Variety (January 1953)

270 LEGITIMATE The Play’s THE Thing : By JOHN ROEBURT “All the world’s a stage . f . its men and women . . . players.” But the immortal Bard, alive in our time, would revise his observation to read: “All the world’s a . . . and Its people playwrights .” Because, despite John Golden’s cry of Drought and R. Sherwood’s lamen- tations, just about everybody and his creditor has written, is now writing, or contemplates soon writing from prepared notes— a play. The playwriting bug in Everyman is a phenomenon of our times; a dedi- cation more endemic than Quiz Con- tests and Church Bingo. Any reason- ably literate fellow without (secret or open) dramaturgical desiderata is, underneath it all, really not a reason- ably literate fellow. Our paper stock of American plays, written by and for Americans, can be freely, said to be 59Y—over-X times, over—Well anyhow, it’s one helluva lot of paper! I’ll not cite Library of Congress statistics on yearly play registration. Too frightening in its omen for the kind of land we dump on our posterity. Plays for ploughshares, for ballbearings and Rybutol. A nation spearing the heavens with ball-point fountain pens. Brother, how will we ever stand up to the Russians? Wherefore this universal consecration, why this mass addiction? A search for motive in mine fellowman and yours, is as complex as trying to make sense from Jean-Paul Sartre. First consider the truly neophyte dramatist, the non-pro, the fellow already nicely mired in his own workaday environment. He has his job, Govern- ment bonds, pet parakeet, his pre-paid burial plot Yes- terday, today, tomorrow—his rut’s comfortably built to measure, and in the deepest sense, he likes it. But he writes plays on the side—evenings, Sundays, and St. Valentine's Day! | Just for Kicks What secret dream does he dream, what psychical com- bustion pushes him into this frightful self-expenditure? Is it the lure of sudden wealth, or his name up high on the Alvin marquee, or the yelping joy of Walter Kerr? Not a bit. This is not the design of the truly neophyte, drama- tist. For him the sheer playwriting experience is the whole of it. The manuscript alone suffices for him; the manuscript of itself, in its unproduced and virginal state, is the ecstasy and catharsis. Broadway, La Jolla, or Brat- tle, is not the mote in his eye. He absolutely does not purpose the overthrow of Moss Hart, or go it claw and fang with Mary Chase for capture of the $4.80 custom- ers. In fact, and get this: he seldom even bothers sub- mitting his magnum opus to the market! Then what’s with this Joe? Why the systematic an- nihilation of foolscap? We can only (wildly) speculate. The play here is Outcry; its author’s Retort Supreme to the Spoilers and Rowdies who mobilize him come day- break, flog him through the live-long day, and boot him to bed come night. The play subject is, inevitably, his own work world. The technical materials vary with the region, genre, and industry. In Seattle, it’s the salmon- canning industryr in Salinas, it’s lettuce; in Paterson, tex- tiles; along Madison Avenue, nepotism and nostrums. The ingrate writer has secret animadversions, the script re- veals; a cannibalistic craving to gnaw the hand that feeds him. Blustery iconoclasm is the tone of the piece. Blow the lid off, tear the joint down, cry havoc. His job (fac- tory, office, water works, mine, steamship agency, maga- zine) is exposed as a chromium and mahogany Hades, a drab underworld of lowlifes, his immediate superior Prince Machiavelli in a Hickey-Freeman suit. With the fall of the 3d Act Curtain, Boss and Establishment lay beautifully rendered. The hatcheting is wrought in per- fervid dialog that would bemuse even George Jean Nathan. An end in itself, this; proof of the fellow’s innate su- periority over Vulgarity. The play is documentation to the fact that the blinkers he wore for all to see, never covered his unerring Third Eye. And oh, heady triumph, too: the Kid v/ho flunked the Fourth Year English Re- gents, now stands as one with Aeschylus, Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller. Art end in itself, verily, and the play is regretfully locked away, never to be seen or seized by Jed Harris. k Too combustible, too personal, too insurrec- tionist. Too‘ big a concept, much too big a risk! Let it be read around, he’d get canned out of his job, drummed out of the local branch of the Odd Fellows. The play Wish then, as a rebel cry, Lucifer Anonymous defending Christendom, the Ego in search of its face. But is this similarly true of the Pro, the proven writer with credits on file for whomsoever to invesigate? The proven writer, this is to say, of magazine, column, book, film, radio, teevee, but exclusive of the established playwright, the elite corps who regularly crack the Atkinson-Chapman line. The writer only then, whose toil and pay is in vine- yards other than the penning of legitimate 3-acters. Why is it with him? Why must he stubbornly write plays for leisure frolic, in every hour he can wrest from the Moloch ar.d his Missus, and dare submit same with the speed of Air Mail? Wherefore hisJFrenetic dedication? J Tli rives, on It I do not now speculate. This guy I well know, Yorick! 