This Day in Theater History (Novelist Balzac Scores Stage Hit at Last, Posthumously)

Aug. 23, 1851—Honoré de Balzac might have been dead for a year and five days, but he achieved the stage triumph he’d been craving for nearly three decades at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris with the comedy Mercadet.

I am far more familiar with the novels and short stories that comprise La Comédie humaine, a wide-ranging, interwoven panorama of French life in the first half of the 19^th century, than with Balzac’s plays.

Astonishingly, he did not confine his energies to the more than 90 novels and dozens of tales for which he is best known, but also turned out six major plays, along with a verse drama from his early 20s, Cromwell, that should probably best be termed “apprentice fiction.”

(Oh, I almost forgot: in his 20s, to keep the financial wolves at bay, he churned out essays and journalistic pieces, many under pseudonyms, and at the time of his death he also left 46 works unfinished. And I thought Hemingway was bad!)

What audiences saw 175 years ago in Mercadet wasn’t Balzac’s first crack at this material. It had first emerged from his busy pen as Le Faiseur (“The Speculator”). It must have been something of a mess, because it fell to Adolphe d’Ennery to act as what we might call a “script doctor” today.

You might call d’Ennery Balzac’s counterpart for the stage, as he was sole or co-author of more than 280 plays—except with this difference: he knew how to keep and even boost the totals he made from his work. 

He certainly had a good idea of how to fix Le Faiseur, whittling it down from five to three acts, retitling it, and making it easily the biggest theater success of Balzac’s career (though even in this instance, it was only a moderate success).

Let’s give Balzac some credit instead of ridiculing him for his lack of stage success in his lifetime. First, he took great pleasure in adding drama to his fiction.

In a February 1934 French Review article with the intriguing title “Balzac Precursor of Eugene O’Neill,” the French and Italian literature scholar Hermann H. Thornton observed, “Only the most literal-minded compiler of literary manuals could fail to see in him a dramatic author of the first rank,” pointing to his tendency to demarcate scenes, to read his own work aloud, and to speak “with excellent diction.”

Moreover, he hasn’t been the only novelist who’s had trouble in turning from fiction to the footlights.

Though John O’Hara wrote the “book” portion of the classic Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, that show lopped in its initial 1940 run—and his other unproduced dramas (collected in the 1961 collection, Five Plays) have, to my knowledge, been barely remembered, never mind staged, since the pugnacious author wrote them.

Charles Dickens’ attempt at amateur theatricals led not to major London stage success but to a clandestine love affair with a teenaged actress (as I explained in this post from 18 years ago).

And I can’t neglect to mention Henry James—whose Guy Domville was such a crushing fiasco that it ended after a half-dozen attempts his desperate hope for a London stage hit, as I related in this post.

Stage flops were not the only thing that James and Balzac (worshipped as “the father of us all” by the American expatriate) had in common: they were both obsessed by what James called “the money passion.” 

It seems that, though D'Ennery streamlined the novelist’s script, he didn’t strip away its devastating satire of post-revolutionary French bankers and mountebanks who will let nothing stand in the way of profits—including a roguish, inveterate speculator of a father who is out as much for his own creature comforts as for his daughter’s dowry.

This Day in Theater History (Henrik Ibsen, Playwright-Provocateur, Dies)

May 23, 1906—Characteristically exclaiming Tvertimod! (On the contrary!”), playwright Henrik Ibsen, who influenced the international theater scene by overturning expectations and confronting audiences with controversial subject matter and greater realism, died in Oslo, Norway, at age 78 following a series of debilitating strokes.

In 25 plays written over nearly a half century, Ibsen moved from historical and/or verse dramas to challenging contemporary tragedies shot through with verisimilitude, psychological insights and symbolism.

Carefully studying the works of Shakespeare in his long initial theatrical apprenticeship, he ultimately was exceeded only by The Bard as the most performed playwright in the world.

 His work influenced such later playwrights as August Strindberg, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and, perhaps most powerfully, George Bernard Shaw, whose essay “The Quintessence of Ibsenism" expounded his importance as a dramatist of ideas.

In his youth Ibsen was a political radical, and in the plays of his maturity he was unafraid to embrace iconoclasm.

In A Doll’s House (1879), he dared to show a housewife willing to leave not just her husband but her children in making a bid for independence.

