomat, a Yankee, a columnist, a business man, a young couple, into whose talk are concentrated not only the conflicts which shake our world, but the steady convictions of the playwright.

Other Plays.

The melancholy roster of outright failures, given in detail, would draw undeserved attention to the names of dramatic contraptions with no good thing to be said for them. Roark Bradford's John Henry and Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem could be considered as having prematurely closed. No tears need be shed, however, for George M. Cohan's The Return of the Vagabond (7 performances), Ayn Rand's The Unconquered (6 performances), Another Sun, by Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner (11 performances), Goodbye in the Night (8 performances), Passenger to Bali (4 performances), The Man Who Killed Lincoln (5 performances), Young Couple Wanted (13 performances), G. B. Shaw's Geneva (15 performances), The Burning Deck (3 performances), A Case of Youth (5 performances), The Scene of the Crime (12 performances), Out From Under (9 performances), The Strangler Fig (8 performances), At the Stroke of Eight (8 performances), Russian Bank (11 performances), and The Old Foolishness (3 performances).

Here are sixteen plays involving two hundred and sixty actors, an investment of thousands of dollars, and the top-notch abilities of people like George Abbott, Donald Oenslager, Walter Huston, Cheryl Crawford and Theodore Komisarjevsky; yet the average number of audiences who saw them was eight. Here, for the Season, 1939-40, were the Drama Critics' Circle and the Pulitzer Prize Committee, both finding no more worthy recipient for honors than the charming but aimless Saroyan who wrote The Time of Your Life. Here in the American Theater, a whole year failed to discover a major new talent. That year saw the 'discoveries' of previous ones — Irwin Shaw, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, writing below their own best level. It employed such gifted artists as Oenslager and Mielziner to design scenery which was dismantled and sent to the warehouse almost before its paint had dried.

Summary.

In the attempt to cushion disaster, ticket prices for plays of average Hollywood quality are raised so high that playgoers prefer the cheaper coziness of the movie palace. At a moment when men face calamitous events with what courage and intelligence they can summon, no voice is raised in our theater either to defend or enlighten. The conventional entertainers trade on their reputation; the innovators of the 1930's imitate Saroyan and fail to distinguish between the confusion and cross-purpose of their make-believe characters and that which is in their own minds. Retreat to Pleasure becomes not only the title of a play but a slogan for an art which, at its best, had and will have more inclusive aims. As the year ends, Hallie Flanagan publishes, in Arena, the history of the Federal Theater, a history which, as she writes, 'points to one dynamic fact, profoundly significant for the future of the stage: that the theater, often regarded even by members of its own profession as dead or dying, still has tremendous power to stir up life and infuse it with fire.'