popular theatre of the thirties

Popular Theatre of the ThirtiesAuthor(s): Gerald WealesSource: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Summer, 1967), pp. 51-69Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125138 .

Accessed: 06/08/2014 05:00

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Tulane DramaReview.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.177.221.19 on Wed, 6 Aug 2014 05:00:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125138?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


51

Popular Theatre of the Thirties

GERALD WEALES

I

The hardest literary game to play is that of typicality, choosing the work that most

represents a period. Asked to make such a choice, to put my finger on the 1930's play, I would reach into the repertory open-handed, my fingers spread wide so that I could come down on more than one play. On Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! (1935) as the exemplary social play with its urban idiom and its amorphous Leftist solution. On Three Men on a Horse (1935), in which John Cecil Holm and George Abbott

caught a tone of knowing innocence and a tempo of word and movement that marked much of the comedy of the decade. Perhaps on On Borrowed Time (1938), the play that Paul Osborn made from Lawrence Edward Watkin's novel, openly stuffed with the throat-lumping sentimentality that also lurks behind the seriousness of Awake and

Sing! and the toughness of Three Men on a Horse. Other choices might be substituted, other categories added; by tailoring the description to one generalization or another, it would be a simple matter to find any play of the period, so far as it had some per- sonality of its own, typical of the decade. The temptation is great. The comfortable

way of writing literary-social history is to begin with a preconception about the

period and then find the works that illustrate it. Although one of my concerns in this essay is to see how popular drama reflects the political and social attitudes of the 1930's, I did not want to gather the reflections at the expense of the drama. For that reason, I had to begin with the plays.

That was less simple than it sounds. I decided that 100 plays-give or take a few- would be a fair sample of the popular drama of any decade. The question was how to choose the plays. My test of popularity was the conventional Broadway indication of success, length of run. On the assumption that some seasons as a whole were less successful than others, I chose not to pick the 100 plays which ran longest during the decade, but the ten most successful season by season from 1929-30 to 1938-39. The making of the list involved obvious complications which I solved by being arbitrary. If a play that bridged two or more seasons had the bulk of its run the first year, I listed it in the season that it opened; otherwise, in the season that it closed. The placing of it is important only in that its presence knocked another play out of the ten chosen for that season, and ordinarily no more than a few performances separated the play that I chose from its closest competitor that I passed over.



Theatrical historians and/or sociologists may find my methods impressionistic, but then any test of popularity based on length of run is suspect to begin with. None of the plays on my working list ran for less than 200 performances, but it is impossible to know how many people saw a play during its run; there are too many variables. Charles Collins, commenting on the Chicago season in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1935-1936 says of The Great Waltz, "This operetta-spectacle . . . ran for 15 weeks in the Auditorium to an attendance which would represent a full year's capacity business at any of the smaller Chicago theatres." The same disparity would be apparent if the Center Theatre, where it played in New York, were compared to the more conventional Broadway houses. Not only do the varying capacities of the theatres make a difference, but so too does attendance; a short run to full houses may reach a larger audience than a longer run at half capacity. Despite the inescap- able imprecision in gauging popularity, however, the plays under consideration in this essay were all Broadway successes.

I reread as many of the plays as I could find, most of them in published editions, a few in manuscript. In some cases, particularly for the musicals, I could find no text. In such circumstances, I had to depend on the descriptions of reviewers, which were occasionally contradictory, but recorded songs and published lyrics helped to offset this disadvantage. Having found my specific material, I moved back to generaliza- tions. On the assumption that a catalogue-even one that passed itself off as a mosaic -would be a chore to read, I settled for the essay that follows. I made no attempt to see that each of my one hundred choices was mentioned, but-except in rare instances identified in the text-the illustrative material that I have used comes from the plays on my list. The result, hopefully, is a reasonably accurate portrait of popular drama in the 1930's.

II

Tobacco Road is obviously the 1930's play. Jack Kirkland's adaptation of Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel opened at the Masque Theatre on December 4, 1933. It closed on May 31, 1941, after one of the longest runs in the New York theatre. The play must have changed character year by year. In With a Reckless Preface, lamenting the failure of his own Gentlewoman (1934), John Howard Lawson wrote, "Two important plays of the past season, Peace on Earth and Tobacco Road, succeeded in fighting a winning battle against stupid reviews." In an essay in Pharos, lamenting the failure of his own Battle of Angels (1940), Tennessee Williams wrote: "Hence the failure of the theatre really to explore the many levels of society except in the superficial and sensational way of Tobacco Road and its prototypes, which please the carriage trade inversely to polite drawing-room comedy by representing their social inferiors as laughable grotesques." Probably both Lawson and Williams were right. Kirkland must have wanted to retain some of the seriousness that lay under the comedy of Caldwell's novel, but in transferring the material to the stage he went for easy laughs and sentimental morals. The blatant sex and the broad gags, particularly the nonsense with the disintegrating car, obviously contributed to the play's success, and-judging by what happens with most long-run plays-these elements must have become more and more obvious as the run continued. By the time it closed, Tobacco Road was no more than a successful joke.

52 GERALD WEALES



POPULAR THEATRE OF THE THIRTIES

Caldwell's novel would probably be called a tragi-farce today, a very funny book of which the final effect is not funny at all. The indifference, ignorance, and animality in which the Lesters live and by which they die is stultifying. Although their poverty, which is supposed to have gone on for several generations, is not a product of the Depression, it becomes more vivid in the economic context in which the book was written and published; it reflects the hopelessness of the very early 1930's. On stage, both the poverty and the hopelessness are ameliorated; since a hungry low comedian cannot be all that hungry, the pain of their situation is milked away. Hopelessness is softened by the addition of a conventional sub-plot (Pearl's escape to the city) activated by conventional motivation (mother-love: Ada's sacrifice of herself to that escape). The curtain may descend on the dead Ada, the dozing Jeeter, the falling shingle, but the audience can still hear the footsteps of Pearl pounding the road to Emerald City-Augusta. In one sense this is the traditional happy ending of popular theatre, but it is also the expected end to the serious plays of the decade. The social drama of the 1930's not only assumed that something was wrong but that something could be done. The political optimists of the Left joined hands with the happy-ending traditionalists and produced a decade of positive curtains. If Pearl looked around her on that lonesome road she would find herself not lonesome at all, but in the company of the heroes and heroines of the plays of Clifford Odets, Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman.

Tobacco Road is, then, a good introduction to the popular plays of the 1930's. We tend to think of the decade as the period in which the social play flourished, but Gerald Rabkin in Drama and Commitment says that only about 100 out of 1500 productions between 1929 and 1941 dealt with significant social and political themes. Since we may not share a definition of significance, I neither deny nor confirm his figures, but they do indicate that the plays of the 1930's fit no preconception. Our serious playwrights did have a stronger political and social orientation in that decade than at any other time in the history of the American theatre, but they were only occasionally successful with large audiences. The Group Theatre, which is a kind of symbol of serious theatrical endeavor for the 1930's, had only two popular successes -Sidney Kingsley's Men in White (1933) and Clifford Odets' Golden Boy (1937). Awake and Sing!, that representative play of my opening paragraph, whatever it has come to be, was really a succes d'estime. The popular theatre did not deal with the serious problems of the decade head on, as the social theatre tried to do; it ap- proached them obliquely, teased them, played with them, ignored them. The plays that I have been re-examining include farces, melodramas, sentimental comedies, ladies' handkerchief plays, musical comedies and revues, most of the standard brands of theatre; in the bulk of them, the decade's problems are on the edge of the action, or only in the wings. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of this indirection is to look at the double nature of those plays which deal with or pretend to deal with serious themes.

