This Day in Theater History (George Kelly Reaches Career Peak With ‘Craig’s Wife')

Oct. 12, 1925—After years of developing his craft from vaudeville skits to full-length comedies, playwright-director George Kelly triumphed in the next stage of his evolution as a playwright-director with Craig’s Wife.

The drama opened at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre in the first of 360 performances, staged by Kelly himself. And, in what many observers believed was a consolation prize for being bypassed the prior year, Columbia University awarded him the highest prize in American theater, the Pulitzer Prize, midway through its run.

Coming on the heels of his prior Broadway success, the comedy The Show-Off, Kelly should have been able to look forward to additional adoring audiences. But, at age 38, he would never create another hit. When he died 50 years later, he was all but forgotten—a fate that largely continues to this day. (Many familiar with the life story of Grace Kelly know that she made her professional acting debut at age 19 in her uncle's satire, The Torch-Bearers.)

In a post from last spring, I wrote about the 1936 film adaptation of this domestic drama, starring Rosalind Russell. I intend to write yet another post, on the 1950 remake starring Joan Crawford, later this year.

But the play itself is little seen these days. Even a couple of other plays by Kelly, Philip Goes Forth and The Fatal Weakness, have been mounted in the late dozen years by the estimable Off-Broadway troupe The Mint Theater.

Why did Kelly fall off his high place in American theater?

*Audiences rejected his continued turn toward drama. Kelly’s next three plays, Daisy Mayme, Behold the Bridegroom, and Maggie the Magnificent, flopped. Even before the Great Depression ensued, audiences preferred his comedies.

*Changing times brought changing audience and critical tastes. Once Kelly returned to comedy in 1931 with Philip Goes Forth, theatergoers were more open to plays by the likes of Clifford Odets that addressed the multiple crises affecting the nation. Kelly decamped for remunerative but unsatisfying work in Hollywood as a screenwriter. When he returned to Broadway later in the Thirties and Forties, he continued to work in the vein of the character-driven, “well-made play” tradition, at a time when younger playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were experimenting with different stage forms.

*His economic and social conservatism left him out of sync with the times. Kelly despised the New Deal and regarded the politically progressive Group Theater as faddish. A deeply religious Roman Catholic, he was similarly dismissive of psychology and the greater sexual frankness associated with Williams and William Inge.

*He had rigid views of how his plays should be staged. Kelly insisted not only that he direct his own plays but that actors interpret his lines exactly as he dictated them. This did not allow for much in the way of innovation or in allowing the introduction of collaborators who could approach his work with a fresh eye.

*In particular, “Craig’s Wife” is often regarded as misogynistic. The title character of Kelly’s most honored work made a fetish of her home, to such an extent that it destroyed her marriage and left her isolated at the play’s end. The 1936 film version introduced elements that would motivate her unrelenting materialism, but these are largely absent from the play itself.

*He had no interest whatsoever in promoting himself. It wasn’t only that Kelly felt that his work should speak for itself, but he desired to maintain his private life. Not only would there be no interviews during his career, but, with the destruction of nearly all his personal papers a few years before his death, no opportunity for a posthumous biography that might intrigue readers with previously guarded secrets. In the years since Kelly’s death in 1974, it has become increasingly believed that those “secrets” related to his sexual orientation. A lifelong bachelor, Kelly introduced William Eldon Weagley as his “valet,” even to his Philadelphia-based siblings, but their 55-year relationship strongly suggests that the playwright was gay.

Appreciations: ‘Craig’s Wife,' With Rosalind Russell, at MOMA

It’s been 20 to 30 years since I saw a film at the Museum of Modern Art. But earlier this week, one caught my eye on the institution’s Website: Craig’s Wife, a 1936 movie that is part of the series The Lady at 100: Columbia Classics from the Locarno Film Festival.

I gather that TCM has shown this at some point, but the vintage-film channel must have buried it overnight, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see it while I could. My guess is about 60 people joined me Wednesday night in the audience at MOMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2.

