This Day in Theater History (Odets Makes Last Broadway Splash in ‘The Country Girl’)

Nov. 10, 1950—Playwright Clifford Odets—onetime hope of the American theater, more recently scorned as a Hollywood sellout—landed his last Broadway success with The Country Girl, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre.

Though the play ran for 235 performances—which, according to the economics for non-musicals of the time, was enough to secure a profit—it has not been revived as often as other works by major American playwrights, such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.

Most Americans, if they are aware at all of this drama of an alcoholic has-been reaching again for Broadway stardom, recognize it from the 1954 film starring Bing Crosby, William Holden, and, in her Oscar-winning role, Grace Kelly.

The original play, staged by Odets himself, possessed nothing like the box-office draws of the Paramount movie, though one principal had known renown, and two others would experience it.

*Holden’s role, as hotshot young director Bernie Dodd (with elements of Odets’ friend Elia Kazan), was played by Steven Hill, better known to posterity as the original team leader in the Mission: Impossible TV series and as D.A. Adam Schiff on the long-running Law and Order.

*Georgie Elgin, the alcoholic’s beleaguered wife played by Kelly, was originally performed by Uta Hagen, who won the Tony Award for the role—and would win another, a dozen years later, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while earning additional recognition as an influential acting teacher.

*The principal actor that I knew the least about was Paul Kelly (no relation to Grace), who may have felt the greatest affinity with his character. Over two decades before, he had served 25 months for manslaughter for killing in a drunken fistfight the husband of his lover (and eventual wife). He had painstakingly rebuilt his career since then, but surely experienced the same regret as Frank Elgin’s over alcohol’s role in derailing his career.

The Country Girl was Odets’ second attempt in as many years to return to the heights of the New York theater scene he had occupied in the mid-to-late 1930s, as a founding member and most significant playwright associated with The Group Theatre.

When he came back to the Great White Way after a financially rewarding but creatively unsatisfactory stint as Hollywood screenwriter and director, he no longer exhibited the concerns with the working classes that animated him previously. But he continued to write about what he knew: in this case, actors.

In The Big Knife (1949), he had implicitly indicted himself for yielding to compromise and temptation—and explicitly assailed the studio system for blackmail and other thuggish methods for keeping stars in line. But even the presence of a real-life Hollywood star (and Odets friend) John Garfield hadn’t been enough to keep the production going beyond three months.

The Country Girl was different, depicting a struggle in which the pressures from without were nothing like the pressures from within faced by

The George Seaton screenplay departed somewhat from the play by making its fragile leading man into a musical-comedy star, making the part more comfortable for recording artist Crosby. But those encountering the drama after seeing the film may be surprised by other changes, both in casting and dialogue.

For one thing, Frank and Georgie have been married about 10 years before the play begins, and the drab existence resulting from his drinking has robbed her of vibrancy and youth. At 31 years old, Hagen would have been closer to the age that Odets had in mind than Grace Kelly, who sought to downplay her glamour and youth by wearing glasses, brown wool, shapeless dresses, and cardigan dresses.

In the years since, actresses who played Georgie have been considerably older than Grace Kelly or even Hagen, including, in TV productions, Shirley Knight (38) and Faye Dunaway (40), and, onstage, Jennifer Jones and Maureen Stapleton (both 47), Christine Lahti (34), and Frances McDormand (51).

Additionally, for whatever reason, Seaton chose not to use as much of what F. W. Dupee called Odets’ “sad and seedy poetry”—idiomatic speech like “tense as a bug in June,” or  “an ulcerated sponge for a brain.” And these days, some ethnic references (for instance, to Chinese laundry workers) are likely to be deleted for stage shows because of political incorrectness.

Odets would likely have responded with dismay to at least some of these changes. Producer Dwight Deere Wiman had postponed the play’s opening for the 1949-50 season to allow the playwright more time to tinker with the dialogue.

For all the time and energy Odets devoted to getting the play right, he still marred it with unnecessary touches—chiefly the complications arising from the Georgie-Dodd relationship, at first a clash of adversaries before becoming a love affair that takes them by surprise.