1 have broken onion rolls with him, and swigged deep draughts from pinchbottles. I have spun gossamer dreams with him, and held his hand in nightmare. Does he write plays in a sure, shrewd, brash design calculated to snag the house key from Lee Shubert? Does this joker per- form with the aplomb of an old pro at home with words, with a like professionalism and easy-does-it as he indites his soap operas, screen tales, features and greeting card limericks? No, he does not! The play, the very notion of the play, does something uncanny to this fellow. In the fell grip ot his Muse, he is a man transfigured. Hives from secret sub-depths pop through his skin like warts on an apple. His eyes smoke, like automobile headlamps in the Cali- fornia smog. And the voice, too, is a casualty. The free- swinging gabber who can verbalize Darryl Zanuck into a spot surrender of cash, is suddenly a guy with the stam- mers. Our boy can. now only converse in the strangled oh s of a Monte Cristo seeing his first sunrise after 30 years in the Pit. The play it would seem, the whole 164 pa Sf! ? f ! he sacred first draft, is stuck in his throat! ^ What does the play represent to him? Nothing more A ©r less than Mother, Earth, Sky, Nativity. All other scriv- John Rocburt Forty-seventh Anniversary ening triumphs; the string of smash screenplays, the 204 socko weeks of sudsy Procter Sr Gamble washtub drama, the shelf of whambang novels—all nothing, pooh, all trivia, bah, dross, drivel, fiat for the Pharisees. None of it the true substance of the true inner man, the nub of his intellect, the hey nonny nonny of his soul. To this fellow, the play is the thing, and no fooling! The play is chimera* the siren call of the bright Medusa, a thing of Awe, the creme de la creme of his mortal milk, the tabernacle of his true faith, the neon-lighted dream, his Atonement and his Redemption. He must write plays for breath, and he must write them in a self-searing maso- chism, as if from pain alone must come birth. And brother, does he put on a show! He walks in hu- mility, heavy with Strindberg, muttering incantations frpin early Odets. He feasts ravenously on any crumb of-pr^tsie, rushing rewrites to suit his housemaid and idiot brother- in-law. His every progress from word to line is a breath- less bulletin in theatrical gossip columns. The play pages are a de facto Bill of Divorcement—his wife can’t get 20 seconds of his consecrated time. His tour-de-force in the writing, or in transit to Audrey Wood, takes narrative precedence over the traumas of boyhood on the Analyst’s Couch. He utterly denudes himself of professionalism, and stands naked as birth and twice as guileless, before the Lajos, Egri bible, “The Art of Dramatic Writing.” He sits meekly in student seminars on Play Construction, and makes dutiful memorandum of gibberish. His Industry Citations, Scrolls, and Statuettes, lie mouldering in the attic with his. old violin, Jce, skates, and Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class 1 .” But a framed and matted letter from The Theatre Guild that reads “Your play was cer- tainly interesting, but present Guild production plans make it impossible . . .” hangs proudly on his studio wall! Crazy? Now friend, leave us not be hasty . . . I’ll quickly remark on a third type guy in the business of scheming up 3-acters. He began in his college sopho- more year. Now in his middle age, the man is still the boy. He is a playwright down to his toes, with never a digression, never a phrase or a comma lost to Young and Rubicam, or S. Goldwyn, or Field & Stream. Plays pour like steel ingots, in endless assembly; a stupendous ton- nage of paper stacked in his furnished room, in the cellar of his mother’s house in Flatbush, in his married sister’s closet. The latter performs without fee as Command Li- brarian, keeping scrupulous catalog of the welter, and performs secretarially, too, in a lively correspondence with Lee Sabinson. Twenty years of it, and he hasn’t made a buck, yet^ nary a complaint. He hasn't time to complain. He's in the middle of a new play. This latest one’s an allegorical drama of the Insect World. A peppery piece, peppered with social symbols. There will be a casting problem. He’ll need to find a talented insect for the central lead. But that’s a crisis for another day. First things first; the play’s The Thing! Huh? What? Do I have a play, does somebody ask? For immediate option? Well . . . sure thing! Come on-a my house, and make your pick. One play? Mister Bloom- garden, please!