All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (12 page)

Four

Beauty That Springs from Knowledge:

NEW BROADWAY

Among the theatre’s experiments in the 1920s, three in particular stand out as antagonistic to what we could call Broadway Before the Strike. Some may see these three experiments as typifying a revolt against naturalism—against, more precisely, the “realism” of David Belasco, in which, many felt, a veneer of innovation was painted over
passéiste
romanticism. Nevertheless, all three of these novelties characterize New Broadway as surely as the many new theatres built north of Fortieth Street made obsolete the older auditoriums farther south. Of the trio, one was ephemeral, one was long-lived and claims a historical contribution that has been in dispute for seventy-five years, and the last one proved enduring right up to the present day.

The ephemeral invention was a style: expressionism. Whether in painting, music, or theatre, expressionism employs fantasy, distortion, and alienation to amplify its power of communication. But it shows up in so many forms that it’s easier to cite adherents or examples of the art than to define it. Arnold Schoenberg, Edvard Munch, Franz Kafka.
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,
Richard Strauss’
Salome, Berlin Alexanderplatz
.

Or perhaps it’s better to isolate the particulars of expressionism on the American stage. There is, for instance, the depiction of a crowd of nobs coming out of church in Eugene O’Neill’s
The Hairy Ape
(1922) as, the author directs, “a procession of gaudy marionettes,” even “Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness.”

Or consider Woodman Thompson’s set designs for John Howard Lawson’s
Roger Bloomer
(1923), including a street scene of houses leaning drunkenly on one another under an elevated railway that curves elastically through the sky. This is another element of expressionism’s visuals—the deformation or enlargement of ordinary things. A sight of the age is the gigantic mechanical calculator that Mr. Zero climbs around on in Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine
. Music and noises—rackets, especially—are also a feature of the style, as in the steady
incalzando
drumming that begins after the first scene of O’Neill’s
The Emperor Jones
(1920) and continues through the penultimate scene.

Expressionism’s fantastical surprises may inspire dream sequences or rudely cut themselves into “real” life. In George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s
Beggar On Horseback
(1924), reality is a somewhat skinny frame surrounding a vast surreal enactment on expressionism’s favorite theme, the corruption of human existence by the parochial intolerance of lowbrows.
Beggar
’s protagonist, a fellow of artistic bent, is so rattled by his future in-laws’ Main Street emptiness that he kills the lot.

Murder is almost de rigueur in expressionism, a kind of poetic Scream in which every man is his own Caligari.
The Adding Machine
thus treats not an artist but a nerd—our Mr. Zero, an accountant—as a psychosis waiting to happen. Dehumanized by a life as dreary as his job, then told he is to lose even that, and to a machine, Mr. Zero snaps, murders his boss, and is executed, to sample various afterlives till he is sent back to earth for more of the life that is nothing. However, in another John Howard Lawson title,
Processional
(1925), yet another murdering protagonist busts out of jail in the literal sense, simply breaking his cage apart despite
his
story’s more or less naturalistic atmosphere.

What we find most elemental about expressionism is the oddly skewed nature of its hyperspace dialogue, that quality of characters not so much conversing as confessing, or sharing drastic poetry with the audience, or simply free-associating. Sophie Treadwell’s
Machinal
(1928) presents a heroine as alienated as Mr. Zero. But he speaks in ordinary urban English, while Treadwell’s protagonist spends a monologue letting her mind go for a walk. Then, too, there are the famous asides in O’Neill’s
Strange Interlude
(1928) and
Dynamo
(1929) and Elmer Rice’s
The Subway
(1929).
Strange Interlude
uses its asides most variously, sometimes as lengthy monologues and sometimes as momentary observations or skinny little reveries:

PROFESSOR LEEDS:
(greeting his former student) So glad to see you, Charlie! A surprise, too! We didn’t expect you back so soon!

Fortunate, his coming back … always calming influence on Nina …

MARSDEN:
And I never dreamed of returning so soon. But Europe, Professor, is the big casualty they were afraid to set down on the list.

PROFESSOR LEEDS:
Yes, I suppose you found everything completely changed since before the war.

