All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (33 page)

One wonders what would have happened if Eva Le Gallienne had been put in charge instead. FDR considered it. But Le Gallienne offered to found an elite company to match the Comédie-Française or the German state theatres. The
best
of a culture. Roosevelt wanted the
most
of a culture, a relief program that—Le Gallienne must have realized—would serve as a safety net for the least capable people in the business. What Le Gallienne envisioned was a perfect
Hedda Gabler
. What Roosevelt envisioned was a poor family treated to a matinée of
Lightnin’
that would open their horizons. Theatre makes you smart.

The Federal Theatre’s four years seems small until one remembers what a sprawling beehive it was. A joke in George M. Cohan’s star turn as FDR,
I’d Rather Be Right
(1937), found Federal Theatre Unit no. 864 barging in to perform their production number “Spring in Vienna.” As the unit director explained, “Whenever we see three people together, we’re supposed to give a show.”

But it wasn’t a joke; there were plays going on all over the place. There was even a sudden flowering of an independent little theatre movement in New York during the 1938–39 season. Congress finally crushed the Federal Theatre on June 30, 1939—the program was shut down starting at midnight on the very day of the vote, the equivalent of a Renaissance Italian poisoning party—but Roosevelt’s national theatre never did close, in a way. Because one of its most notable innovations eventually became theatre law: color-blind casting. While the Federal Theatre’s Negro Units would have been happy to put on black plays, there was a shortage of the software; and such new items as William Du Bois’
Haiti
(1938) were used up quickly. So why not do … oh,
The
[
Swing
]
Mikado
?
Macbeth
?
The Show Off
? There was even a black staging of the Nativity (to balance a white one) during the Christmas season of 1938 that toured the city in a literal sense, playing on street corners, in front of the
Daily News
building, and on the steps of the Forty-second Street Library.

Here we must backtrack a little, to see how black theatre emerged in the Golden Age, both as a separate entity and, after the late 1930s, more integrated into the mainstream. Historians have a treasury of landmarks to cite, but an often overlooked one concerns a piece of casting in
Abraham Lincoln,
the chronicle play by the English John Drinkwater that we took note of on its appearance here in 1919. In one scene, Lincoln tells a black preacher—a freedman—of the presidential intent to proclaim Emancipation as, outside, men march off to battle to “John Brown’s Body.” The servant, one William Custis (apparently modeled on Frederick Douglass), was played by Charles S. Gilpin, a black man. Now, this was emancipated casting, for in 1919 custom requested all-white troupes (except for the extras) with black speaking roles played by whites in blackface.
2
If this was not the first such occurrence, it was the first important one, for one year later Gilpin burst into fame for his convulsive grandeur in the title role of
The Emperor Jones
.

White musicals incorporated separate black ensembles on rare occasions, and Florenz Ziegfeld definitively integrated Broadway in 1910 in hiring Bert Williams for the
Follies
, the first black
headliner
in a white show. In spoken drama, the first citation is the performance by an all-black cast of three one-acts by Ridgely Torrence for two weeks in 1917 at small, out-of-the-way theatres, first the Garden (across the street from Madison Square) and then the Garrick. Gilpin’s turn in
Abraham Lincoln
is more significant, right up on The Street at the Cort in an otherwise white troupe. The third breakthrough, most significant of all, is
The Emperor Jones
. Launched by the Provincetown Players on off-Broadway, play and staging alike aroused such interest that the show was taken uptown, in makeshift matinées here and there but then for an open run at the Princess Theatre for a total of 204 performances. Note that in the mixed-race
Jones,
the ringer was now white. (He was Jasper Deeter, soon to found the famous Hedgerow Repertory Theatre, in southeast Pennsylvania.) This led on to more expansively mixed-race productions and, as well, prominent black plays (by whites) such as Paul Green’s
In Abraham’s Bosom
(1926) and Marc Connelly’s Bible retellings,
The Green Pastures
(1930).