As if in answer to those who protested that decision, he outraged public opinion even more by presenting in Ghosts (1881) a wife who stayed with her husband and suffered the consequences: a son suffering from syphilis, which she believes he inherited from his philandering father.

When that predictably brought down on him a storm of criticism, he responded with An Enemy of the People (1882), which displayed contempt for representative democracy (“What is the majority? The ignorant mob. Intelligence is always to be found in the minority”).

Paradoxically, this nonconforming playwright grounded much of his work in what would have seemed familiar to audiences of his time: the well-made play featuring plot exposition (often with long-concealed secrets) and clear denouements.

I wonder if those traditional elements may account for why so many performances of his plays stateside go beyond normal translations into English to more freewheeling adaptations meant to recreate the sense of shock experienced by his own Victorian audiences.

In the case of A Doll’s House, for instance, Ingmar Bergman and Amy Herzog, among others, have trimmed the text and even eliminated characters. 

Herzog and Miller, understandably unnerved by the advocacy of eugenics in An Enemy of the People, jettisoned the concept, but in the process downplayed the satire that even took in the play’s hero, Dr. Thomas Stockmann.

Even when playwrights have delivered adaptations with less stilted dialogue that retain the plots, they can be undermined by wayward directors. Ivo van Hove, working with Christopher Hampton’s serviceable 2004 adaptation of Hedda Gabler, undercut it b subjecting his lead, Elizabeth Marvel, to a tomato dousing.

This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Premieres)

Jan. 31, 1901— When the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) prepared its third production of an Anton Chekhov play, its actors were baffled, complaining that the script was “not a play, but only a scheme; there are no roles but only hints.” At its premiere on this date, audience reaction was bifurcated, with 12 curtain-calls after Act I “but only a half-hearted one after Act IV.”

In the century and a quarter since, Three Sisters has taken its place in the world’s theater canon, though directors and actors still sometimes struggle, as they do with Chekhov’s other plays, with the delicate balance between rueful comedy and drama.

I myself have witnessed the divergent results from the Russian doctor-turned-writer’s “hints.” Though critical reaction was divided at the time, a 1997 Roundabout Theatre production looks better in retrospect, with a starry cast featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Lily Taylor as the titular siblings and, in supporting roles, Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, David Strathairn, and Justin Theroux.

On the other hand, a smaller-scale 2011 production at the Chautauqua Institution, as I noted in my review, was fundamentally misconceived, filled with “directorial encrustations [that] covered and practically suffocated” it.

This dramedy did not—does not—need such embellishments. Simmering in the playwright’s consciousness for nearly the prior 20 years before the show premiered, it limned the decline of three Russian sisters as they dealt with financial pressures, professional dissatisfaction, and cultural enervation amid an isolated provincial town.

And, as University College London Professor Neil Stoker noted in this May 2019 blog post, the play is suffused with Chekhov’s awareness, for half his life, of the tuberculosis slowly destroying him, heightening a sense that “people were not just struggling with the imperfections of their own and others’ natures, but with arbitrary, relentless and invisible killers that made any apparent worldly success futile.”

In the summer of 1883, while staying at a dacha in south Russia, Chekhov had become fascinated with the Lintvarev sisters, three women of intellect and warmth who stimulated his imagination.

Eventually, he sketched a scenario in which he differentiated their fictional counterparts: the oldest, Olga, a schoolteacher burdened with financial responsibility; Masha, the bitter middle sister, who finds refuge from an increasingly loveless marriage through an affair with a Russian colonel passing through; and Irina, the youngest, whose innocence is lost under the weight of circumstance.

Moscow, their childhood home, looms as a symbol of the sisters’ perceived loss of cosmopolitan enlightenment, entertainment and vivacity.

Chekhov wrote Masha with the MAT actress Olga Knipper—who became his wife later that year—in mind. She ended up outliving her husband by half a century, and on her 90^th birthday—now under a Communist regime that had upended the way of life she and Anton had known so well—she could still recite lines from the play that had been molded around her.

The third of Chekhov’s four full-length plays, Three Sisters was, like the others, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who used it as a template for his ideas on naturalistic acting, psychological realism, atmosphere, and indirect action.