The war … Gordon!…

Above, I have named all the major American expressionist plays, to emphasize that the movement—if such it was in the first place—began in 1920 and was over by 1930, counting a mere handful of titles. The extent of expressionism’s influence is not clear, though the style has resurfaced from time to time, as in the fantastical non sequiturs and avowals in the dialogue of the musical
Follies
(1971). Though revisions have naturalized it, the original show was virtually an evening-long expressionist dream sequence like the one in
Beggar on Horseback
.
1

Note, too, that
Beggar on Horseback
was the work of deacons of The Street, not iconoclasts like O’Neill, Lawson, and Treadwell. True, the show is far less dangerous than
The Hairy Ape, Roger Bloomer,
or
Machinal,
because its distaste for boobois America was one that educated folk were happy to share. “All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote at the time, and we seem even more so today in a red-and blue-state America. One wonders, though, if any of the audience wondered why the authors felt the Cady family deserved to die. Yes, Mr. Cady is a sanctimonious money-grubber, his wife a simpering nincompoop, their son a slimy conniver, and their daughter—the protagonist’s romance—a stupid flirtbag. Still, their only real offense is that they’re boring and thus like boring things.

The protagonist (Roland Young, much later Hollywood’s Topper) is a penniless classical composer with a doting neighbor (Kay Johnson) who is his real love—as he finally realizes. This pair further isolates the Cadys as American types: Young has talent and Johnson’s a pistol. In fact, the authors never give the Cadys a chance; several times the four of them speak over each other for long passages, and we aren’t supposed to discern what they’re saying because they aren’t saying anything. For life. The real point of the show is to reveal what Cadys mean by the word “culture,” for the big dream sequence includes a visit to the Cady Consolidated Art Factory, where everything is mass-produced. A novelist dictates to a stenographer, and when he dries up in mid-cliché she goes right on for him. A tour group passes:

VISITOR:
Say, will you show us how the artist works?

GUIDE:
Certainly. What will you have—a cover or an advertisement?

VISITOR:
What’s the difference?

GUIDE:
There isn’t any.

Coincidentally, though
Beggar on Horseback
preceded
Broadway, Chicago,
and
The Front Page,
it already saw how a murder trial might be “produced” as a show-biz event. Indeed, Manny Mozart must have put on this show, too, for no sooner had Roland Young killed the Cadys (“Now you’ve done it,” says Mrs. Cady, after he stabs her daughter) than newsboys came running into the Broadhurst Theatre’s auditorium. “Extra! Extra!” they shouted. “All about the murders!” This was a clever piece of showmanship: as the public turned to take in the action in the aisles, the curtain sneakily came down, ending the first act without the standard punctuation.

There’s a noisy newsboy in
Processional,
too, getting the play off to the fastest exposition in theatre history: “Extry! Soldiers and miners clash! Threats! Thrills! Throngs!” That’s the plot premise—events surrounding a labor action. Plot is the least of
Processional,
however, for it was Lawson’s ambition to leap beyond what he called “the facile mood of Expressionism”—really, the verbose monologues and visual exaggerations. Lawson wanted to abstract something of “America’s character and rhythm,” using “vaudeville patter and jazz noises.” He even employed an onstage band, in the deliberately peculiar grouping of flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, French horn, banjo, accordion, harmonica, and Jew’s harp; the players maintained speaking parts but mostly accompanied the action using pop tunes of the day. Like the paperboys of
Beggar on Horseback
—which opened exactly eleven months earlier—
Processional
’s band marched in right up the theatre aisle.

While Lawson’s dialogue is seasoned with a touch of the customary expressionist raving, he strove to concoct his own blend of the vernacular and the poetic, albeit using little punctuation. His protagonist, Dynamite Jim (George Abbott, climaxing his early acting career to concentrate on writing and directing), the aforementioned jailbreaker, is here entertaining a visit in his cell by his mother and grandmother, the latter called Old Maggie:

OLD MAGGIE:
I can see in the dark. Monkeydoin’s Sin an’ capers … why ain’t men got nuthin’ better to do but kill an’ drink an’ chase womenfolk?… What makes ’em do it?

JIM’S MOTHER:
I dunno the moon, I guess.

JIM:
Yes, and corn liquor.

Processional
is filled with “characters” and reprobates of all kinds, from the Chamber of Commerce to the Klan, and while Jim’s killing of a soldier in a fight is not something we sympathize with,
Processional
is meant more as a crazy vaudeville than as persuasive narrative. Indeed, the show ends as Jim marries Sadie Cohen (June Walker) in “The Jazz Wedding,” bringing back
Processional
’s own newsboy, one Boob Elkins (Ben Grauer) to cry “Extry! Extry! All about the big peace!” as the entire company marches up the aisle to the hot-rodding of the band. This is the “processional” of the title: the parade of American culture that—so we are told once again—becomes its own show biz because that’s all that Americans believe in.