An anonymous reviewer from Time Magazine adeptly identified the “austere telling without a false word or a florid gesture” that would have sustained Odets’ “compact little tragedy of misunderstanding” between Georgie and Dodd over who was really responsible for Frank’s skittishness, depression and breakdown.

Even so, the drama represented more than what Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune called “a fiercely affectionate anecdote about backstage doings."

There are reasons why, despite critics’ predictable carping that this and other Odets plays are “dated,” directors, dramaturges and actors have not utterly forgotten this drama.

Odets might not be writing anymore about the proletariat he sprang from, and the mechanics of staging a show may have changed (near-endless small “workshopping” instead of short, nerve-racking out-of-town tryouts). 

But theater professionals still know how well he showed the tension inherent in bringing an untried play to the stage, as well as the raging, crippling insecurity that so often dogs actors who depend on the public for approval that can never be enough.

Although the history of the American theater is filled with alcoholics, Odets may have been inspired by a relatively recent example: actress Laurette Taylor, who, after years on the bottle, pulled herself together long enough in 1944 by offering a career-defining performance in The Glass Menagerie. 

Outside of Eugene O’Neill, it’s hard to think of another play that limns so thoroughly the self-deception of alcoholics and the vortex into which they pull those closest to them.

In the remaining dozen years of Odets’ life, he would never repeat even the moderate success he enjoyed with The Country Wife, let alone enjoy the acclaim and hope generated by the half-dozen 1930s plays running from Awake and Sing to Golden Boy.

Long under FBI surveillance for his relatively brief Communist party membership in the 1930s, he was hauled in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

 Responsible for raising two children (including a daughter with severe developmental disabilities) after the death of his estranged wife, he named names, albeit none that hadn’t been provided previously to the committee.

He took one more shot at Broadway with his retelling of Noah and the Flood, Flowering Peach.  But his relationship with producer Robert Whitehead was rockier than the one he had enjoyed with his friend Wiman, and any hope for greater attention to the play vanished when the advisory board for the Pulitzer overruled the jury’s selection of his drama and rewarded it instead to Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Back in Hollywood, he masterfully rewrote Ernest Lehman’s initial screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success, but the film’s cult classic status did not come till after his death. 

In the hospital with fatal stomach cancer, he was serving as script supervisor for the short-lived (and even less remembered) anthology series, The Richard Boone Show, a vehicle unworthy of his talent.

But long before, he had already recognized the thin line between success and oblivion in The Country Girl.

This Day in Theater History (Odets, Ex-‘Golden Boy’ of Broadway, Dies)

August 14, 1963—With his critical reputation in decline and his onetime Old Left colleagues shunning him for betrayal, Clifford Odets, a prolific and popular playwright of 1930s Broadway, died at age 57 of colon cancer in Los Angeles, not far from the film colony that for the last 20 years had paid him handsomely even as it took pieces of his soul.

Lest you feel I’m being a mite melodramatic with that last phrase, let me point out that Odets had done so himself in his 1949 drama, The Big Knife (I posted about the Roundabout Theatre revival several weeks ago), where murder is just one of the sins depicted. Moreover, the title character of the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie Barton Fink finds that Hell is literally a Hollywood hotel (to which this playwright with the Odets social conscience and resume and the George S. Kaufman hairdo has fled to overcome writers’ block).

Even before encountering the real Hell, Fink—lured to Hollywood after a single successful play—finds himself in what seems the very embodiment of it: writing, for studio star Wallace Beery, a screenplay about boxing, a sport he knows nothing about.

The scorn heaped by the Coen brothers on their hapless hero, however, was nothing compared with the self-loathing felt by Odets. At least Beery could act. Not so Elvis Presley, the star of Odets’ last film credit, Wild in the Country (1961). And Odets, the son of Jewish immigrants, who made his name as the voice of urban America, must have felt just as unmoored as Fink grinding out a boxing screenplay when he took on his last writing assignment a year before his death: the Richard Boone TV Western, Have Gun, Will Travel.

