All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (48 page)

Fifteen

The Great Sebastians Make Their Last Visit:

THE LATE 1950
S

One might have expected the first years of national television to create attendence slumps at amusement parks, bars, restaurants, and cinemas. One might even have anticipated the unprecedented boost it gave to the business of its advertisers. But surely no one foresaw that TV might become in effect Broadway’s biggest supporter—at first—as if to halt the steady contraction resulting from the overextended 1928–29 season and the unrelated cataclysm of the Depression. First there were too many theatres, and then there was too little money.

But now there was television, with its two centers of production, in New York and Los Angeles. The latter was closely allied with the movie industry, and the former, obviously, with Broadway. Actors, writers, and techies found their work doubling or tripling, both for headliners and those well below the glamor level. The home screen had yet to invent most of its genres or to discover the talent appropriate to them, so, throughout the 1950s, a large fraction of New York TV production was “theatre”: sixty- and ninety-minute dramas and musicals taped “live” in the studios (which were usually the former theatres whose disuse was created by that overexpansion in the 1920s). On Pearl Harbor Day in 1947, the original Broadway cast of John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman’s adaptation of Marquand’s novel
The Late George Apley
(1944) revived the show on NBC, heralding a major new form, Televised Broadway. Whether in such odes to Rialto events as Mary Martin in
Peter Pan
or Katharine Cornell and Anthony Quayle in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
or in entirely new work with a Broadway flavor such as Julie Andrews in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Cinderella,
TV was not only Broadway’s employment bureau but its cultural adjunct.

The system worked both ways, so that TV writers often moved to The Street, sometimes with expansions of works previously televised.
Middle of the Night
(1956) was one such, written by Paddy Chayefsky and produced and directed by Joshua Logan. The biggest name involved was Edward G. Robinson, making his first Broadway appearance since
Mr. Samuel,
in 1930. He played a fifty-something in love with a twenty-something (Gena Rowlands) in that unique Chayefsky world in which your butcher, manicurist, or, here, clothing manufacturer turns out to be as fascinating as a big-game hunter or tango dancer. It’s not unlike Clifford Odets without the ecstatic philology, a William Inge of the urban melting pot. At 477 performances,
Middle of the Night
was a hit, mainly for Robinson’s expert underplaying and movie-star name; the work is utterly forgot today.

William Gibson’s
The Miracle Worker
(1959) is one of the best-remembered of the straight-to-Broadway TV dramas, not least because tristate-area schoolchildren of a certain age made their first Broadway visit to this title, usually on a class trip. We’ve had a footnote on the food fight between Anne Bancroft and ten-year-old Patty Duke; here, now, is their strange relationship in toto, as the older woman battles the younger to get her to drop her defenses and let therapy make her whole. This happens so seldom in real life that its often rather instantaneous success on stage—as in
Lady in the Dark
(1941)—can seem silly. In
The Miracle Worker,
however, it is enthralling, and of course the audience knows that the little girl grew up to be Helen Keller.

The two leads were extraordinary. In
Theatre Arts,
Jack Balch tried to analogize Duke’s “energy and fury” and came up with Judith Anderson’s Medea. An extremely faithful movie with Bancroft and Duke has made constant reviving unnecessary, though in 1997 Duke took time out from her busy schedule of scolding the rest of us (because as a child star she suffered being rich and famous while we were enjoying pop quizzes on
The Last of the Mohicans
) to take Bancroft’s role of Annie Sullivan in a back-to-television adaptation, opposite Melissa Gilbert.

To an extent, highbrow Broadway disdained the TV writer, as happened earlier with the Hollywood writer. Neither Chayefsky nor Gibson was welcomed aboard—and Gibson had made his debut with an original for the stage,
Two For the Seesaw
(1958), with Bancroft opposite Henry Fonda, the entire cast. Of course, highbrow Broadway still held an ace in Eugene O’Neill. Though he died in 1953 with his greatest play entrusted to his widow to withhold for twenty-five years,
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
was news too big for the vault. Yale University Press published the text in 1955, Stockholm gave the world premiere in February of 1956, and Broadway took its first look at the piece at the Helen Hayes Theatre (now demolished, to Eva Le Gallienne’s intense relief) on November 7, 1956.