Clearly, Lawson planned to seize his public with something clamorous, weird, and exultant.
Processional
is something like a concept musical without a score, yet another piece of New Broadway. The critics weren’t ready for it. Percy Hammond of the
Herald-Tribune
thought it “suffers from convulsions,” and the
American
’s Alan Dale called it “pointless, witless, opaque, ill-written, and abjectly foolish.” Keep in mind, though, that both men held reactionary views. (Remember Dale fulminating about the racial integration in
Aphrodite
’s ensemble?) The more curious Heywood Broun, of the
World,
thought
Processional
in need of revision. But, for now, it was “the scratch paper of a great American play.” That’s actually quite a compliment, and audiences kept
Processional
running for three months.

If Kaufman (yet not Connelly) remains one of Broadway’s golden names and Lawson is forgotten, Sophie Treadwell came out of obscurity for a nice little huzzah when
Machinal
made a return at the Public Theater, in 1990. Expressionism has been extinct for so long that, back in the 1930s, when someone would say to George S. Kaufman, “You know what play of yours should be revived?,” Kaufman would snap back, “It’s dated,” having assumed the allusion was heading for
Beggar on Horseback
. Yet Treadwell apparently tapped into something timeless in
Machinal
. Again, we have a murder case, this time a real one. Here’s how reporter Damon Runyon described guilty accomplices Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray: “A chilly looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble, you-bet-you-will chins, and an inert, scare-drunk fellow that you couldn’t miss among any hundred men as a dead set-up for the blonde, or the shell game, or maybe a gold brick.” It was, said Runyon, “the Dumbbell Murder” because of the pair’s inept killing of Snyder’s husband and their inability to keep their stories straight. As
Broadway
has been telling us, murder was a headliner’s act; if the world was a vaudeville bill, a capital-punishment trial was the coveted next-to-closing spot. Jolson wasn’t bigger. Among those sent to report on the Snyder-Gray days in court were D. W. Griffith (presumably to discern the hidden allegory), Peggy Hopkins Joyce (for the gold-digger angle), Mary Roberts Rinehart (who, we recall, co-wrote
The Bat
and thus knew crime), and the Reverends Billy Sunday and John Roach Stratton. A
Daily News
photographer with a camera concealed in his pant leg caught a cloudy view of Snyder dying in the electric chair, and it greeted the city on the front page the following day.

Treadwell’s take was not prurient but artistic: why did she do it and what kind of story does it tell? An expressionist one, of course, so Snyder has become, as the form prefers, symbolic and somewhat dehumanized as simply the Young Woman (Zita Johann). We eventually learn her name: Helen Jones. But expressionism really likes names like Mr. Zero or Boob Elkins, or simply job designations, so the rest of
Machinal
takes in the Husband, the Mother, the Judge, the Priest, and the sole character who actually listens to what the Young Woman is saying, the Man (Clark Gable, a couple of years ahead of the movies). The nine scenes bear titles—another expressionist exercise—such as “At Home,” “Prohibited,” “The Law,” and “A Machine”: the execution, of course. The Young Woman’s final words are “Somebody! Somebod—.” Snyder’s were “Forgive them, Father.”

Treadwell avoided
Beggar on Horseback
’s fantasy and
Processional
’s gallimaufry of theatricalities, inventing instead a kind of expressionist naturalism—to heighten the experience without wallowing in The Experimentalism Of It All, and to explore her protagonist’s feelings as an indiviual. The other two plays do that at times, but are also eager to kick away convention for the threats! thrills! and throngs! that so much of Broadway’s twenties experiments depended on. Treadwell’s approach is stylized, true—but her storytelling is person-scaled. In
The Adding Machine
or
The Hairy Ape,
the alienation of modern life is an institution, a monster, virtually a character in the play. This is because expressionism generally was about the playwright: about his ingenuity in dramatizing his cross-section of society. Treadwell wanted to be ingenious, too: but she needed even more to show how a woman denied any happiness in her working, social, or romantic life chances upon someone loving and appreciative—the Clark Gable figure—and more or less loses her reason in trying to find her way back to that brief happiness. Yes, through murder.