In Some Time in the Sun, Tom Dardis took a nuanced approach to the traditional tale of how Hollywood twisted the likes of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Agee, Huxley, and West. Odets might conform to the stereotype of the misused artist better. To be sure, he had a couple of successes: Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a masterful collaboration with Ernest Lehman on a powerful Winchell-like gossip columnist, and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), which provided Cary Grant with perhaps his best dramatic role. Yet much of his time was spent frustratingly on projects where he never received screen credit (e.g., dialogue for the Grant-Bergman love scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious).

Among Odets’ final projects was a musical version of perhaps his greatest Broadway success, Golden Boy. That drama of an up-from-the-streets young man with opposing talents for music and boxing starkly posed the choice between art and commercialism, good and evil—and, many critics (often, former friends) believed, foretold Odets' own fate.

Especially crucial in this regard was Odets’ 1953 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). For the last six years, after having been identified as a Communist, Odets had fallen squarely within the committee’s sights, and it soon became clear that his brief but intense association with Marxism in the mid-1930s had been extensively recorded. The playwright-screenwriter’s attempt to soften the impact of his testimony, by only informing on those named by others, could not disguise the fact that he had capitulated, even while the likes of Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman had, famously, not done so.

In the early 1940s, when he had walked away from his associates in the Group Theatre to go to Hollywood, many old friends believed he had betrayed his gifts by forsaking his dream of socially relevant theater. A decade later, they could point to the HUAC testimony as a second, more personal betrayal.

For years, Odets had been a tortured soul. New Yorker critic John Lahr, in as fine and sympathetic a treatment as the playwright has received from any critic in the last couple of decades, notes that Odets had tried suicide three times before the age of 25. While married to Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer, he had been so jealous of her friendship with Albert Einstein that he had cut to shreds a photo of the scientist. Now, with his HUAC testimony, the anguish became less overt, but still consumed him from within.

Odets’ harsher critics depict a man too addicted to the creature comforts of Hollywood to embrace principle at the height of the blacklist, but the case was not that simple. By the time of his testimony, it had become abundantly clear that his six-year-old daughter had severe developmental issues that required extended psychiatric treatment. During these years, his divorce from wife Bette Grayson (then the latter’s death a couple of years later) meant that his family expenses had mounted significantly.

The past several years have brought to New York stages revivals of some of his better-known works: Golden Boy, The Country Girl, Awake and Sing, and The Big Knife. While it is good that modern audiences now have a chance once again to decide for themselves the ultimate value of his work, the quality of those productions has varied enough that we are still nowhere near a consensus on Odets' place in the American theater landscape.

Even at the height of his fame, Odets sensed this alienation. “I am homeless wherever I go, always lonely,” he wrote in his journal in 1940, just before he headed out to Hollywood.

Theater Review: Clifford Odets’ ‘The Big Knife,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

At the performance I caught of Clifford Odets’ 1949 drama The Big Knife, the audience broke out in applause at the wonders that set designer John Lee Beatty had performed at the American Airlines Theatre. The time might have been the late 1940s, as the Hollywood studio system felt its hegemony seriously threatened for the first time. But most of the theatergoers undoubtedly wished that the movie-star home they saw was real and that they could move in there themselves.

Before long, we learned that it was all a gilded cage. The owner of this splendid Beverly Hills home, Charlie Castle, is a prisoner in his own well-appointed fortress. All these creature comforts only make it that much harder to unfasten the chains of a multiyear contract that his studio is pressing him to sign, through every means, fair and foul, at its command.

John Garfield, then about to be caught up in his own Tinseltown tragedy as a blacklist victim, starred in the show’s initial run more than 60 years ago. Surely, the matinee idol and Odets, his onetime associate in New York’s Group Theatre, the great troupe that helped revolutionize American acting with a more naturalistic style, shared bone-deep aspirations to higher art and an all-too-human susceptibility to matters of the flesh that elevated this collaboration to moments of real power.

That sense of urgency, however, was never really communicated in the revival mounted by the Roundabout Theatre that closed this past Sunday.

