1941: Drama

Résumé of the Year.

That Broadway tenure is no measure of a play's intrinsic merit becomes obvious when one considers the productions that bridged 1940 and 1941, having raised their first curtains in the fall of the former year. Four months was all that audience-interest allowed to Elmer Rice's anti-fascist Flight To The West, to Helen Hayes' and Maurice Evans' frolicsome Twelfth Night revival, to the fresh fantasy of Cabin In The Sky, and to Elmer Harris' Johnny Belinda, in which Helen Craig so appealingly acted a deaf mute. Of five months' duration were several pieces less deserving than the foregoing: Ed Wynn's vaudeville, Boys and Girls Together; George Washington Slept Here, its sure-fire dialogue and actability guaranteeing it a second career among the amateur theatres; Old Acquaintance, to which Peggy Wood and Jane Cowl gave their ripe talents as comédiennes; Hold on to Your Hats, kept alive by the raucous humors of Martha Raye and Al Jolson. The fresh satirical revue from Hollywood, Meet the People, closed long before its shallower competitors. A revived Charley's Aunt chalked up six months of hilarious business, and The Man Who Came To Dinner played for eight. Three musicals gained year-long success: Louisiana Purchase, which had moderately good tunes and book, and the irresistible Victor Moore; Pal Joey, a George Abbott show based on the escapades of a hoofer taken from John O'Hara's satiric pieces in the New Yorker; and Panama Hattie, whose chief boast was the ever-delightful, irrepressible Ethel Merman.

Even more inexhaustible attractions were found by audiences in a few shows. By the time Separate Rooms came to an end in the fall of 1941, this machine-made farce had played a year and a half. A New Hellzapoppin continued throughout the year the feverish slapstick of the older version; and 1941 will at least be famous as the year in which Tobacco Road closed a Broadway run which began back in December 1933.

Already more than a year old are four productions which seem on their way to making records for endurance. It Happens On Ice has gone into a second edition. Life with Father can be seen in three cities: Dorothy Stickney and Howard Lindsay reincarnate every middle-aged American's mother and father on Broadway, Lillian Gish and Percy Waram in Chicago, Dorothy Gish and Louis Calhern in Boston. Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen, in its dramatization by Chodorov and Fields, still delights audiences, and Ethel Barrymore continues with dignity and eloquence to grace the part of the schoolmistress of Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green.

It would be gratifying to report that the offerings of 1941, assayed as a whole, were found to contain finer qualities than those of the previous year, to reveal new writing, acting and staging talents, to set higher imaginative standards. The record would not support such claims. The familiar pattern is repeated, and of the thirty-odd productions to be seen in the closing days of 1941, one-third were musical shows, one-third light comedies; of the remaining third, three or four might be said to have more than seasonal interest. And the year's crop of outright, flop-by-night failures seemed bigger than ever — well over forty of them with an average life of twelve days. The strongest among them, S. N. Behrman's The Talley Method, played four weeks; the best of them had in their casts actors like Pauline Lord, Barry Fitzgerald, Elia Kazan, Margo, and Elsa Lanchester; the frailest was titled The Lady Who Came to Stay, who belied her title and remained on the boards for two days. They were, in most cases, ramshackle affairs, whose producers gambled and lost.

Musicals.

The diligent producers of musical shows were as active as ever in 1941, and a few of them struck gold. First of all, there was Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark, produced by Sam Harris. A ladies' magazine editor, through psychoanalysis, re-lives her conscious and sub-conscious past; fact and dream, normal and fantastic are blended in a thoroughly original and exquisitely produced piece deriving its many perfections from the varied talents of its collaborators: Kurt Weill for haunting music, Ira Gershwin for deft lyrics, Albertina Rasch for choreography, Harry Horner for entrancing and witty décor, Irene Sharaff and Hattie Carnegie for costumes; and above all, Gertrude Lawrence bringing superb talents as actress, singer and dancer to the part of the distraught lady in the dark. Crude by comparison, Crazy with the Heat had at least the familiar comic gifts of Willie Howard, whose impersonation of a broken-down Russian ballet-master stopped the show; Albert Johnson designed the settings, and Catherine Littlefield the dances. George Abbott, mindful of previous success with a musical built on the college theme and peopled with youngsters, chose a Winsocki prep school for the locale of Best Foot Forward. With the exception of Rosemary Lane, who played the disruptive movie star, the cast of this musical was a roster of newly discovered talent — Nancy Walker, Victoria Schools, June Allyson, Maureen Cannon. John Cecil Holm wrote the book, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane the tunes and lyrics.