—I’ve got trunks full of them. Who Was That Book I Seen You Out With Last Night ? By MAX SHULMAN As I sit here in my cane bottom chair, in my hand an old meerschaum pipe filled with good shag—and I really prefer bad shag, but I can’t find it anywhere—as I sit here thus reminiscing over the flow of books that spewed from the presses in the last twelve- month, I ask myself what kind of year, bookwise, was 1952? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it indiffer- ent? I confess that I am unable to come to a conclusion. Let me list a few leading titles of the year, and you help me decide. Following 1951’s pattern, the sea continued to play a major role in' American letters. There was “Sem Goona,” the pulse-pounding account of an intrepid Kurd named Sem Goona who sought to duplicate a sea voyage in a birch bark canoe reputed to have been made a thousand years ago by a group of natives from Cannes around Cape Horn and through the whale infested south- ern sea to Perth, Australia. It has become a legend of publishing how Mr. Goona’s manuscript was discovered in the esophagus of a sperm whale brought into the South- ern Cross Rendering & Whale Oil Co. Then there was “The Wet Sea,” by Pierre Descartes, a pulse-pounding account of the invention of the pom-pom, so beloved by the French ordinary seaman. (Mr. Descar- tes’ earlier book, “The Beret Story,” will be fondly re- membered by aficionados of head coverings.) Then there was “How Deep and Blue Is the Deep Blue Sea,” a pulse-pounding historical romance of the briny deep, a posthumous work by the beloved Evelyn Goodhue Pipgrass, who died, as you will remember, serving out the last years of a Mann Act rap. She was the only woman ever to be convicted under this statute. Speaking of historical romances, there comes to mind immediately “The Codpiece,” by Norman S. Balderwit, a pulse-pounding story of how .fiery, hot-blooded, raven- tressed Maud Gransmire, daughter of a lowly kiosk, rose from candy butcher on the Liverpool Coach Line to be- come notary public to the King himself. Moving from romances of the past to factual accounts of the present, who will not remember Clyde Fenster- macher’s pulse-pounding “I Was a Weighmaster for the FBI,” the stranger than fiction account of busting the short-weight racket at the Reading Coal & Dock Co. And in the same genre, “I Was a Boarder by My Wife,” by Medford Eau Claire, a Wisconsin man who left his wife when he discovered she was smuggling pelts from Canada but later returned, incognito, and joined her m her lawless work. They made a bundle. In the anthology line two volumes stand out. First, of course, is “This Is tyy Next Best,” edited by Aaron Pert- wee, a pulse-pounding bpqk in which 100 American au- thors pick their ownHtavorite stories except one. The other anthology is “A Treasury of the World’s Great Southpaws,” over 300 stories by left-handed writers. This collection is all the more remarkable when you con- sider that its compiler, Raymond Gatehead Zinns, is-him- Wednesday, January 7, 1953 Bring Broadway Back Alive By PHILIP DUNNING This is one of those then-and-now stories covering over a third-of-a-century of the ups and downs of Broadway, the longest and most famous street in the world, starting way downtown in Manhattan and running clear on up to Albany, a distance of some 145 miles. But its fame was gleaned from the theatrical productions presented and not from the mileage covered. The section that passes through the bright light district at Times Square can be kind and warm or cold and cruel, glamorous and wonderful or shoddy and phoney. It all depends on how you look at it or how it looks at you. It has been very kind and generous to this wayfarer and I shall always be grateful. From this fabulous street came the characters, locale and the plot for the play, “Broadway,” writ- ten in collaboration with George Abbott. And in addition it was where I had the good fortune to meet Frances Fox, the girl I married. Phil Dunning Recently we celebrated our 33d wedding anniversary by strolling up Broadway to see the tremendous changes that have taken place since we first rambled through that region when we were young and gay. Just a Memory | We began our stroll at 32d street and Broadway where Wallack’s Theatre once stood. That particular spot was selected for sentimental reasons. My first job in New York was at- Wallack’s in Louis N. Parker’s delightful comedy, “Pomander Walk.” Wallack’s was demolished many, many years ago. As we strolled we played a little game, each in turn trying to recall the name and location of the legitimate theatres we had known. "Gone but not forgotten were Daly’s . Manhattan.. Garrick.. , Herald Square . .Savoy . Knick- erbocker .. . Casino.. . 