The 1930s saw more black drama but fewer landmarks. (One odd statistic: the 1930–31 season was the first in almost eighty years in which there was no major tour of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.) The Scottsboro case inspired two plays, which opened within the same week in 1934, the little-known
Legal Murder
and John Wexley’s famous
They Shall Not Die,
with Claude Rains as the crusading defense attorney fighting a legal lynching. These plays continued to be the work of white writers, but now Langston Hughes entered the lists with a genuine hit,
Mulatto
(1935), which played an astonishing 375 performances in the theatre’s worst season since who knew when, albeit in the smallish Vanderbilt Theatre. Like
In Abraham’s Bosom, Mulatto
told of the difficulties of those of mixed genealogy, caught between the separate behavioral codes of southern life; and, as in the Green, Rose McClendon distinguished herself. The Federal Theatre, for all its ecumenism, could not field star power. The better actors had to fight for a place in commercial precincts.

The Green Pastures
’ twenty-one-month run (with another star turn, from Richard B. Harrison, as De Lawd) dwarfed all other black plays. But the diffidently redoubtable DuBose Heyward capped the thirties black cycle in collaboration with his wife, Dorothy, in
Mamba’s Daughters
(1939). As in the Heywards’
Porgy,
the source was a novel by Du Bose and the setting was the Charleston ghetto, where blacks avoid white law enforcement to dispense their own rough justice. Maintaining the tradition that outstanding black plays offer at least one notable performance—Gilpin, McClendon, Harrison, though
Porgy
was apparently more of an ensemble statement—
Mamba’s Daughters
offered Ethel Waters in her first non-musical role. In fact the a cast was filled with names that buffs dote on, including
Porgy and Bess
alumni Anne Brown, Georgette Harvey, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Helen Dowdy, along with Canada Lee, Alberta Hunter, Fredi Washington, and our own José Ferrer. Katharine Cornell’s husband, Guthrie McClintic, was the producer-director, and for a special treat Heyward wrote with Jerome Kern a bel canto blues for Waters, the lament of a jailed woman called “Lonesome Walls.” It’s not unlike a female “Ol’ Man River.”

Even without the big number, Waters’ role of Hagar is quite heroic, treating a woman with intense family loyalty and a homicidal resentment of those who would cheat her. The play has few if any supporters, though it ran 162 performances at the mighty Empire, but Waters’ very size in the part made the assumption all the more invigorating. What other talents might have been passed over thus far? For the revelation of Sweet Mama Stringbean—agent of song, dance, and assorted “foolnish”—as an actress of stature implied that the public’s appreciation of black talent had been too narrow.

Again, the Federal Theatre widened it, just by showing how much black talent there was. From song-and-dance shows
here
and the occasional black tragedy
there
, black performers were getting around with greater ease. And surely part of the job description of a democracy’s national theatre would be the furtherance of democratic values. The elite stage that Eva Le Gallienne dreamed of creating would have to be called an incorrect model.

So would the Theatre Guild, despite one virtue it claims over all the other theatre organizations mentioned in this chapter: it lasted for two generations. That aforementioned opening number of
The Garrick Gaieties
spoofed the Guild’s process of play selection with “We know just what to do because we always take a chance!” Yes: on European works. Some national theatre that is. Even when the Guild adopted Americana, what exactly did the Guild stand for? Excluding the likes of
The Bat
or
White Cargo,
the Guild did everything.

This was the complaint of its most stagestruck junior staffers Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. They thought the Guild lacked focus. This trio envisioned an alternative motivated by more than the inchoate wish to “take a chance.” An alternative whose actors and technicians would forge an integrated system for the honest presentation of honest writing, completely devoid of the hokum queen and matinée idol that still thronged the stage. In 1937, W. Somerset Maugham could approvingly explain acting in his novel
Theatre
in a manager’s advice: “Don’t
be
natural …
seem
natural.” The Clurman-Crawford-Strasberg actor would
be
natural.