I became interested in this film through my exposure, via the Off-Broadway troupes the Peccadillo Theater Company and The Mint Theater, to George Kelly, a member of the famous clan of that name in Philadelphia. (Yes, he was Princess Grace’s uncle, and reportedly a major positive influence on her decision to become an actress.) 

The three Kelly plans I saw through the Mint—The Show-Off (1922), Philip Goes Goes Forth (1931), and The Fatal Weakness (1946)—convinced me that he has become an unjustly neglected playwright. If I found these plays of merit, then how could I resist the allure of Craig’s Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize after it premiered in 1925?

One aspect of Craig’s Wife may account for why it might not be revived so much these days. A conservative Catholic, Kelly held to then-traditional ideas of a wife’s subservience to her husband, and to some extent this drama reflects these mores.

Harriet Craig, the title character, living in an age when women enjoyed little to no financial independence, would certainly win greater sympathy from modern audiences than she would before the rise of feminism in the Sixties. But Kelly’s severe indictment of her materialism and strange emotional detachment registers just as strongly as before, if not more so.

The playwright, who between Broadway stints worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, was reportedly displeased by how his prize-winning work had been adapted by other hands for the big screen. But today’s viewers are likely to regard the movie as an improvement—one that “opens up” the action, while streamlining the dialogue so that the peculiar chilliness of Mrs. Craig becomes more manifest.

The three people most responsible for this successful stage-to-screen transfer were all women—all perhaps better attuned than Kelly to the psychological undercurrents of the main character.

Rosalind Russell was supposedly none too happy about MGM loaning her out to Columbia Pictures to play this unsympathetic role. Her fears proved groundless. She not only received top billing for the first time onscreen but widened her range by playing the kind of challenging female lead in which Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would soon specialize. (In fact, the latter played Mrs. Craig in the 1950 remake.)

The role was carefully crafted with input from director Dorothy Arzner and screenwriter Mary McCall, Jr.  The only female director who worked consistently in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties (and, I discovered from Ben Mankiewicz’s discussion of the film on TCM, the inventor of the “boom mic” that allowed actors greater freedom of movement), Arzner did something that male colleagues had done frequently before but might have given pause to someone in her exposed position: she fired the production designer.

Instead, she turned to former MGM star William Haines, who had forsaken his acting career to become an interior decorator. Using Kelly’s stage directions as inspiration, Haines transformed the upper-class Craig house into a virtual fortress in its own right—uninviting, even forbidding, reflecting Harriet's hauteur. With one additional, telling set of details: Greek motifs which subtly suggested that a tragedy of the protagonist’s own making was occurring inside.

With Arzner ensuring her presence on set, even enabling her to come up with alternative lines on the spot, screenwriter McCall reworked Harriet into a woman less status-conscious than intent on maintaining a hard-won measure of autonomy within marriage—breeding a fanaticism about her home that alienates everyone in it, even her besotted husband.

The script advances this conflict, with none of the leisurely exposition favored by Kelly. A prime example: the first line and image, with Mrs. Harold crying out in alarm to her fellow housemaid, “Mazie!”—signaling to viewers immediately that the abused household staff remains on edge even without Harriet around to supervise the maintenance of her “holy of holies,” as Mrs. Harold calls it.

Equally helpful, McCall and Arzner actually showed the characters referred to but never shown onstage: the doomed Fergus and Adelaide Passmore. That provided an early opportunity for the great character actor Thomas Mitchell (Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life) to display his skill in a short but crucial role as desperate Fergus.

Though the role of Harriet’s easily manipulated husband Walter was too one-dimensional, other characters fared better under Arzner’s guidance, notably Jane Darwell (Mrs. Harold), who a few years later would the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath; Billie Burke (next-door neighbor Mrs. Frazier), best known as the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; and John Hamilton, who made his mark two decades later as editor Perry White in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman.

Later this year, I hope to write more about how Joan Crawford played this role, as well as the controversy over the years involving the play itself. But if you can’t watch the 1936 version on the big screen, as I was lucky enough to do, I urge you to catch it on YouTube.