By the middle of the decade it became possible for the popular play to join hands with the 1930's message play, at once to reach an audience through conventional devices and to offer liberal sentiments which were more comforting than they were revolutionary. The classic cases are Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935) and Robert E. Sher- wood's Idiot's Delight (1936). The supposedly serious plays that came earlier in the

53



decade are not quite so pat in their positions, but in them attitudes can be seen form-

ing, recognitions being made, sometimes in spite of the theatricality or the obvious sentiment that attracted audiences. John Wexley's The Last Mile (1930) is an example. Insofar as it is an attack on capital punishment, it may be taken as a serious play, but one whose relevance does not depend on a particular period; insofar as that attack

implies an indictment of society, the play may be seen as a forerunner of the more

plainly committed, less successful plays that Wexley was to write later in the decade. The play's success, however, seems not to have depended on either implicit message. The Last Mile was often coupled with Subway Express (1929), a quite ordinary detective play by Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison, because both were staged by Chester Erskin and both made meticulous use of realistic detail. This suggests that the famous first act of Mile, the preparation for the execution, was a kind of theatrical tour de force in which substance finally gave way to a piling up of literal detail. After

years of prison movies, it is difficult to imagine that the cliches of the first act led to the kind of horror that the social message would require; even if the play's opening succeeded in those terms, the effect must have been lost in the ordinary prison-break melodrama of the next two acts and the romantic death of Killer Mears, who listens to a recitation of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and then runs into the waiting machine guns. Mears is a conscious rebel against the system, dramatically and ver-

bally ("This is my duty. To show the world that I don't like it"), and as such he is a stock 1930's figure, the gangster as victim-hero. On screen, there were the Little

Caesars, the Public Enemies, the Scarfaces and, on stage, a little later, Baby-Face Martin in Dead End. In The Petrified Forest (1935), Robert E. Sherwood attempted to give that character an intellectual justification, to define him as the last of the rugged individualists, but that play, although it invented Humphrey Bogart, was never popular in the sense that The Last Mile was.

Elmer Rice had two plays in 1931, both successes. The Left Bank is a kind of good- bye to the twenties, a comedy drama in which Claire walks out on her bohemian husband in Paris and returns to America and the future. It is an unbelievably dull

play, but it is a reflection of a kind of American withdrawal, the shifting of serious American literature from Paris to New York, from a European orientation to a domestic preoccupation. Outside this play, the expatriate world can be seen in only two successful plays-Sidney Howard's Dodsworth (1934), in which it is the empty environment most comfortable to the vapid Mrs. Dodsworth, and Biography (1932), in which S. N. Behrman uses it as off-stage background. Popular drama's involve- ment in American subjects, American settings, American problems is the more obvious when one considers the reception of imported plays during the 1930's. Only a handful of English plays and two European ones-Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel (1930) and Jacques Deval's Tovarich (1936)-were popular successes; of the English plays, after 1935, only Ian Hay's school farce, Bachelor Born (1938). Aside from a few musical comedies and an occasional historical drama, American plays kept out of Europe; the only serious exception is Idiot's Delight. When the young couple goes off to Europe with such enthusiasm at the end of Mark Reed's Yes, My Darling Daughter (1937)-even though the Depression drives them there-the play has a strangely anachronistic sound to it, an echo of Philip Barry's Holiday (1928).

Rice's Counsellor-at-Law is loaded with cliches-the cheating wife, the loving secre-

GERALD WEALES 54




tary, a near suicide-but it is a great deal livelier than The Left Bank, if only because it is filled with colorful stock characters who seem always on the move. This alone

might explain the play's persistence, but I suspect its appeal was thematic. For one

thing, it may have been attractive, when the first shock of the Depression had stunned the country, to have a dynamic hero like George Simon, a man with a sense of profession and an ability to act. More important than that, however, is the idea that the immigrant group out of which Simon has risen is a great deal more honest and likable than the rich, society world into which he has married. In effect, Counsellor- at-Law is a stick-to-your-own-kind play, a warning to the self-made professional. The

message persists in plays as different as Men in White, the first of the hospital plays, and Nicholas Consentino's incredibly awful Moon over Mulberry Street (1935).

The corruption of wealth implied by all three of these plays marked the depiction of the rich throughout the decade. For the most part the capitalist-businessman is a

stereotypical villain even in plays which are not markedly Leftist in tone-James

Hagan's One Sunday Afternoon (1933) and Maxwell Anderson's The Star-Wagon (1937), for example. Even a play as indiscriminate in its satire as Howard Lindsay's farce She Loves Me Not (1933) provides a comic capitalist whom the heroine leads

by the nose: "Who did you think my father was-one of your employees?" Probably the only really sympathetic successful capitalist to appear in a popular play is Sam Dodsworth and he derives from Lewis's 1929 novel. Oliver Jordan in the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber Dinner at Eight (1932) is presumably a sympathetic char-

acter, but he is losing his business and dying of a bad heart; besides there is a wicked, successful capitalist to balance him and a dithery society wife to suggest the foolish- ness of it all. The examples might go on and on. In the comedies, from Larry E. Johnson's It's a Wise Child (1929), in which the demon banker is outsmarted in love and money, to the Cole Porter musical Leave It to Me! (1938), in which Sophie Tucker buys Victor Moore the ambassadorship to Russia, the businessman is a

figure of fun. Since the Johnson comedy opened before the Crash, it should be clear

that, in part, what is in operation is a familiar audience allegiance. In both comedy and sentimental drama, the audience has always identified with the underdog and, although the poor little rich girl is a teary possibility, the rich, being powerful, are the natural villains. In the context of the Depression, this dramatic stereotype simply received a boost from outside forces. There are successful plays of the decade deal-

ing with the rich or at least the well-off, but the playwrights ordinarily manage some kind of built-in apology. The most obvious example is Clare Boothe's The Women

(1936). It must have been the fashionable clothes and the insular bitchiness of the characters that made that play a success, but Miss Boothe was not content to let the

implied satire of her settings-the hairdresser's, the reducing salon, the fitting room- put the play in perspective. She wrote two denunciations into it (one from a nurse, one from a cigarette girl) and, in a preface to the published play, added a reminder that this was an "isolated group." It was not until the end of the decade, in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story (1939), that a playwright was able to say, without sounding ridiculous, "With the Rich and Mighty always a little Patience."