Danny Kaye, in Herbert and Dorothy Fields' Let's Face It! became one of our most resourceful comics in numbers especially contrived for him by Sylvia Fine and Max Liebman within the framework of a Cole Porter show which had, besides, three ludicrous females in search of adventure in an army camp, played by Eve Arden, Mary Jane Walsh and Edith Meiser. In High Kickers, which sentimentalizes the old-fashioned leg-show, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker embodied the lusty and not-too-finical humors of an out-moded genre, in settings by Nat Karson, with a script by Jessel himself aided by such old hands as Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.

Sons o' Fun was really a third edition of Hellzapoppin, depending for its hilarity on the vaudevillians Olsen and Johnson, abetted by Ella Logan and the torrid Carmen Miranda; its dance routines were by Robert Alton, and its settings by Raoul Pène DuBois. In the conventional mode of operetta, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd wrote the book and lyrics and assumed the direction of Sunny River, in charming sets by Stewart Chaney, and with smart costumes and dances by Irene Sharaff and Carl Randall. Eddie Cantor chose Christmas Night for the première of his Banjo Eyes, the plot of which had been drawn by Joe Quillan and Izzy Ellinson from that old favorite. Three Men On a Horse. The horse in this extravaganza is named 'Banjo Eyes,' and is played by Mayo and Morton in scarcely less frisky style than that of the ebullient Eddie, who gambols, chatters and prances quite as though he had not been absent from Broadway upwards of ten years. Vernon Duke composed the tunes to words by John Latouche and Harold Adamson, and a bevy of designers have given opulence and sparkle to a show which has a Belmont Park finale.

Comedies.

That one-third of the year's product which ranged from the frankly farcical to the intelligently comic, employed as varied talents as those of Noel Coward and Owen Davis. At one extreme was Pie in the Sky, which the critics considered a regrettable indiscretion; at the other, William Saroyan's fascinating and wayward The Beautiful People. Gay on the whole, with a special appeal to theatre people, were the antics of six stage-thirsty juveniles in search of a producer, in Francis Swann's Out of the Frying Pan, which William Deering produced, and which Alexander Kirkland directed with an eye for laugh-getting. A similar goal was set, and at moments reached, by Theatre, another portrait of the famous actress on the stage and in private life originally from the pen of Somerset Maugham, and dramatized by Guy Bolton. In Theatre, Cornelia Otis Skinner displayed her technical brilliance in a role for which the rest of the piece was mere background.

Similarly a vehicle for stardom was Spring Again, by Bertram Bloch and Isabel Leighton, whose crusty ancestor-worshipper could have been played by no other than C. Aubrey Smith, and whose fragile elderly lead fitted Grace George to perfection. It was Joseph Buloff as a Hollywood producer who brought this play to life and challenged the laurels of his mellow co-stars. In Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward sought to give the old triangle a new angle by putting one of its three chief characters into the spirit world. A broadly-caricatured medium, played by Mildred Natwick, materializes the first wife of a novelist (Clifton Webb) Leonora Corbett plays this inconvenient apparition, and Peggy Wood the more substantial but equally troublesome second wife, in scenes which are Noel Coward at his not-quite-best — inventive, witty and sparkling. No such originality marked Parker Fennelly's Cuckoos on the Hearth, a rather mad pot-pourri of farce situations and characters kidnapped from other entertainments, directed by Antoinette Perry and sponsored by Brock Pemberton.

In Junior Miss, Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields have again, as in My Sister Eileen, drawn a play from sketches in the New Yorker, in this case Sally Benson's series about the Graves family trying to cope with its adolescent young. The 'junior miss' of the play's title, is brought to hilarious life by Patricia Peardon. Rose Franken has built around another family problem — this time the three-cornered conflict of husband, wife and wife's mother — a compact, quiet and searching character-study of real distinction, and has been fortunate in the cast of Claudia: Donald Cook expertly plays the husband, Dorothy McGuire the immature and unpredictable young wife, and Frances Starr the mother. Donald Oenslager designed the single setting for one of the year's few substantial dramas.

Another family perches dizzily on a San Francisco hilltop in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People; their home appropriately skeletonized in surrealist style by the designer, Samuel Leve, and their life a typical Saroyanesque mingling of the real and the fanciful, the logical and the irresponsible. These fragments of their author's own permanently adolescent mind play with mice, blow trumpets, live on forged checks, write one-word novels and behave, in short, like delightful and very human and amiable lunatics, not the least reason for their appeal being a combination of absurdity and affection in their attitude toward life and each other.

Murder and Mystery.

