All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (42 page)

As à clef comedy faded, a new attraction flowered: the adaptation from the French. The texts were generally less translated then transformed (if slightly), to bridge a cultural divide; S. N. Behrman alone has adapted a couple for us already. Still, the late 1940s saw the French create an active contingent on Broadway, led by Jean Giraudoux. His
Siegfried
had come to town, at the Civic Rep, as far back as 1930. Now, just after his death, in 1944, came
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(1948) and
Intermezzo,
retitled
The Enchanted
(1949).

Of Giraudoux’s successors, Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed the most réclame, the former with a Katharine Cornell-Guthrie McClintic
Antigone
(1946), esteemed if not vastly attended, and the latter with
No Exit
(1946),
The Respectful Prostitute
(1948), and
Dirty Hands,
renamed
Red Gloves
(1948).
The Respectful Prostitute
was the hit, less for Sartre’s scathing look at race relations in the American South than for a new star, Meg Mundy.
Red Gloves,
treating skullduggery in some unspecified European Communist group, offered Charles Boyer in his Broadway debut, which gave the show a “movie star” advance sale, an electric opening night in the old style, and a run of 113 performances.

Perhaps because they were so well “adapted,” the French plays did not call attention to Gallic writing, or the kind of acting suitable to it, as for instance in the quibbling badinage of the madwomen in
Chaillot
. All the same,
something
was happening. On one hand, three of the greatest divas of the ancien régime—Laurette Taylor, Ethel Barrymore, and Pauline Lord—made their New York stage farewells in the 1944–45 season; on the other, Julie Harris would soon unveil the “new acting” in her Frankie Adams. And meanwhile, something else happened: a six-week visit, in 1946, by London’s Old Vic.

A company headed by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Miles Malleson, Margaret Leighton, and Joyce Redman gave the two parts of
Henry IV, Uncle Vanya,
and the oxymoron of Sophocles’
Oedipus
followed by Sheridan’s theatre spoof
The Critic
. Unmissable above all was the practice of ensemble, as when Leighton and Redman slipped from Chekhof’s Yelyena and Sonya to two of Jocasta’s attendants in Thebes, or even when Miles Malleson contributed a bit to each of the four bills but directed
The Critic
.

The outstanding tour de force was Olivier’s taking on Oedipus and Sheridan’s Mr. Puff in a single night—a leap, so to say, from Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
to Drury Lane dandy. Of course, George Jean Nathan maintained his role as Mr. Pan, insisting that the whole business was thrilling only the usual snobs; but Nathan’s rating of Olivier overall as “competent and commendable” and Richardson as “at times competent and commendable” is an alternate snobbishness. And what are we to think when Nathan claims the company didn’t pronounce English very well?

A veritable English explosion the very next year, 1947, persuaded many theatregoers that the English not only pronounced but acted very well. Donald Wolfit brought his company over in Shakespeare and
Volpone
. John Gielgud staged Euripides’
Medea
in Robinson Jeffers’ version with (the Australian) Judith Anderson and himself. There was as well a Gielgudian troupe giving
The Importance of Being Earnest
and Congreve’s
Love For Love,
with Robert Flemyng and Pamela Brown in both, along with Margaret Rutherford’s Lady Bracknell and Cyril Ritchard’s Tattle. Granted, these two comedies are easy to pull off, for the actors can play on the wit, while the language of Shakespeare or Chekhof opens upon a psychological labyrinth. Really, what have Wilde’s Ernest or Algernon to reveal as they puppet about, bickering over muffins and courting the mysterious Bunbury? The strings, my lord, are false.

At that, Brits Michael Redgrave and Flora Robson let down their side in a
Macbeth
(1948), directed by Norris Houghton, that sought to reestablish the primitive world the play inhabits. Redgrave spoke of “people who slept in their clothes, had no time for haircuts, and didn’t shave just before a battle for their lives.” As with Lionel Barrymore’s
Macbeth
in 1921, the concept tantalizes (as does the casting of the Weird Sisters, one of whom was Julie Harris). But no one was in the mood. As if supporting the George Jean Nathan Theory of English Acting, this
Macbeth
crashed in 29 performances.