In the plays where the vantage point is from the Left, the corrupt or indifferent rich are to be expected-peripheral businessmen in Men in White and Dead End, the dead-certain grandmother in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934). Among

55



the successful plays of the decade, however, there were only two unrelenting indict- ments of the capitalistic system-Golden Boy and Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939). The first of these is a fairly obvious parable about the emptiness of American success; the second, an historical play in which the greedy Ben Hubbard specifically identifies his family with an entire class. It is possible, however, to see the Odets play as the sentimental story of a violinist turned boxer, and to find the Hellman play a melodramatic struggle for power within an atypical family, one safely placed at the turn of the century. I suggest these variant interpretations not as true readings of the Odets and Hellman plays but as possible explanations for their success in the face of the weak radical impulse in the general audience. This can be seen in the rela-

tively few radical figures who turn-up in popular plays-almost all of them stereotypes. Harry Becker in Counsellor-at-Law spills out the jargon of denunciation-"Cos- sacks," "kept parasite," "capitalists and slave drivers." Since Becker's view of Simon's life and marriage ("you're a traitor to your class") is the one that the play itself takes and since he is finally the victim of police brutality, Rice intends him to be taken seriously. In later plays, characters like Becker had no place because his

language too easily became comic. Communists or revolutionaries of any stamp were

likely to be jokes, like the publicity-conscious Liebowitz in She Loves Me Not. From Luella Gear, singing "I Still Love the Red, White, and Blue" at a Communist rally in Cole Porter's Gay Divorce (1932), to the sex-hungry Henrietta, whom no one takes seriously in Arthur Kober's "Having Wonderful Time" (1937), Communists and fellow-travelers were given an amiable satiric going over in lighter plays. The converse was also true; red-baiters were gently needled. This can be seen as early as the Gershwin-Kaufman-Ryskind musical Of Thee 1 Sing (1931): at the end of Act I, when Diana tries to break up Wintergreen's marriage to Mary Turner, the chorus sings "It's a dirty work of Russia-A communistic plot!" The same attitude is in evidence at the end of Act II of the Hart-Kaufman You Can't Take It With You (1936), when the G-men arrive to investigate tne revolutionary messages that Ed, who prints for a hobby, has distributed with Essie's candy.

These cross-purpose gags, presumably acceptable to a single audience, are important not as examples of serious satire, but as an indication of why there was so little room for a serious radical in popular drama. Aside from Becker and Quillery, the "extreme- radical-socialist" of Idiot's Delight (who is introduced so that Sherwood can show that his nationalism is stronger than his radicalism), the political or social activists -what few there are-tend to be union figures who, like the organizer brother of Golden Boy, are unspecifically Leftist, or, like the girl on strike in Dead End, are

wrongly accused of Communism. Both these figures appear so briefly that they remain cartoons, though favorable ones. Biography is the only successful play to use a radical, Richard Kurt, as a principal character. Here, as in so many of his plays of the 1930's, S. N. Behrman presents a central figure, Marion Froude, who embodies a kind of tolerance that is in danger from both the Left and the Right. "Studying you," Marion says to Richard, "I can see why so many movements against injustice become such absolute-tyrannies." The portrait of Kurt is sympathetic, but not sentimental; as a character, he is gauche and demanding and easily hurt, as an idea, he is potentially dangerous. In retrospect, Behrman seems to me one of the most interesting playwrights of the decade; his commitment to a kind of humanism allowed him to examine the ideas and the attitudes of the period with less pre-judgment than could

GERALD WEALES 56




a dramatist whose political allegiance was more specific. This does not mean that it was his seriousness of purpose that drew audiences to Biography; in fact, those

plays of his in which the debate became more urgent were not popular successes. It is true that Biography is a play of ideas, but it is also a triangle play and, more

important, the portrait of a fascinating woman (a star part for Ina Claire) who uses a complicated amalgam of openness, flirtatiousness, and motherliness to manipulate men of whatever political persuasion. I suspect that audiences were more interested in the way she won Richard and then gave him up than they were in the political and ideational implications of her behavior.

The only serious play from the early part of the decade that fits no comfortable

pigeonhole is The Children's Hour. It demands special attention because-if we put aside Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures (1930) and Tobacco Road as doubtful cases-it is the first serious play of the period to have a really long run-almost two

years. The play is primarily a melodrama about the workings of the big lie, although it seems to be torn between whether it is going to be about the evil that a vicious lie can cause (a social play) or the truth that can come accidentally out of such a lie

(a psychological play). If Brooks Atkinson's review (New York Times, November 21, 1934) may be taken as an example, reviewers were more interested in the first of these. Audiences, then, had a genuinely important theme to fan their righteous indignation and, for those who strayed from the social to the psychological, the

possibility of lesbianism to intrigue them. More than that, they had the working out of an intricate plot in which the villainous Mary and the pettish Mrs. Mortar (evil and indifference to it) overcame the good characters, and anyone who has read fairy stories will tell you that even though you want Red Riding Hood to get away, the

pleasure lies in watching the wolf in action. Both Mary and Mrs. Mortar are over-

stated-Mary ludicrously so-but for this reason they stand out in contrast to the reasonable grayness of Karen and Martha. The play that The Children's Hour most

resembles, so far as I am concerned, is Rudolf Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), for Mr. Barrett and Mary are two of a hissing kind. Besier gives his audience the direct pleasure of watching the villain get his come-uppance (even Flush escapes him), but Miss Hellman, more subtle and more interested in power as it exists in the real world, transfers the come-uppance from Mary to Mrs. Tilford and makes a valid social point. The political implications are certainly relevant to the 1930's-any labor history will indicate how the big lie was used against union

organizers-but, whatever Miss Hellman's political intentions, that aspect of the play was not emphasized until the revival in 1952, after Senator McCarthy had taught more of us to think in those terms.

The best examples of the commercially successful social play, as I suggested earlier, are Dead End (the popular Depression play) and Idiot's Delight (the popular pacifist play). By the time Dead End came along (October 28, 1935), the Depression was an accepted fact in the popular theatre. In the early part of the decade, it was pretty much ignored, at first because the successful plays had been written and, in some cases, produced before the Crash. Lack of money was a motivating force in some of the early comedies-the Lardner-Kaufman June Moon (1929), Frank Craven's "That's Gratitude!" (1930), the Hart-Kaufman Once in a Lifetime (1930)-but show-business poverty is an occupational disease not restricted to the 1930's; it served as the basis of American comedies long before Black Thursday. The first direct rec-

57



GERALD WEALES

ognition of the Depression on the American stage came from two very different sources; on the one hand, there were serious plays, like Claire and Paul Sifton's 1931-calls for revolutionary action that drew small audiences; on the other, there were successful musical comedies that made casual, often flippant nods at the dis- astrous state of things. In The Band Wagon (1931), the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz-George S. Kaufman revue, there is a number called "Miserable with You," which comments on the business prospects for next year, "What is called down in the dumps today will be known as up in the dumps by that time"; in Of Thee I Sing, there are jokes about unemployment and a song which asks, "Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers/Long as you've got a kiss that conquers."

In a very short time, the Depression became the background against which plays of all kinds went through their traditional paces. In the fall of 1934, for instance, there were two successful comedies that took place in homes which the Depression had forced the owners to turn into tourist accommodations-Lawrence Riley's Personal Appearance, a limping satire about a man-devouring movie star, and Post Road, by Wilbur Daniel Steele and Norma Mitchell, a reasonably exciting crime comedy in which a sharp-tongued old maid foils some kidnappers. Both are plainly 1930's plays in their incidental references-to radio, to jigsaw puzzles, to celebrities of the period-but not even an occasional political line (Bud in Personal Appearance says, "no need of starving with Roosevelt and me on the job") can make the Depression more than contemporary window dressing. Both plays depend on outsiders invading a home situation; in an earlier period, an accident or a storm would have provided the excuse. The Depression is the accident of these plays. In that sense, it is a device as well as decoration, but it is not a motivating force.