Charlie’s gilded cage might be one reason why some audience members (and judging by the reviews, critics) had had a hard time warming to this production. No getting around it: this is a problem play, in more ways than one.

Like an earlier play by Clifford Odets, Golden Boy (revived in an acclaimed production late last year at Lincoln Center), The Big Knife dramatizes the way that capitalism corrupts, undermines and defeats artistic aspirations. It is much easier, however, for an audience to feel sympathy for Golden Boy’s Joe Bonaparte—fearful that the Great Depression will crush his dream of a career as a violinist, grasping at boxing as his meal-ticket out of poverty—than Castle, earning his way in an uninspired career, but gainfully employed, for all that.

The melodrama that Odets wrote, from inside the belly of the beast, mirrors in some ways the B-movie fare that Castle longs to escape. Seldom has any writer’s disgust with Hollywood been rendered so palpably. (In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a star might be forgotten, but not a target for blackmail or cause of a murder plot—just a perpetrator of a crazed, accidental shooting.)

From 1935 to early 1940, Odets was considered the “golden boy” of American theater, with seven plays to his credit. In 1949, after a prosperous but artistically unsatisfying time writing and directing films, he returned to the Great White Way, hoping that this vehicle—molded first to the persona of good friend Cary Grant, then, more crucially, to Garfield—would be his comeback.

It wasn’t--and, if a critical reevaluation will ever try to salvage Odets, it’s hard to see how this play will reclaim his once-prestigious perch in American theater.

By and large, the drama is about as well-cast as any recent Roundabout production. Marin Ireland makes for a deeply sympathetic Marian, Charlie’s estranged wife, whose continuing love for him is sorely tested by his unfaithfulness, his departure from his ideals as a struggling young actor, and the presence of a stalwart if dull writer who would like to marry her. Chip Zien turns Charlie’s agent Nat Danziger into an anguished father figure to Charlie and Marian, who tries to resolve the impossible: his client’s wish for artistic freedom and the studio’s mounting anger over their chief moneymaker’s defiance.

Particularly excellent are two heavies in this production: Richard Kind, who, as an at times comically tyrannical studio boss, Marcus Hoff, will remind many of Columbia Pictures’s infamous chief, Harry Cohn; and Reg Rogers as Smiley Coy, Hoff’s slimy all-purpose fixer, who, with a phone call, can make almost any problem disappear—including a drunk-driving incident from a year ago that involved Charlie, for whom a friend took the fall.

The one major actor I could point to in the cast who was problematic was, unfortunately, the lead, Bobby Cannavale. He made a fine impression on me in a fine 2005 ensemble production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, but he couldn’t carry the burden created by Odets.

The difficulty starts with the playwright’s quirky dialogue. Sometimes a line puts a sharp twist on what, in other hands, would sound cliched (Charlie to Marian: “Play billiards, Angel, or put the cue down,” rather than “Don’t start a conversation and then drop it”). In other instances, though, the lines come across as faux-poetic (“You go on grieving for the past, like a weeping bird”). In still other cases, the dialogue is the worst kind of speechifying, holding the play’s themes aloft in the most boldface banner (Charlie on studio bosses such as Hoff: “Don’t they murder the highest dreams and hopes of a whole great people with the movies they make? This whole movie thing is a murder of the people.”)

Perhaps only Garfield could have invested such lines with the raw believability that Odets desired. Nowhere near as heralded as he should be today as the precursor of Brando, Pacino, DeNiro, or, indeed, generations of New York actors, Garfield--whose centennial went criminally unnoticed a few months ago (including by me)--might not have been always sympathetic, but with his intelligence, sexual magnetism, and unrelenting intensity, he was compulsively watchable and fully human. It isn’t a disgrace that Cannavale doesn’t possess all these qualities, let alone in such abundance. Few other actors do.

Nevertheless, my disappointment as I left the American Airlines Theatre was keen. I had vague memories of the 1955 film adaptation of this play starring Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger. I had hoped that the Roundabout would weave magic from this fascinating but neglected drama. But despite fine casting and production values, Doug Hughes’ deeply respectful direction only focused more attention on the play’s hollow core.