One has little to add to all that has been written about The Great American Play, but for some notes in no particular order. First: that first production in Swedish was so big an event in Western Civilization that Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations secretary-general, sent a congratulatory message; imagine that happening today. Second: this “other” of O’Neill’s blatantly autobiographical plays takes place exactly when
The Iceman Cometh
does, in the summer of 1912. The Circle in the Square
Iceman
revival that revealed Jason Robards Jr. as the apparent O’Neill stylist and persuaded the Widow O’Neill to let José Quintero direct
Journey
occured in May of 1956—as if guiding Broadway’s attention back from Stockholm to the place where an American play earns its recognition. In his heyday, O’Neill was imposing: now he would be great.

But he would have to give too much away to get there, which is why he wanted that quarter of a century to pass before his personal memories suffered the assault of his artistry.
The Iceman Cometh
is autobiographical only in the abstract;
Journey
tells us what it was really like and how it felt at the time. So, from the play that is set far off, in a barroom, the destructive if avuncular relationship between Larry Slade and Don Parritt is revised for the play that is set close up, in the home, as the fraternal relationship of James and Edmund. We remember Slade eagerly awaiting the thump of Parritt’s body on the pavement at
Iceman
’s close. Thus, as if he had spent his career peeling away the “theatre” of it all to arrive at one perfect script for Broadway’s first reality show, O’Neill turns from the colorful, stagy, and allegorical
Iceman
to something unheard of in playmaking: one day in the life.

Note, too, that while O’Neill is never thought of as an Irish playwright, he is very much one here because his family background—father James was Irish-born, in Kilkenny—is
Journey
’s family background. And yet the sterotypical Irishman, so endemic to the show biz of O’Neill’s youth and given mythical apotheosis in
Iceman
’s Harry Hope, was all but eradicated by the 1950s. Most James Tyrones play James O’Neill with a touch of brogue—a very world away from the pickled Clancy that Charles Winninger was still purveying in Hollywood just a decade before. Indeed, the senior Tyrone is intolerant of fun-timers and binge drinkers, of any men without a steady line of work. At one point, he excoriates “Broadway loafer’s lingo” as if disapproving of
Guys and Dolls,
of the new ways to live that were to be discussed in our arts from 1919 on.

The cast that Quintero assembled for that first American
Journey
varied from sound to brilliant: Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards Jr., and Bradford Dillman. Mary Tyrone was actually to have been Geraldine Page, barely thirty then but an expert ager. March, however, was sine qua non, and he wouldn’t work without his wife, capable but not quite the shimmering ruin that Page would have played. Interestingly, Robards also did not appear in the part that
he
was meant for, for of the two sons it was the younger James that was thought the showier, more actory role. But Robards felt an affinity for the more complicated Edmund, and it has been the “Robards role” ever since, leaving Jamie to the
jeunes premiers
. The 1962 film’s lineup of Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Robards, and Dean Stockwell is unbeatable, though Vanessa Redgrave, in 2003, found something new and striking in Mary by playing her as a drug addict. Not someone weird and wispy who is living on a pharmacopoeia, but a helpless monster trapped in the outbursts and disconnects of substance withdrawal.

There were further O’Neill disinterments to come, but the true playwright of the 1950s would have to be Tennessee Williams. We’ve had mention of
The Rose Tattoo
(1951) and
Camino Real
(1953), but it was
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955), at the center of the time, that showed Williams as sharp as ever in his blend of the erotic and poetic, his compassion for his people even as he strips them of illusion. O’Neill doesn’t like his characters (except in his UFO,
Ah, Wilderness!
), but then he is most often writing about his difficult family. Williams got his family out of the way in
The Glass Menagerie,
then went on to the real art of telling tales. If his glory diminishes by the 1970s, it is simply because we all sat through that interminable second act that great American lives aren’t supposed to have. Williams had a long one, filled with ghastly flops.