Audiences, then, were accustomed to hearing about the Depression, in comedies and dramas alike. What Sidney Kingsley managed to do in Dead End was move it from the background to the foreground and find a way of presenting it that would touch audiences and, at the same time, convince them that something serious was being said to which they could give their assent. What he found was children-the Dead End Kids. I do not intend to suggest that Kingsley was being venal, trying to cash in on the serious problems of the decade. I assume that he (like Hellman, like Rice, like Sherwood) wanted to say something important within the frame of popular drama, that his message (like theirs) was tempered by the medium in which he was

working and that he (like them) was not consciously weakening his art, but was, in fact, writing at the top of his talent. Taking an epigraph from Thomas Paine, "The contrast of affluence and wretchedness is like dead and living bodies chained together," Kingsley sets up a situation (real geographically, artificial as he manipulates his entrances and exits) in which he can contrast the vulnerable life in the slums with the protected enclosure of a luxury apartment. Even more than in Men in White, his main plot is pushed aside so that he can present brief scenes, cartoon vignettes which make simple social points. The plot is there, however, and its working out is central to what Kingsley has to say. Tommy, the leader of the slum kids, is a bright boy who has fallen into indolence and petty crime. In the course of the play, a series of relatively unimportant (even comic) incidents leads to the moment in which he stabs a man to protect himself from arrest. At the end, he is faced with reform school and, as the example of Baby-Face Martin indicates, a career of crime as the

58




only way of living and dying. Not that Kingsley can let his play end without the inevitable note of hope. Gimpty, who has fingered Martin, is determined to use his reward money in an attempt to save Tommy.

This optimistic note is not simply a sop to the audience, a way of letting them leave the theatre with the taste of possibility in their mouths. It is Kingsley's and the decade's conviction that something can be, must be done about the slums that form the Tommies. Its weakness as a positive action is that it suggests the possibility of

personal salvation, the escape from the environment, rather than the changing of the slum situation. Tommy's possible escape aside, the main thrust of the play seems to be toward making a strong and bitter social point. After all, the play is called Dead End; it ends with Tommy's arrest, not his release, and with his buddies, huddled around the remains of the fire that they have been forced to put out, singing "If I had de wings of a angel." The point about environment creating character is made explicitly in the play (too often), and the curtain scene seems to suggest that nothing can be or will be done about the slums. Seems only, however, for not only Gimpty's decision but the presence of the kids themselves extenuate the apparent blackness of the play. Although Kingsley makes a sincere effort to be realistic about slum kids, to provide them with tough lines and situations, to suggest an amoral environment, he cannot help making them lovable. This is not simply a reaction in retrospect, a reduction to innocence from the vantage point of the lines and actions of the LeRoi Jones teenagers in The Toilet. It is implicit in the dramatic stereotypes in the gang. Tommy, the toughest of them all, is basically a sweet kid who looks after the weak ones, and Spit, the stool pigeon, is a standard bully. Kingsley is not as far from Booth

Tarkington as he seems to be. Although what happened to the Dead End Kids after

they went to Hollywood is hardly the fault of Kingsley's play, as he presented them they already carried the seeds that, out west, would sprout into a few touching movies with social points and then a very broad comedy series. It is easy to think of the kids as they were labeled by a later movie title: Angels with Dirty Faces. Seen that way, their presence on stage weakens the point that Kingsley wanted to make in creating them.

The combination of anger and sentimentality that marks Kingsley's presentation of the boys spills over the other characters and situations. It is in these, as much as in the main story, that the play's typicality lies, for Dead End is a compilation of 1930's

stereotypes. As with most stereotypes, they have important relevance to the world

offstage, but Kingsley's apparent attempt to get everything in finally renders them ludicrous. I have already mentioned the gangster and the shopgirl whom an indignant policeman calls "a lousy Red." There are also Baby-Face Martin's first love, now a diseased whore, and her sister under the skin, Gimpty's beloved Kay, a rich man's mistress. Gimpty is the unemployed professional, the slum boy who worked to educate himself only to find no job at the end of the process. "I used to be on the daisy chain," sings the Vassar graduate in one of the Harold Rome songs from Pins and Needles (1937), "but now I'm a chain store daisy." Gimpty is an architect with slum clear- ance as his dream, the destruction of those tenements in which he grew up crippled (rickets), but, as he says, "Nine out of ten architects are out of work." We meet one of them a year or so later, in Yes, My Darling Daughter, in which Doug, finding that he cannot make a living as an architect, goes off to sell razor blades in Belgium; Mark Reed, a writer of comedy, is interested only in trotting out mock problems-

59



the man who must give up his profession, the couple who cannot afford to marry -only to sweep them away in a final farcical act.

The marriage problems of Ellen and Doug in Reed's play are a late variant on a familiar cliche of the decade which Kingsley, in Gimpty and Kay, presents in its

purest form. The young couple, in love but too poor to marry, was one of the indict- ments that radical playwrights brought against the failing economic system. Kingsley follows the tradition of 1931-, Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! and keeps Gimpty and Kay apart. Within two years, the emphasis had shifted and the young couple found that they could marry despite the obstacles, even in defiance of them. This is the case in Yes, My Darling Daughter, but there is big-rich money hovering in the background of that play, so it is hardly typical. Arthur Kober's "Having Wonderful Time" is more to the point. It is a formula boy-meets-girl play, especially designed as a Depression love story. Chick, another unemployed professional (lawyer), falls in love with Teddy, but cannot ask her to marry him ("I've no right to ask you to starve with me"); in the last act, she does the asking, and they face a difficult but not impossible future together. The young lovers in the Kaufman-and-Hart, Rodgers- and-Hart musical, I'd Rather Be Right (1937), face the same problem and solve it in the same no-solution fashion by marrying anyway, in this case on the advice of President Roosevelt. In Pins and Needles, the courtship song, "One Big Union for Two," balanced the lamenting "What Good Is Love?"; in the 1939 version, the latter gave way to "I've Got the Nerve To Be in Love." If Gimpty and Kay could have held on until 1937, they could have got married after all, but the cliches of Dead End were those of 1935. Besides, Kingsley needed them as one of the exhibits in his case against the system.