The debate swirled on—what exactly constitutes acting? Instinct and intelligence, of course. Technique, voice, imagination, but also … what? There was the inspiring ensemble of the Group, but how would the Group compare with those Old Vic show-offs in Shakespeare? Was there such a thing as cultural entitlement, as when our own Maxwell Anderson’s
Anne of the Thousand Days
(1948) called upon Brits Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman to enact Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn?

And then the nature of American acting was revealed conclusively, by a near unknown who had been on the scene in a handful of small or secondary roles. He settled this
querelle des acteurs
with what might be the outstanding portrayal in American theatre. Then he left the stage forever.

Yet no one took Marlon Brando for a historical figure when he arrived in New York, in 1943; his attitude so lacked professional piety that he seemed to dare producers not to hire him. True, before Brando John Barrymore merrily offended with his Don’t Give a Damn front. But Barrymore was protected by tradition, dynasty, lore.

Brando was protected by his lack of tradition; his talent was—there is no other word for it—startling. He could walk downstairs in
I Remember Mama
(1944) munching an apple and transfix the public. It’s a famous Broadway story: they didn’t believe he was acting. Had someone missed a cue? Was a stagehand pushed on to cover for him? Mama Mady Christians and crabby Uncle Chris Oscar Homolka were so busy upstaging each other they could never figure out how Brando—as one of Mama’s children—got an exit hand just by saying goodnight. As I’ve said, Katharine Cornell adored reviving
Candida
(1946) with Brando’s Marchbanks: his novelty refreshed her portrayal. But Tallulah Bankhead had Brando fired during the tryout of Jean Cocteau’s
The Eagle Has Two Heads
(1947) for failing to make kowtow to the diva.

This is so much trivia. In the middle of it, just before
Candida,
Brando gave a hint of what was to come in Maxwell Anderson’s
Truckline Café
(1946). A kind of proletarian
Grand Hotel,
it suffered one of the worst critical shellackings of all time. The reviews read like victim-impact statements at a murder trial, and the show closed in two weeks.

Yet it left the memory of an extraordinary scene in which Brando, having drowned his unfaithful wife in the Pacific Ocean, came roaring back onstage to break hell loose.
Truckline Café
’s director was Harold Clurman, and he and Elia Kazan produced (in association with Anderson’s home firm, the Playwrights’ Company). With a set by Boris Aronson at the Belasco Theatre,
Truckline Café
was virtually a Group entry after the fact, and it was Kazan who so to say “Grouped” Brando up for that last entrance with runs up and down a stairway and a blast from a pail of water: so Brando’s Sage McRae would truly “be” a man coming back from a shattering experience in the ocean. It was a double-album expansion of a one-number role, and the theatre community talked of it for the rest of the season. Olivier, too, was famous for physical stunts, yet there was always something of the fop, the beau, about him—even as Coriolanus, with a genuinely death-defying fall to be caught by the heels by two terrified supernumeraries just before he hit the stage, a Shakespearean Mussolini. “A more shocking, less sentimental death I have not seen in the theatre,” Kenneth Tynan wrote, in awe. So the dandy could menace. Still, Olivier was stylish. He was a pageant. He was … well, English, while Brando was brutish, hot, American.

So we wonder why, when producer Irene Mayer Selznick was readying
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947), with Kazan as director, he didn’t immediately suggest Brando. True, Stanley Kowalski was originally supposed to be over thirty and Brando was twenty-three; but it seems a small point. Madame Selznick, the daughter and wife of Hollywood moguls, naturally wanted to tap movie stars: John Garfield as Stanley and Margaret Sullavan as Blanche DuBois. But Tennessee Williams didn’t like Sullavan, and Garfield, though the right age, made too many demands, such as agreeing to play only four months of the run. Kazan reckoned that Garfield actually wanted to take the role but couldn’t face moving his family from California, and thus applied prohibitive conditions. Indeed, perhaps stirred by the success that Brando’s Stanley created, Garfield went to Broadway later in
Streetcar
’s season, in Jan de Hartog’s
Skipper Next To God,
a 6-performance flop. In 1952, Garfield finally got to play the role that Clifford Odets had promised him in 1937, in the title role of a
Golden Boy
directed by Odets. It was Garfield’s last performance before his untimely death.