Even though MAT was well on its way to becoming “The House of Chekhov,” the playwright and director often clashed on how to stage the play, with Stanislavski stressing a harsher realism, leading Chekhov at one point to depart from rehearsals in a huff for Nice, France, convinced as late as three days before the premiere that the show would fail.

What united the collaborators, despite their differences in tone, was a sense that their characters and subject matter—ordinary Russians of different classes and occupations, unsure and paralyzed over how to act in a time of shifting socioeconomic change—required a changed treatment of plot and atmosphere.

The large, melodramatic gestures of royalty, for instance, would be replaced by smaller moments that might precede or follow major events. So, as in Three Sisters, audiences see not a duel onstage but its build-up and shattering aftermath.

British actor Ian McKellen, who, according to The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, has “played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his generation,” has underscored an aspect of these plays he began to absorb nearly 70 years ago: “more than any other dramatist, Chekhov brings actors close together on and off the stage. If they fail to respond as a company, the plays don't work.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1970 British film adaptation of Three Sisters, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring, left to right, Louise Pernell, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Watts.)

This Day in Theater History (Infamous ‘Frankenstein,’ in One-Night Horror Flop)

January 4, 1981 – This season wasn't the first in which Mary Shelley’s monster showed up on the Great White Way. Twenty-seven years ago, “The Creature” made an appearance every bit as widely anticipated – and, ultimately, disastrous – as it was in the 1818 novel and classic 1931 Boris Karloff film. 

Two years in the making, Frankenstein, written by Victor Gialanella and directed by Tom Moore, played 29 previews at the Palace Theatre, opened, then closed after one night. The play didn’t stint on production values –its lighting and set designs were later nominated for Drama Desk Awards.

But delays and special-effects snafus sent the budget flying from an initial $500,000 up to $2 million – the most expensive non-musical production ever mounted on Broadway to that time. (Nowadays, of course, that would hardly buy the cast and crew coffee.) 

It didn’t help that the actor who played Dr. Victor Frankenstein, David Dukes, had to face an audience after taking over the role during previews after just five days of rehearsals. 

All this strenuous effort went to waste when the crushing reviews poured in, including by the all-important New York Times. Even after the closing notice had been posted, there was a Monday-morning-quarterback attempt to produce a commercial that would raise the monster from the dead, but it was abandoned when sufficient funds couldn’t be raised. 

Yet I wondered, in reviewing the tangled history of this production, if there might not be another reason for this colossal flop. Some of the actors involved had enjoyed or would continue to enjoy notable careers – Dukes, John Glover as Victor’s friend, and John Carradine (the horror movie dependable, here playing the blind hermit). 

And then I stumbled upon the answer: Dianne Wiest, playing Victor’s adopted – ahem! – “cousin.” 

Woody Allen seems to be the only one who has had much luck in coaxing good – yes, even Oscar-worthy – performances (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway) from this at-best idiosyncratic actress. Perhaps he’s found in her a kindred spirit who can invest his neurotic roles with just the right tone. 

Other directors have not enjoyed similar luck. During the sad season she played the chief prosecutor on TV’s Law and Order, for instance, she looked like she had just swallowed castor oil – week after week. 

If she was bad then, then imagine my misfortune when I caught her only a year after her role in the Frankenstein debacle, in Othello, sandwiched between two sterling performers – James Earl Jones as the tortured warrior-lover, and Christopher Plummer as an outwardly man-among-men, inwardly seething Iago. 

Later I would see better Desdemonas – a young and luminous Maggie Smith in the 1965 Laurence Olivier film, a heartbreaking Lucy Peacock at the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada in 1994, and an exotic Irene Jacob on film, opposite Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh, a year later. 

But in 1982, I had to listen to Wiest unleashing, in wavering tones, “My lo-o-o-r-r-d.” Her childlike, simpering attitude led me Columbia friend Alan to conclude, with infinite justice if not mercy, “She should have been smothered by the end of the first act.” 

So that explained the problem with the first Frankenstein. It wasn’t runaway budgets. Dianne Wiest had given the production the cooties. Talking about ill-starred “bullets over Broadway”! 

From what I’ve heard, Mel Brooks’ new show is riding the good will generated by its predecessor, The Producers. But at least he doesn’t have Wiest to give the show the kiss of death.