In the last half of the decade, there were only two successful plays which might chal-

lenge Dead End for the title of The Depression Play-Golden Boy and John Stein- beck's Of Mice and Men (1937). Golden Boy, as I indicated earlier, is an attack on the idea of American success. It is unusual among the social plays in that it accepts the consequences of its material and its ideas and sends its hero to suicide. The

optimistic note, insofar as it exists in the play, remains on the periphery with the

union-organizing brother; there is not the problem, as there is with Dead End and with most of Odets' plays, of a black view wearing a bright note of hope in its but- tonhole. Although George and Lennie are migrant workers in Of Mice and Men, there is nothing about the play that places it in the 1930's. The play, like the novel, is primarily about loneliness and rootlessness; only George and Lennie seem to have escaped the separateness that infects the other characters, and their dream of a

place of their own is destroyed. By bringing the curtain down on George shooting Lennie, after telling him about the rabbits once again, Steinbeck makes a kind of proletarian tear-jerker. There is the same kind of sentimentality about Joe's death in Golden Boy. Although both playwrights presumably intend the deaths to make a point about society (Odets) or the human condition (Steinbeck), it is possible that the success of the plays stems from the long-standing audience attraction to tears (see The Second Mrs. Tanqueray or, for that matter, La Boheme).

Idiot's Delight is in many ways like Dead End. It, too, is a collection of stereotypes brought together to let the author make a strong and very direct statement, which is weakened by the play's leading characters and their charade. The ground was not as

GERALD WEALES 60




well prepared for Sherwood's pacifist message as it was for Kingsley's comments on the Depression and its effects. Pacifism was very much a part of the 1930's, of course, and there were inevitable anti-war statements in the social plays of the period. Yet, with one important exception, pacifism does not figure in the popular drama. That ex-

ception lay in the imported English plays. For the English, whose losses were so great, World War I remained a frightening reality; the heroism may have been sentimental- ized in plays like R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, but the horror was insisted upon. Evocations of that horror turned up, briefly, in the most unlikely plays-John L. Balderston's Berkeley Square (1929), an English play although the author was Amer-

ican; A. A. Milne's Michael and Mary (1929); Autumn Crocus (1932), by C. L. An-

thony (Dodie Smith). Its effect can be seen in Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina (1935), in which Albert speaks the pacifist message, averting English participation in the American Civil War by tempering Victoria's concern with honor, "And for that Honour we should send thousands and thousands to die!" In Grand Hotel, in the

figure of Dr. Otternschlag, Vicki Baum, from the German side, gets in her attack on "the Great Bestiality." The pacifist sentiments in some of Krug's speeches in Robert E. Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna (1931) and implicit in the character of Fuseli in Golden Boy are exceptions among successful American plays. In fact, while Journey's End was finishing its New York run, a show like Sons o' Guns (1929) could open; it was a musical in which the World War I setting was no more than a nostalgic device and an excuse for gags. When Idiot's Delight came along, then, it was a distillation of the pacifism that was in the air but not on the popular stage.

Sherwood's main point in Idiot's Delight is that as long as men remain captives of their nationality they will become the victims of men like Achille Weber, the munitions

manufacturer, the internationalist whose only loyalty is to himself: "he is a master of the one real League of Nations-The League of Schneider-Creusot, and Krupp, and

Skoda, and Vickers, and Dupont. The League of Death!" The speaker is the radical

Quillery, and his denunciation is dismissed by the German scientist as "Marxian nonsense!" The audience knows better, however, because both Harry and Irene, who were played by the Lunts, also denounce Weber. To make his point, Sherwood traps a

group of national types at a winter-sports hotel on the Italian-Swiss border and lets us observe them as the Second World War begins. The French radical deserts the United Front and the hope of revolution as an "antidote for war" to die a Frenchman. The German scientist abandons his work on a cancer cure and returns to Germany, presumably to work on germ warfare. The honeymooning English couple, who love

Italy, stand ready to destroy what they love. The Italian captain, a polite cynic, is

simply waiting for his government to tell him who the enemy is. The Americans are idealistic and naive, helpless in the face of European antagonisms. In these characters and in a great many direct statements, Sherwood denounces war as both pointless and horrible. Within the play, the war begins, but it is Sherwood's hope, presumably, that the play is a warning not a prophecy, a plea made by Irene: "You can refuse to fight!"

Sherwood's message is clear enough, but the vehicle he cranks up to carry it is presumably what made the play popular. Early in the play he poses the question-or lets the American vaudevillian Harry Van pose it-who is the mysterious Irene, the mistress of Achille Weber? Is she the Russian performer with whom he once made it

years ago in the Governor Bryan Hotel in Omaha? Of course she is. Harry knows it.

61



GERALD WEALES

Irene knows it. The audience knows it. As everyone waits for the revelation that will reveal nothing, the play's best intentions are almost smothered in romantic nonsense. The danger is not that the pacifist message will be lost completely-it is too relentless for that-but that the preoccupation with the cat-and-mouse game of Harry and Irene

may detract from the seriousness. The softening effect of their story can best be seen at the end of the play. The war has begun. Harry and Irene are alone in the cocktail

lounge of the hotel as the bombers come over. He sits at the piano, playing a frag- mented melody, settling finally on "Onward Christian Soldiers," at first in jazz rhythm, then solemnly. As they sing, the bombs fall. The end ought to be ironic, I suppose, even angry, but it is inescapably romantic-the brave kids from Omaha face death with a song on their lips. As in Dead End, the candy coating not only takes away the

pill's bitterness, but its curative powers.

Although later in the decade there were a couple of successful musicals that played at anti-war satire-Hooray for What! (1937) and Leave It to Me! (1939)-Idiot's Delight stands almost alone among popular plays in its concern with pacifism. For that

matter, it is one of the few plays that takes serious cognizance of what is going on in the rest of the world. The prevailing concern with American problems seems to have

kept the references to Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan at a minimum, and most of them are casual, even comic. Only toward the end of the decade, in a number like

"Mene, Mene, Tekel," which was added to Pins and Needles in 1939, did we get an

unambiguous attack on the Nazis in a popular show. "The Four Little Angels of Peace," from the same show, which changed its angels during the run of the revue according to shifting events and alliances, was both a satiric thrust at the dictators and a plea for peace. As such, it embodies a major dilemma of the decade, how to be at once

pacifist and anti-fascist. Since the popular theatre resolutely turned its back on the international situation, it provides no reflection of America's changing attitude toward the possibility of war in Europe. There was one possible exception: in retrospect, at

least, it is possible to read as an allegorical call to action Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), in which his Lincoln reluctantly decides to take a firm stand, even at the risk of war. That play now seems a half-way house between Idiot's

Delight and There Shall Be No Night (1940).

There is a scene in the Kenyon Nicholson-Charles Robinson farce Sailor Beware!