Murder and mystery were the theme of both Arsenic and Old Lace and Brooklyn, U.S.A., and both plays gave an original twist to violent death. The former actually made unnatural death a subject for laughter by creating two lovable and kindly old maids who have a weakness for putting visitors quietly out of the way, and who compete with their brother's record for victims. Joseph Kesselring wrote Arsenic and Old Lace; Bretaigne Windust directed it for Lindsay and Crouse. Josephine Hull, Jean Adair and Boris Karloff played the Brewster trio. Audiences quickly responding to something audaciously new in the field of dramatic thrillers, continued after a full year to fill the theatre. It is too soon to predict whether Brooklyn, U.S.A., will match that record. Its two authors, John Bright and Asa Bordages, being newspaper men, are familiar with the details of recent gangster murders in Brooklyn, and have based their thriller on fact. Through authentic detail and an evocation of the grim and sordid atmosphere of racketeering, an atmosphere intensified by Howard Bay's settings, the playwrights have given their piece documentary as well as melodramatic value; and their emphasis on the human consequences of the events recorded lifts Brooklyn, U.S.A., from melodrama at times to tragedy.

Another thriller was the psychological horror drama, Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton, originally played in London as Gas-Light, and brilliantly acted here by Vincent Price, Leo Carroll and Judith Evelyn. A murder mystery with the light touch was Mr. and Mrs. North, from a book of the same name written by Frances and Richard Lockridge, and dramatized by Owen Davis, with characters provided by a series in the New Yorker. The Norths, in story and in play, were a delightfully erratic pair who found themselves on the trail of a double murder; they were acted by Albert Hackett and Peggy Conklin.

Revivals.

No year fails to bring revivals of time-tested plays, and 1941 saw three outstanding ones: Euripides, Shakespeare and Shaw. Gilbert Murray's version of The Trojan Women, directed by Margaret Webster, appeared briefly under the aegis of the new Experimental Theatre. Miss Webster acted in it, as did Dame May Whitty; the choreography was by Felicia Sorel, and the incidental music by Lehman Engel.

It was again the brilliantly resourceful Margaret Webster who directed Maurice Evans's revival of Macbeth, with musical score by Engel and in settings by Samuel Leve. Thanks to Miss Webster, music, settings, lights and sounds drive rapidly to a crescendo of horror. Mr. Evans, an intelligent and resourceful Macbeth, fails to achieve, as a whole, the heroic dimensions of his part; Judith Anderson creates the most memorable Lady Macbeth in recent memory, and stands at the very top of her profession.

Another first lady of our theatre is Katharine Cornell, and it is a tribute to her respect for the theatre that she played Mrs. Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma not as a star role but in proportion to Shaw's play as a whole. The revival was staged by Guthrie McClintic, with settings by Donald Oenslager. Wherever Shaw was diabolically satirical at the expense of medical pretension and bombast, the play was most amusing; the passages where Shaw sentimentalized, as in the famous credo of the dying painter, were harder to vitalize for an audience of today. Fortunately, the piece was directed with an eye for those brittle Shavian qualities which best survive time, and acted by a cast richly capable of projecting them, including Whitford Kane as Sir Patrick Cullen and Raymond Massey as Sir Colenso Ridgeon. Miss Cornell's Jennifer was, of course, a graceful and exquisite performance.

Serious Plays.

A relatively small number of plays in 1941 dealt with the war, or with the issues involved in it. The best of all anti-Nazi plays to date, and probably the finest play of the year, was Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine. Into the secure, comfortable Washington home of an elderly diplomat's widow stalk the passions and ideals for which men are dying throughout the world. Her son-in-law is Kurt Mueller, a secret anti-Nazi agent whose identity becomes known to the blackmailing pro-Fascist Rumanian nobleman who is his fellow houseguest. Kurt has to murder the count and go back to his work in Europe, breaking once and for all with the quiet life his sensitive character needs, for the sake of doing what his conscience believes necessary. It is into this conflict of character in Kurt, nobly resolved, that Miss Hellman has put her most trenchant writing and Paul Lukas his superb acting abilities; the rest of the cast, directed in masterly fashion by Herman Shumlin, creates characters who live long after the final curtain — Lucile Watson the matron, Mady Christians her daughter, George Couloris the Rumanian blackguard.

Frederick Brennan's The Wookey is, by comparison, routine stuff, mingling farce and tragedy, domestic humor and air-raids, in the simple tale of a bargeman in whom British individualism is incarnated, and who battles two enemies at once — the 'government' which is always making mistakes, and the Nazis who are trying to destroy the home which is his castle. The settings are by Jo Mielziner, and Edmund Gwenn's mellow acting makes thin playwriting seem more substantial than it is.