The year was 1931, not a propitious year for the founding of a company interested in what we might call Drama of Social Inquiry. Indeed, the trio did not at first
break
with the Guild. Their launching venture, Paul Green’s
The House of Connelly,
was presented “under the auspices of the Theatre Guild,” for the Guild had to underwrite the ten-thousand-dollar capitalization cost. Green’s play had in fact been under Guild option—what play with a sad ending and folkloric patina hadn’t been under Guild option, often for years on end? Set in the south,
The House of Connelly
told of the struggle between sluggish tradition and revitalizing youth; tradition wins, in the murder of the heroine by archons of the old ways, ironically enough two black women.

As we shall see, this is exactly the material that Clurman, Crawford, and Strasberg sought to build their theatre on, though they did persuade Green to revise for a sunny ending, as the young heroine prevails. The play’s preparation was unprecedented: three months of summer commune training in which Strasberg coached and drilled the company (many of them Guild bit players) into an artistry of Being Natural. There was exercise in dance and improvisation. There were all-night discussions.
3

Then came the customary Runthrough For the Guild, and the Gang of Six threw its usual tantrum, demanding the replacement of several actors and the reinstatement of the original tragic finish. (One can almost imagine Lawrence Langner asking, “Whoever heard of a play with a happy ending?”) Clurman, Crawford, and Strasberg held firm, however. How were they to perfect the concept of thespian ensemble if actors could be plopped in and out?; and as for the ending, the alternative was not to describe the world but to improve it.

So the Guild halved its financial support and did not put
The House of Connelly
into subscription rotation. Our three breakaways now really had to break away, raising five thousand Depression dollars, scrambling for a booking, and hiring staff. Yes, they would eventually have left the Guild, but they were forced to leave
now,
as the Group Theatre, and already we have one of the Group’s defining elements of character: integrity. In a world so compromised by needy psyches and freaks of fortune that the bitterest enemies might be writer and director, or co-stars, or married, the Group never suppressed its value system opportunistically. The five thousand dollars that the Group’s chieftain trio had to raise could prove unavailable; the loss of the Guild’s subscription support could mean the difference between a one-off and the future. But when the Guild menaced Green’s optimistic, progressive ending and la-di-dahed Strasberg’s painstakingly coordinated thespian symphony, the Group didn’t have to think it over. The answer was no: or you might as well be doing
White Cargo
.

One can love the American theatre without loving Eugene O’Neill, Eva Le Gallienne, or George Abbott; the development of overhead lighting or the revolving stage; or even free programs. But one cannot love our stage without loving the Group. So why are so many critical of the organization that tried harder than any other to idealize its art? The complaints are clichés even today:

It lasted for only nine years, presenting twenty-three different plays of which but a handful joined the national stock. At least the Theatre Guild made a campaign out of Eugene O’Neill. The Group had, mainly, Clifford Odets (with six titles, his entire early output), and (with two titles each) Paul Green, Irwin Shaw, and Robert Ardrey. The emphasis on Lee Strasberg as the Group’s director (Clurman and, less often, Crawford and others also directed) overstressed Strasberg’s limited interpretation of the Stanislafsky System as Strasberg’s own “Method.” And, of course, those Group actors were ever deserting to Hollywood. Thus, Franchot Tone, the original Will Connelly in the Group’s first show, soon enough became a second-rank leading man at MGM as the Gentleman in Tails vying with Real Man Clark Gable for Joan Crawford’s Shopgirl Princess. And we already know the saga of Clifford Odets.

What irritates about these criticisms is that while they’re mostly true they are also entirely misleading. First of all, what is “only” about lasting nine years of Depression when virtually everything you put on is non-commercial? Keep in mind that even producers dealing exclusively in commercial attractions failed all the time; and the Group never had the Lunts to fall back on.

As for the paucity of golden names among Group playwrights, didn’t the Group by its very vocation have to open its own tabernacle of writers? How many saints are to be assembled in nine years? And regarding Strasberg’s direction: yes, he so centered his teaching on the actor’s personalization of character that he created a schism within the Group (though the division was not official till the 1950s). Indeed, Strasberg’s belief that Stanislafsky’s program was a concluded science warred with the Russian master’s own view of his approach as an ever evolving experiment.