(1933), which is set in Panama, in which Chet, the hero, talking mock Spanish, drives Seior Gomez away from the heroine. "Y'know that's the trouble down here," he says, "these foreigners try to muscle in on everything. Now I always say, America for Americans." His behavior and his language (he later calls Gomez a "greaser") are not meant satirically (this was the year of the Good Neighbor Policy) nor real-

istically (the play is a farce about sailors not a slice of naval life). Although Billie does protest ("Say, you can't treat people that way"), neither she nor the audience are to think the less of Chet for his casual waspishness. The scene is not only an indication of the general indifference of the popular theatre to the world outside the United States; it is also a reflection of an attitude toward national and racial types. Today, the villain in the flimsiest kind of melodrama can be identified immediately by his casual use of "nigger" or "spick." The line was not so clear in the 1930's. Ed Wynn was no less lovable in Hooray for What! for having to say, "It sounded more like an Italian shell to me. Did you hear it go WOP?" but then that musical used its international

setting as an excuse for the traditional comic stereotypes of nationality. Preston

62




Sturges' Strictly Dishonorable (1929) is a more interesting case. A very fragile but very popular comedy in which an Italian opera singer wins a gentle Southern girl from her stuffy fiance, it establishes that Henry is the bad guy by letting him describe the hero and the Italians who run the speakeasy in which the action takes place with words like "wop," "dago," "greaser." Yet Isabelle remains on the side of the good guys, even when she is saying, "I love to hear darkies sing 'em at night. Funny people! Don't have thing ... never did have anything . . . never will have anything. And just as happy." Of course, this was the decade of Stepin Fetchit's great success. The word "nigger" is used casually in plays like It's a Wise Child, One Sunday Afternoon and Elmer Harris' The Young Sinners (1929), and in contexts which indicate that the word for the authors and presumably for the audience was not emotionally loaded. This casual usage disappeared later in the decade, and there were never many examples of the Negro comic turn so evident in the movies. The only one that comes to mind is a brief visual joke in The Women in which Clare Boothe places a Negro maid alongside a woman wearing a mud-mask.

There were only two successful plays about Negroes during the 1930's-The Green Pastures and Langston Hughes' Mulatto (1935)-and only a handful of other plays in which Negroes were presented, sympathetically. Both The Green Pastures and Mulatto depended on stereotyping. Marc Connelly's play is an attempt to present a sophisticated idea of Christianity (the change from the wrathful to the merciful God) in a simplistic fashion. It is firmly committed to a concept of the inherent dignity of man, as the scene between God and Hezdrel so clearly shows. Even so, it comes across as a series of anecdotes about lovable darkies, as Isabelle in Strictly Dishon- orable would say, and the Broadway regional dialect Connelly gives his characters (by Uncle Remus out of the Two Black Crows) only emphasizes the stereotypical surface. Mulatto is a nastier case. In his introduction to Hughes' Five Plays, Webster Smalley tells something of the play's production history. The producer, Martin Jones, who had presented White Cargo in 1923, doctored Mulatto while Hughes was out of the country; he went for lurid effects, for instance, a rape added to Act II. Hughes' play is not really very good, but it is a serious attempt to treat a figure who belongs nowhere (is neither white or black) and, through him, to comment on a society divided between oppressors and their unprotesting victims. What Jones tried to make of it can best be seen in an advertisement which appeared in the newspapers shortly after the play opened: "The Most Talked of Sex Play in Years."

Although some reviewers (see New York Times, October 25, 1935) treated Mulatto as a serious play, the peripheral Negro characters in plays dealing with other matters probably spoke more directly about Negro problems than did the sexed-up version of Hughes' play. In Act II of The Last Mile, Jackson, the Negro prisoner, who is otherwise not much different from the other prisoners, makes a sudden bitter speech in which he insists that he will not meet the condemned man in heaven for there will be two heavens, one for whites and a "niggah Heaven long by that theah toilet." Ironical- ly, Wexley's play opened less than two weeks before The Green Pastures, in which we get a glimpse of Jackson's segregated heaven, although Connelly's celestial fishfry masks the smell of the toilet. In Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer (1933), Ethel Waters sang "Supper Time," a lament for a husband who has been lynched; from all accounts, it was an extremely moving performance, but its effectiveness was inevitably lessened by its place in a revue where it necessarily gave way to a number totally dif-

63



ferent in kind and intention. Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall put a Negro character into The Pursuit of Happiness (1933) so that they could show the pro- slavery, aristocratic stance of the Virginia colonel who is presumably fighting for the ideals in the Declaration of Independence. It is typical of their play and of a particular kind of well-meaning drama that they finally let Mose say, "Colonel, you so fond of slavery-why don't you be a slave yourself?" It is a device designed to boost the spirits of a sympathetic audience-a rhetorical solution to a practical problem. Crooks in Of Mice and Men is cut off from the other characters because he is a Negro, but the play does not (as the novel does when Curly's wife threatens him with lynching) present his special situation to show how other men use his being a Negro to escape their own sense of separateness. These few characters aside, the Negro exists in the popular plays of the 1930's-if at all-as a background figure who gets no special comment.

Although I have been talking about contemporary problems and attitudes, I have, in- frequently, gone for my example to a play set in another time. Among my hundred- odd plays, there are only fourteen nonmusical dramas set in the past, and most of them have some relevance to contemporary problems. There are dark undertones in Ah, Wilderness! (1933), since Eugene O'Neill wrote it, and there is a serious philosophic point being made in Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), but these two plays come as close to providing nostalgic escapes for the audience as any written in the 1930's. For the rest, there is no mistaking the marks of the decade-for instance, the capitalist stereotypes in One Sunday Afternoon, The Star-Wagon, and even Zoe Akins' adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Old Maid (1935). Most such references are extrusions, eruptions on the surface of plays that have other concerns. Yet, in four instances among the successful plays, dramatists did make direct attempts to use historical material to comment on the contemporary world. In Mary of Scotland (1933), Maxwell Anderson wrote a variation on his perennial fable about how impossible it is for political innocence and idealism to triumph in the world; his point may have got a little muddled in production, for an empathetic audience might take Mary's final defeat as a triumph, particularly if Helen Hayes were around to show the girl's spunk. The Langners in The Pursuit of Happiness hoped to use their Hessian deserter, who believes literally in the Declaration of Independence, to illustrate the distance between practice and preaching in the United States, but, as they admit in a foreword to the published play, its appeal lay in its bundling scenes. As I suggested earlier, Iillian Hellman's The Little Foxes uses the greedy Hubbards to attack a whole system, and Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois uses its hero to show how even the most scrupulous hedger must finally commit himself to action. By a judicious choice of Lincoln speeches, Sherwood manages to suggest that his Lincoln is a 1930's liberal, sound on race, tyranny, labor problems, and the fallibility of the Supreme Court. It is possible that discussing the serious problems of the decade in an historical context sets up an automatic distancing in the audience, but surely no more obviously than the use of the popular-theatre devices discussed earlier in this essay.

More than a fourth of the plays I examined were comedies of one kind or another. There were drawing-room imports from abroad and American approximations, plot comedies (boy-gets-girl) and character comedies, mild satires and others that were unlikely amalgamations of style. Most of them, as the casual references earlier in this essay indicate, reflect the 1930's in one way or another and some of them from late

GERALD WEALES 64




in the decade-"Having Wonderful Time" is the best example-would be lost without the Depression background. Yet, none of these is what I think of as a 1930's comedy. That label belongs to the farces that were so popular, particularly in the last half of the decade.

Sailor, Beware! and She Loves Me Not, both produced in 1933, are early examples of such farces, and even earlier comedies, such as June Moon and Once in a Lifetime, which mix show-business satire with the courtship of boob lovers, are cousins germane. Yet, the purest 1930's farces come after 1935, and all of them had George Abbott as director and/or producer: Three Men on a Horse (1935); Bella and Samuel Spewack's Boy Meets Girl (1935); "Brother Rat" (1936), by John Monks, Jr., and Fred R.