Williams himself might have demanded Brando as Stanley. However, the playwright spent so much of his time wandering around the globe enjoying himself that he wasn’t up on the news along the Rialto. Williams not only knew nothing of Brando; he may not even have heard about Maxwell Anderson’s very public reply to
Truckline Café
’s reviews, in which he likened the critics to rednecks—“a Jukes family of journalism.”

Not that Williams was lazy; he worked tirelessly at his art. But here is something new in this saga, a portent of the breakup of the theatre community. Imagine Ned Sheldon, in the 1910s, being ignorant of the appearance of a major new talent. But then, Ned Sheldon was a playwright because, in the world he grew up in, Broadway represented the height of glamor. Tennessee Williams was a playwright because he wrote plays; his idea of glamor was being on site when Gore Vidal slipped on a banana peel.

At that, Williams was thirty-six and still virtually unknown. His only previous show had folded on the road, and
The Glass Menagerie
was perceived at the time as mainly an actress’ comeback triumph. By comparison, Ned Sheldon at thirty-six was a king of Broadway. When he ventured into a mean-streets setting, it was
Salvation Nell
(1908), realistic for its day but still somewhat glamorous. With Mrs. Fiske as Nell, how mean could it be?
A Streetcar Named Desire
was sordid: its heroine is a dithering loon and the male lead rapes her. There isn’t even any redemptive social inquiry, as there is in
Salvation Nell
. Instead, there’s violence and poetry, sexy and gay and crazy all together.

But it had Elia Kazan, you say. Kazan was nobody, too. Yes, he directed
The Skin Of Our Teeth
and a smash Mary Martin musical,
One Touch Of Venus
(1943). However, here as well the triumphs belonged to others.

Now this would change; it was
Streetcar
that changed it. As we know, it was Jed Harris who foresaw the shift in the public’s interest from the guy who pays the bills to the guy who talks to the actors. But it was Kazan who most significantly implanted the concept of the director as the most masterly of the theatre’s artists. Master
ful
? No: Kazan could not control Bankhead on
Skin
. Yet see how cleverly Kazan developed the gulf between Blanche and Stanley by giving minutiae of advice to Marlon Brando but no help at all to Jessica Tandy. It was Kazan’s way of throwing the play to her in the face of Brando’s spectacular “debut.” Kazan knew that Brando—whom he finally mentioned when Garfield didn’t work out—was going to take Stanley to the bank. And he knew that Tandy was capable enough to create a superb Blanche without his coaching. What Kazan especially knew was what Williams taught him about the Blanches of this world: they’re effective only as manipulators, good with dandies and plops. They’re no match for a man. To let Tandy be the protagonist of her own tragedy, Kazan had to leave her helpless, overwhelmed by Stanley/Brando: tragic. Is this how Ned Sheldon’s plays were directed? Did Olivier work this way?

As we head into the last decade of the Golden Age with Williams and Kazan, we can see
A Streetcar Named Desire
as the most influential work of that age—the one that conclusively widened the scope of Broadway’s subject matter, that understood the importance of the director, that absorbed the example of the Group in the “meaning” of acting. We admire the O’Neillian lilt of Williams’ title, and we need to know more about this play.

Twelve

It’s About This Doctor:

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
AND
THE CRUCIBLE

Ian Marshall Fisher, the impresario of London’s Lost Musicals series (the equivalent of New York’s Encores!), has developed the theory of the “driver” and the “facilitator” to describe the relationship between two leading characters in a play. The facilitator is all-important in an ancillary way: essential in framing the superiority of the driver. In Shakespeare’s
Othello,
the title role is actually the facilitator, while Iago, the longest role in all Shakespeare, is the person who runs the play. His evil is its subject.

When Tennessee Williams wrote
A Streetcar Named Desire,
he naturally thought of Blanche as the driver, to Stanley’s facilitator. For one thing, Stanley is by far the shorter role; one of John Garfield’s conditions for accepting the part was a line buildup. Then, too, the Stanley that Williams envisioned wasn’t quite the well-nigh Shakespearean cocktail of coiled-spring power, verbal humor, peacock beauty, and appetitive brutality that we now know him to be, because to Williams’ knowledge there was no such actor in stock. Whom might Williams have had as a model? Van Heflin, perhaps. Or yes, Garfield. Then Brando appeared, and the facilitator became the driver.