But with Kazan directing
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and a cast headed by Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara as Maggie and Brick, Burl Ives and Mildred Dunnock as Brick’s Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Pat Hingle and Madeleine Sherwood as Brick’s scheming brother and sister-in-law,
Cat
was a smash. It is second to
Streetcar
alone in Williams’ work in immediate and lasting popularity, but here the outstanding role is not the Beautiful Male but the Resourceful Female. That’s why they call her Maggie the Cat. Indeed, despite writers’ common remarking of
Cat
’s Williamsiana—the South, homosexuality, alcoholism—
Cat
’s characters are unique in Williams’ gallery. Big Daddy is especially unencountered elsewhere, so unlike the sex demons and mollycoddles Williams favors. Brick is a combination of the two, a former athlete who is now a drunken hater of his life; and Maggie, one of Williams’ favorite children, is foreign to the style of the Williams leading lady, as a sensible person thrown into a bizarre situation who sets about taking control of it: and succeeds.

Something else worth noting: as if aware that doubters would accuse Williams of repeating himself with more southern decadence, he introduced structural novelties into
Cat,
first of all in letting each act start exactly where the previous act ended. Second, he opened Act One with a monologue for Maggie (with terse retorts from Brick) that rivals Hickey’s. Third, Williams held Big Daddy’s entrance till Act Two, let him dominate it, then slammed him with the announcement that he has terminal cancer and cut him out of the third act but for offstage cries of anger and pain.

However, Kazan thought Big Daddy too fascinating to shelve midway in the action. Kazan had other reservations about the third act, and while Williams accommodated Kazan in all this, he troubled to publish his original third act as an appendix to the script as performed. One odd thing about Williams is that while he appeared on talk shows as a brain-fried loon, throwing out an arm and crying, for no apparent reason, “I cover the waterfront!,” when writing about his work he was perfectly rational about his procedures. Explaining his willingness to compromise with Kazan under duress, Williams wrote, “The reception of the playing script has more than justified … the adjustments made [under Kazan’s creative] influence. A failure reaches fewer people … than does a play that succeeds.”

Harold Clurman directed Williams’
Orpheus Descending
(1957), a revision of
Battle of Angels
(1940), the play referred to earlier that closed out of town; it was supposedly booed right off its Boston stage. The earlier title reveals the play’s religious undertow, while the later title of course suggests Greek myth. Interestingly, the hero is another Brando role (albeit only in the 1959 film version,
The Fugitive Kind
), Val Xavier (Cliff Robertson). A “savior” in snakeskin jacket with a guitar, he charms the ladies, especially the local hellion (Lois Smith) and the wife (Maureen Stapleton) of the worst villain in all Williams (Crahan Denton). Unappreciated when new, the play got a healthy jolt when Vanessa Redgrave took on Stapleton’s role in London and New York in the 1990s, making a facilitator into a driver in one of her most remarkable portrayals. Still, there were doubters. On English television, all-around theatre man Stephen Berkoff merrily suggested that the play was “about a snakeskin jacket,” unfortunately in the presence of Williams acolyte Maria St. Just, who ripped into Berkoff like a tiger. “And such a second-rater, too!” she concluded witheringly.

Reunited with Kazan, Williams returned to somewhat trodden ground in
Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959), filled with classic Williams types: the Big Lady (Geraldine Page); the hustler, fetchingly named Chance Wayne (Paul Newman); his childhood sweetheart, the even more fetchingly named Heavenly (Diana Hyland); and her father, the small-town fascist Boss Finley (Sidney Blackmer). Louis Kronenberger called it “a fuming and rioting depravity,” perhaps because it began The Morning After, with Page asleep in bed and Newman, astir in pajamas, slippping a tape recorder under the bed, presumably to collect data for blackmail. When Page finally awoke, donned glasses, and inspected Newman, she uttered what must be the second gayest line Williams ever wrote: “Well, I may have done better, but God knows I’ve done worse.” The gayest line followed right after: “I like bodies to be hairlessly silky smooth gold.” And soon after that, Page was smoking hashish, right in front of Louis Kronenberger.