Finklehoffe; Room Service (1937), by John Murray and Allen Boretz; Clifford Gold- smith's What a Life (1938). They are all built on the same plan. One character

(usually the chief comic, but not necessarily the hero) commits an act (sometimes out of kindness, sometimes self-interest) which sets off a chain of events, during which his every attempt to hide or solve his difficulty leads to further complication. At the

end, of course, all knots are untied. In Sailor, Beware! Barney, protecting Chet's good name as a seducer, bets his watch that Chet can make it with Billie, the virginal B-girl, and before you can say "first-act curtain" the whole ship is involved. In She Loves Me Not, Paul Lawton and two of his friends shelter a night-club dancer in their Princeton dormitory, and gangsters, Hollywood types, businessmen, wild radicals pop out of the woodwork to help or hinder. In Three Men on a Horse, Erwin Trowbridge, who writes Christmas card verses for a living and dopes horses for a hobby, takes a defiant drink and ends trapped by a band of down-at-the-heels gamblers. In Boy Meets

Girl, two practical-joking Hollywood writers befriend a pregnant waitress and make her child a star. In "Brother Rat," which takes place at V.M.I., Billy undertakes to

get the money Bing needs for the birth of his child, and comes within a hair of getting him kicked out of school. In Room Service, Gordon Miller goes through an escalating series of operations to hang onto the hotel space he needs to rehearse the show he is

putting on. In What a Life, Henry Aldrich, who has to come first on a history exam to get the money for a dance he wants to attend, begins by cheating and ends by being accused of theft.

The thing that is most characteristic about all of these shows-even on the page- is a kind of energy, the frenzied force that carries the characters through the intricacies of plot. They depend for laughs often on physical business rather than on lines. The authors of "Brother Rat," for instance, ask that the curtain be brought down on Act

I, Scene I, after an elaborate routine in which Bing's hat is passed from hand to hand,

finally to him, as he hurries to parade. The more fantastic the play, the more likely it is for the physical comedy to become amiable nonsense. She Loves Me Not and Boy Meets Girl are full of almost surreal bits. There is a typical example at the end of Act II of June Moon which stands out because it is unusual in that show. Throughout the act, a window cleaner has been watching the activities in the music publisher's office; just before the curtain, he puts down his sponge, goes to the piano and begins to pick out a song we have heard earlier, whereupon Maxie, the song-plugger, comes

in, picks up the sponge and begins to wash the window. It is the incongruity that makes the scene funny. In the same way lines are laugh lines by virtue of surprise more often than of wit. At their cleverest, they are good wisecracks. There are gags that are not funny at all, but become funny by repetition-the cutter who keeps com-

65



ing into the producer's office in Boy Meets Girl, the persistent collection-agency man in Room Service, the boy who wants desperately to see the principal in What a Life. Even the central characters are standard farce stereotypes, built on a single tic of irascibility, braggadocio or-the favorite-naivete.

Aside from the incipient bedlam that such shows are likely to offer the audience, they communicate two things-irreverence and sentiment. The first of these is on the surface, a kind of catch-all attack which is sometimes satirical (Boy Meets Girl), but more often a simple shout-to institutions, ideas, people-to get out of the way or be trampled. The sentiment can break through the surface of the play, as in some of the Chet-Billie love scenes in Sailor, Beware! or in the child-raising message speeches of What a Life. More often, it remains underground, an implicit embrace of the brouhaha, and comes up only for the final curtain. Boy Meets Girl, which is the cleverest of these farces, plays it both ways with a subtlety that the others cannot match. The two writers within the play explain how the Boy-Meets-Girl plot works and then the Spewacks provide a travesty of it (the pregnant waitress and the English actor who turns out to be a rich nobleman); the audience, who cannot help being sucked in even while they are being told it is all nonsense, become the butt of the joke.

From my description it should be clear that these farces are nothing new under the sun-that some of their devices are as old as the history of farce and that the surface tone can be found in earlier American farces like It Pays to Advertise (1914) by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett, and Kaufman's The Butter and Egg Man (1925). Why then should there be anything particularly 1930's about them? In some cases- Room Service and "Brother Rat"-the Depression explains the financial need that triggers the action, but that seems to me a relatively minor reason for their appeal. Two things, I think, contribute to their popularity. One is the irreverence I mentioned earlier, the other an oblique testimony to the individual. The leading characters find themselves in opposition to restrictive forces, often institutional ones; schools (She Loves Me Not, "Brother Rat," What a Life), the family (Three Men on a Horse, What a Life), the Navy (Sailor, Beware!), big business ( Boy Meets Girl, Room Service). The difficulties arise because someone among them chooses to act, has faith enough in himself to believe that the individual can control the forces around him. There is an odd conversation, in Act III of "Brother Rat," in which Billy and Dan argue about whether or not rugged individualism is dead. In one sense, the argument is a joke, since it is going on while they walk tours of duty, but it is also relevant to this play and the other farces. Billy is the rugged individualist of "Brother Rat" as Miller is of Room Service, as the writers are in Boy Meets Girl. This can be seen most clearly in the Hart-Kaufman comedy, You Can't Take It with You, which resembles the farces in many ways and differs from them in being more explicit about its ideational point. The restrictive institution here is the government-Grandpa refuses to pay taxes, the FBI moves in on their message-carrying candy business-and the sanctity of the individual is made clear not only in Grandpa's refusal to be pushed around, but also in the eccentricity of all the members of the household and in their conversion of the convention-bound Kirby.

This was a decade in which problems were supposed to be solved by collective action, in which-by the time these farces came along-they were being solved by govern- mental action, manipulation from out there. Does that mean that these comedies are

GERALD WEALES 66




underground political documents? Farcical evocations of an America in which the individual did not depend on his government for aid and comfort? This is plainly the point of You Can't Take It with You. One might even make a case for Three Men on a

Horse, based on Erwin as a worm who turns. But over-all, this reading will not hold. "The days of the rugged individualist are over," says Dan in "Brother Rat." "Look at the WPA. Look at relief." Billy disagrees, of course, since he sees himself as the rugged individualist, but his attempt to control things leads from one fiasco to another. The relief comes from outside, from the commandant in fact, for Claire, his daughter and Dan's girl, clears up the biggest difficulties, off-stage, between the second and third acts. The problem is solved in Sailor, Beware! when the officer who is holding the money (an authority figure) calls off the bet. The boys are reinstated in college in She Loves Me Not through no efforts of their own. A Senator, of all things, who also owns the hotel chain, saves the day-lets the show go on-in Room Service. An un- derstanding authority figure (the assistant principal) and an outside investigation solve Henry Aldrich's many problems in What a Life. These farces were obviously popular partly because people wanted to laugh even in and in spite of a Depression decade, but the implicit appeal, I suspect, came from the fact that their pose of irreverence, their bouncing sense of the individual in action was hedged by the comforting assurance that someone out there was taking care of things.

Musical comedies in the 1930's were not, as they are now, lifetime investments, designed to run for years. Most of the regular producers of musicals planned to package a new show each year, often using a composer, a performer, a format that had worked well before. It was not until the end of the decade-with Pins and Needles and Hellza- poppin (1938)-that musicals began to have extremely long runs, and both of these were revues into which new material was introduced from time to time.