Maxwell Anderson's Candle in the Wind would like to be heroic as Watch on the Rhine is heroic; but the story, this time in prose, of the long efforts of an American actress to free her French lover from a Nazi prison, never achieves compelling emotional force, although Helen Hayes brings charm and defiance to the part of the actress, and the bestiality of Nazi officialdom is exposed with bitter thoroughness. A similar inability to live up to a major theme weakened The Land Is Bright, in which George Kaufman and Edna Ferber traced the history of an American family from the 'nineties to now, its ancient quarrels forgotten in the present crisis. Arnold Moss, Martha Sleeper and Phyllis Povah headed a large cast; the plot was lavish in action, the sets of Jo Mielziner lively, the total effect of the production brittle and unconvincing. The war with its hatreds and suspicions is in the background of a rather tepid piece called Letters to Lucerne, produced by Dwight Deere Wiman with sets by Raymond Sovey, and with a cast of young people who turn out to be the daughters of celebrities — Nancy Wiman, Mary Barthelmess, and Sonya Stokowski among them. The authors, Fritz Rotter and Allen Vincent, depict quietly and at times sentimentally the impact of war on six girls who live in a Swiss boarding-school. Grete Mosheim, as the German child on whose head the miniature tempests converge, plays her part with considerable eloquence. Howard Koch and John Huston wrote In Time to Come, and appropriately opened it on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson's birth. It deals with the betrayal of his peace ideas after the First World War, and derives its interest from being a timely warning and reminder of past mistakes, rather than from strong dramatic qualities of its own. Arnold Korff, Russell Collins and others give competent impersonations of historical persons, and Richard Gaines is a convincing Wilson.

It may indicate a 'trend' that so few plays in recent months dealt seriously with American problems. In its quiet way, Sophie Treadwell's Hope for a Harvest did that. What shall the American do, driven by economic forces from the acres his family has always cultivated, and seeking a new usefulness, a new centre of gravity for his character? Frederic March and Florence Eldridge played thoughtfully rounded characters with authority, in this Theatre Guild production. Marc Blitzstein's incisive and challenging opera, No for an Answer, played for three Sunday nights in January, revealing a score of greater maturity and more controlled power than that of The Cradle Will Rock, with all the social sting of the former work. The production of Clifford Odets' Clash by Night had settings of superb quality by Boris Aronson and was directed by a master of the art, Lee Strasberg. Tallulah Bankhead and Joseph Schildkraut, as the Staten Island wife and her lover, did their expert best with scenes which the playwright had somehow bungled, and which even his occasional flashes of insight failed to make into a play. Paul Green and Richard Wright together made a play in ten blistering scenes from the latter's novel, Native Son. Ostensibly a shocker, Native Son is basically a study in those hatreds, fears, and violences engendered by smouldering resentment toward race prejudice; the fast-moving plot, and the emphasis on melodrama in Orson Welles' staging of the murder scenes allowed less insight into the mind of the negro Bigger Thomas than did the novel, but Canada Lee enriched the part by his playing of it, and the audience, directly addressed from the forestage by Thomas' defense attorney, was left in no doubt as to the author's meaning.

Retrospect.

In retrospect, what is the critical measure of a year whose best plays were so few — Claudia, The Beautiful People, Native Son, Watch on the Rhine? The answer is to be found in a survey published on its own twenty-fifth anniversary by Theatre Arts magazine. That survey reminds us that in the dozen years following 1915, Robert Edmond Jones designed The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife and the provocative Macbeth; Arthur Hopkins staged The Jest and John Barrymore's Richard the Third; R.U.R. and The Adding Machine spoke a new language; Paul Green won the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham's Bosom; O'Neill wrote The Emperor Jones and Odets, Awake and Sing; the Civic Repertory Theatre and the Group Theatre challenged Broadway, and set a new standard for ensemble acting. Those years saw an originality, an artistic integrity, and a technical resourcefulness which the years since cannot match, — with the honorable exception of the Federal Theatre.

Norris Houghton looks elsewhere for signs of promise. In his Advance from Broadway, he sums up 19,000 miles of travel throughout America in search of an American theatre. He found the Summer stock theatres as robust as ever. He found many a trade union producing meaningful plays on its own. He saw plays given to farmers who paid for their admission with the produce of their farms. In widespread community theatres, he found a healthy bond between players and audience. He discovered historical pageants which had grown out of local history, and college theatres striving to develop new playwrights while keeping alive the great classics of the theatre. In Alabama, in Texas, in Vermont, he saw at least the makings of a genuinely national theatre which could become an expression of our life as a democratic people. Here, at least, 'the land is bright.' See also LITERATURE, AMERICAN.