39th Street. . . Princess. . . Broadway ... and the Comedy. We found the Maxine Elliott Theatre still standing but it seems to have lost some of its dignity and charm since TV took it over. . The New Amsterdam.. .Frolic.. .Liberty.. .Sam H. Har- ris. . .Eltinge.. Selwyn.. .Times Square.. .Apollo.. Lyric ... Republic.. . and the Cohan—they have all been torn down, closed or turned over to movies. The game we’d started in fun began to get a bit grue- some as'iwfe continued our shrvey. The Criterion . New York. . .44th Street.. .Bayes. . .Little.. .and -the Carroll Were demolished long ago and the Astor.. .Bijou.. .Gaiety ... Globe. . . Central 1 .. . Belasco.. . Hudson.. Klaw.. . Long- acre. . .Ritz.. Mansfield.. .Biltmore.. .Vanderbilt . . . Bel- mont ... Hopkins... Ambassador and the Cosmopolitan have been converted to other uses. We remember the time when as many as 286 dramatic and musical attractions were presented in Manhattan in a single season, using 76 playhouses. A study of our score card shows that more than half of the 76 living theatres that flourished in the past are now gone. The whole com- plexion of the street has changed. The electric signs are bigger and brighter and the crowds are bulkier and more boisterous. The theatrical district now has the appearance of a giant Coney Island midway. It is pockmarked with come-on auctions . . . hotdog stands . . . makeshift photo studios . . . hole-in-wall fake jewelry stores . . . dancehalls . . . shooting galleries . . . gaudy penny arcades and other scavengers content to feed off the street that the living theatre made famous. Many different things have contributed to the decline of Broadway. It probably began with the first silents . . . Then came the First World War . . . the Actors’ Strike . . . rising prices and higher taxes . . . Radio , . . Prohibition . . . talking pictures . . . Wall Street Lays an Egg . . . then cutrate tickets . . . marathon dances and miniature golf . . . the depression . . . the big migration of Broadway to Hollywood . . . still higher taxes . . . bank closings . . . repeal . . . then a string of quick flops . . . Second World War . . . the gyp ticket scandals . . . pictures in color . . . television . . . the war in Korea . . . still higher prices , . . Cinerama . . . the red-hot Presidential campaign. All of these events have hurt in one way or another. The unfairest blow of all is the tax burden the living theatre is compelled to carry. I wonder how many realize that the Broadway strip from 34th to 59th street, the Mid-Manhattan Mile, is the most highly taxed property of its length in the entire world. Instead of City, State and Federal Governments aiding and assisting, they have clobbered the theatre at every opportunity with unjust laws and unfair taxes. ’ There is no business in the world as risky as the theatre. Recently we ran across a statement made by an eminent showman 34 years ago. I quote from an Aug. 19, 1918, newspaper: “Mana r says new tax will be fatal to legiti- mate theatre. ‘It looks to me,’ Marc Klaw declared, ‘as if Congress, despite all the valuable aid given the various war activities, is bent on legislating the legitimate theatre out of existence.” The art of the theatre is too important to this country to allow it to expire. Broadway must be brought back alive. self not a southpaw. He collects his royalties with his right hand. Standing head and shoulders above 1952’s cookbooks is Amanda Smallens Windrip’s “Forty Thousand Southern Recipes” or “Shut Ma Mouf.” Mrs. Windrip is also well known as a metallurgist and is, of course, the inventor of copper. ■ Speaking of recipes, I am reminded of Herman Spangen- ber’s best seller, “Starch Will Make You Thin.” He re- fers, of course, to laundry starch. It stiffens the spleen, thus sending fat producing enzymes to the aorta where they can do no harm. In 1952 hunters pushed “How to Clean a Woodcock,” by Arnold Template, well upon the best seller list, just as Emily Naughton’s sensitive “The Role of an Ancient Elm” was made a success by loggers. >K * * Well, that’s it—the leaders for the past 12 months. What kind of book year was 1952? Good? Bad? Indifferent? It is for you, the readers to decide. That is the American way.