It would be difficult to find a pattern in 1930's musicals, for, to push a Cole Porter show into the past tense, anything went. The revues ranged from the vulgar-Earl Carroll's Sketch Book (1929)-to the sophisticated-The Band Wagon-to the satirical-As Thousands Cheer. The book shows were mostly contemporary in setting, but there were shows like Jerome Kern's Sweet Adeline (1929) that looked to the past, and, after the Center Theatre became a legitimate house in 1934, there were elabor- ately staged operettas of which The Great Waltz (1934) and White Horse Inn (1936) were the most popular. Although there were a few attempts to write musicals in which the books and the music worked together to some point (George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind got the Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing in 1931), for the most part, the books were simply shaky frames on which the composers hung their tunes and the comedians did their turns. The reviewers were constantly discovering that the musical had come of age, only to forget their discovery within a few months. In less than a year after the opening Of Thee I Sing, Brooks-Atkinson (New York Times, No- vember 28, 1932) was recommending Take a Chance but warning his readers to ignore the plot. When The Band Wagon opened, he wrote (New York Times, June 4, 1931), "It will be difficult for the old-time musical to hold up its head," and two months later Earl Carroll's Vanities opened, with the same young chorus line and the same old bathroom jokes, and, without the Atkinson seal of approval, ran longer than The Band Wagon did. In retrospect, one thinks of the 1930's musicals in terms of the men who wrote the songs-Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, the Gersh- wins, Schwartz and Dietz-or of performers who molded the shows to their own

67



GERALD WEALES

personalities-Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman, Ed Wynn, Victor Moore. Although a show like Girl Crazy (1930) may be done occasionally in an amateur production-with the jokes updated-it does not have a place in the American theatre in any way comparable with the one that some of its songs hold in popular music-"Bidin' My Time," "Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm."

If I were to attempt to describe in a page or two what the musical theatre was like in the 1930's, I would end with a list of this and a list of that and no general impression at all. Instead, I want to consider for a moment one of the assumptions about 1930's musicals-that they were strongly laced with political satire. For the most part, they were not. Most of them paid scant attention to political and social problems. To make a joke about Eleanor Roosevelt had no more meaning in most shows than to make one about Shirley Temple; they were simply recognizable names in the news who could give meaning to a gag. Even in a show like As Thousands Cheer, where the intention was plainly satirical, there was no political point of view. Moss Hart and Irving Berlin were simply making comments about events in the news. This should be clear from the fact that they could follow a sketch about the Hoovers leaving the White House with one about the effect of Noel Coward's visit to New York on the accents of a hotel staff. Nor was there anything particularly 1930's about giving the Hoovers a going over; the Coolidges had got theirs in The Garrick Gaieties in 1925. Cecil Smith in Musical Comedy in America praises As Thousands Cheer for "refusing to be tempted into anger" and compares it favorably with the short-lived revue, Americana (1932). If we take absence of anger to mean absence of commitment (to any political point of view) we have a reasonable description of the general attitude of Broadway musicals toward politics. The musicals-particularly the revues-recognized the problems of the decade more quickly than straight comedies did, but they were material for gags, for sketches, for songs that were amiably intended. Most revues had at least one sketch that came within calling distance of political satire, but the call was not to action. The only successful revue with a definite point of view was Pins and Needles, and, although it was a success on Broadway, it did not originate there. It was put together by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the numbers, even a love song like "One Big Union for Two" or an urban pastoral like "Sunday in the Park," are labor-oriented. It is impossible to listen to any of the songs from Pins and Needles without insisting that that was the 1930's, but in fact the revue was atypical. There was nothing like it before, and the successful revue that followed it was Hellza- poppin.

There is also an ambiguity of attitude in the few successful satirical book shows. Of Thee I Sing is the only one from early in the decade. Its basic assumption is that all politicians are crooks and that the American electorate can be won by heart-warming platitudes; Wintergreen gets elected on a platform of love and retains his office by becoming a father. There is the possibility here for very strong satire, but Wintergreen, for all his brashness and open chicanery, is a lovable hero with a lovable heroine, and the show falls back on standard anti-politician gags (the chief one-an excuse for Victor Moore to look befuddled-is that no one knows the vice-president) and casual jokes about unemployment, the war debts, the Caribbean. At the end of the decade there were three successful satirical shows, I'd Rather Be Right, which allowed George M. Cohan to play Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Hooray for What! and Leave It to Me!, both of which were vaguely pacifist. I'd Rather Be Right is a collection of anti-Roose-

68




velt, anti-New Deal jokes (aimed at the WPA, the Federal Theatre, the Fireside chats, the Roosevelt family, specific members of the cabinet), of which the one on which the plot hinges is that the young lovers cannot marry until the budget is balanced. The satire really has no point, however, for the show is finally pro-Roosevelt, and it is out of his mouth that the young lovers (and the audience) get the message that things will turn out all right because this is the country where "you can come out and talk about what's wrong." Hooray for What!, which has a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, is about a gas inventor from Sprinkle, Indiana, who finds himself involved in a peace conference in Geneva which turns into a war; the formula for his deadly gas is read backwards and a laughing gas is sprayed on the warring armies. "Chuckles," says Annabel, "you've laughed war off the face of the earth." My two sentence description suggests that the show has both point and a point of view, but such is not the case. The opening scent in each act is genuinely venomous. In Act I, the townspeople are about to tar-and-feather Chuckles after singing "Hooray for What!" which says that crowds do not care what they cheer for as long as they can cheer. At the opening of Act II, there is a harshly anti-war armaments fashion show, which sounds like Roberta (1933) re-done as a sick joke. But the satirical point estab- lished in each of the opening scenes quickly fades away as Chuckles, who is after all Ed Wynn, finds himself involved with a trick laboratory, a spy-filled hotel room, an india-rubber act, a dog act. The show sounds as though its creators (Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg did the songs) went to see the unsuccessful Kurt Weill-Paul Green musical Johnny Johnson (1936), brought away its pacifist theme and two of its inven- tions (the small-town opening and the laughing gas), and sacrificed their borrowings to Ed Wynn. Leave It to Me! with a book by Bella and Samuel Spewack, must have been much the same kind of show. Although it poked fun at American politics, the way our ambassadors are chosen, Soviet Russia, the Nazis, and lip-service to peace, it was not, as Brooks Atkinson pointed out (New York Times, November 10, 1938), "steeped in political ideology": "For the Spewacks and their associated minstrels are interested in nothing but comic rumpus."

For most of the decade, the Broadway audiences that went to the successful plays of the 1930's were allowed to forget that Europe lay, threatening, just over the horizon. The Depression and the problems and attitudes that grew out of it, however, were always with them. With them but not weighing on them, for the popular theatre- even at its most serious-had a way of comforting even when it wanted to disquiet. "Someone tells a few jokes," says Jacob in Awake and Sing!, "and they forget the street is filled with starving beggars." Someone tells them the street is filled with starving beggars, he might have added-if he had not been in a 1930's play of his own -and as likely as not the telling is hedged with romance, with sentiment, with comedy, with song.

69



popular theatre of the thirties

Documents

s play

popular drama

exemplary social play

jstor terms

jstor archive

terms conditions of

conditions51 popular

tulane drama review