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.

Quote of the Day (George Kelly, on Being Cheated Out of Life)

“I think it's a terrible thing to let yourself be cheated out of life. Of course, it's all right to do the right thing by people, but be sure you do the right thing for yourself while you're at it. Because half the time they don't appreciate it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright (and beloved uncle of actress Grace Kelly) George Kelly (1887-1974), Daisy Mayme: A Comedy (1927)

This Day in Theater History (O'Neill's ‘Long Day's Journey’ Published)

Feb. 20, 1956—When Yale University Press issued Long Day's Journey Into Night, it capped a nearly two-year backstage drama that saw the widow of playwright Eugene O'Neill disregard the express wishes of her husband and the protests of his longtime publisher that the heavily autobiographical tragedy not be made available for scholars until 25 years after his death.

But under the terms of the will of O’Neill, who had died in 1953, the manuscript was left in the hands of Carlotta Monterey O’Neill. When Random House editors Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins balked at going against his long-expressed wishes, she withdrew the manuscript from their hands and submitted it to Yale University Press.

Perhaps just as important, in the same month, despite her husband’s desire that the heavily autobiographical tragedy never even be performed, she allowed it to be staged in Stockholm by the Royal Dramatic Theatre, whose productions he had admired.

Many regarded Mrs. O’Neill’s actions not just as high-handed, but even as a betrayal of the man for whom she had been mate, muse and, as his health declined, nursed. (In particular, Cerf was so incensed by her move that he unsuccessfully used Random House director Frederick B. Adams, Jr. to urge fellow members of the Board of Governors of the Yale University Press not to publish the play.)

But had Carlotta not taken this course, it’s an open question whether O’Neill’s reputation would ever have come out of the decline into which it had sunk since he won the Nobel Prize in 1936.

As an example of the posthumous fate that could have awaited O’Neill, one need only look at another Irish-American, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright just a year his senior: George Kelly. Like O’Neill, Kelly’s name had shone brightly on Broadway in the 1920s, and he had sought to leave a thumbprint on his plays so distinct that directors felt self-conscious about departing from this vision. (O’Neill wrote extraordinarily detailed instructions about sets, costumes, even line readings; Kelly simply cut out the middle man and directed his own plays.) Both experienced critical and popular failures in the following decade. Both attempted comebacks right after WWII, but receded from the stage when their effort failed.

But unlike O’Neill, Kelly lived on until 1974, a single (and, likely, gay) man with no widow who would fight to keep him in the popular memory as tenaciously as she had once fought her husband himself. The result, as I explained in this prior post, is that when a Kelly play is performed again, as New York’s Mint Theater has done in the past few years, an air of fustiness and datedness clings unfairly to the production, even when it is staged admirably.

Over the years, a host of questions have gathered around both O’Neill’s original embargo on the play and Carlotta’s decision to relax it. Let’s deal first with the various explanations for what may have motivated O’Neill:

*He didn’t want members of his family to be hurt by the play. Both Commins and critic George Jean Nathan recalled O’Neill having told them this. But the three people with the most cause for concern—his parents and brother—had all died in the early 1920s, and in his last play staged while he was alive, A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill disclosed some of the most embarrassing details about Jamie’s alcoholism, including a bender as he escorted his mother’s remains on the train back from California after her fatal stroke. Nor were Eugene’s own children too young to deal with the highly personal disclosures: Eugene Jr. had predeceased his father by three years (and, in any case, had read and been moved by the play in 1941), Shane was in his early 30s, and Oona had become permanently estranged from her father and stepmother because of her marriage to the much older Charlie Chaplin.

*Another person not associated with his immediate family could have felt hurt. O’Neill’s cousin, Agnes Brennan, is not depicted in the play, but her family is alluded to. Most theatergoers or even those more familiar with O’Neill would not have guessed this, but the citizens of New London—and especially Ms. Brennan (the only relative that her husband ever saw, Carlotta acknowledged)—would have known. In the play, the character modeled on O’Neill’s mother, Mary Tyrone, declares that she hates New London “and everyone in it”—which, in the real-life Connecticut community in 1912, included Brennan (privy to all the details of the morphine addiction of Eugene’s mother). Indeed, Agnes, when Carlotta showed her the manuscript before publication, spent “hours weeping,” according to O'Neill's widow.

*O’Neill felt too much disgust with theater contemporaries to trust them with his plays anymore. While the last reason may be most likely, this one cannot be dismissed. Unsuccessful productions of The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten confirmed O’Neill in his longstanding dislike of actors. More than that, he believed that postwar audiences were not ready for material that challenged, disheartened or disillusioned them, as his almost always did.

As for why Carlotta disobeyed O’Neill’s ban on releasing the play, a recent biographer of the playwright, Robert Dowling, offers cogent evidence, pro and con, for the following reasons:

*Carlotta needed or wanted the money. This motive was frequently proposed by people who disliked her—a very sizable group. The only problem was that she did not live lavishly, and she even donated the proceeds of the Swedish premiere to charity.

*Carlotta wanted publicity. But she largely avoided giving press interviews.

*She wanted to forestall any financial claim by O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton. Eugene and Carlotta both felt that his second ex was, with her escalating alimony and child support demands, bleeding the playwright dry. In Agnes’ possession was his preliminary treatment, all the way back in 1927, of the play. By having the play published—with, at Carlotta's insistence, his inscription of the play to her, on their 12^th wedding anniversary in July 1941—she would get a jump on her rival for any future financial claim on the work.

*Even following Eugene’s death, she wanted no competition for his love. One of the couple’s major blow-ups, as Eugene’s physical condition deteriorated, occurred over his close, if non-physical, relationship with the young woman hired to be his nurse. Carlotta’s discovery of his love poem to the nurse led to grappling that could easily have ended in either’s death (her, by his loaded handgun; him, by her butcher knife). His death would have brought to the fore biographers who would inevitably turn up past lovers. She wanted no doubt about who had been there for him when it counted.

*She realized how truly great the play was. A former actress, Carlotta knew great theater when she saw it. She agreed with her husband that it was the best thing he had ever written.

*By reaffirming Eugene’s importance to the world, Carlotta implicitly underscored her status as his muse. One after another, the playwright’s friends and even children had found themselves cut off by Carlotta, who not only carefully guarded his health but also his access. All the revelations that were to come out about him, if she had anything to do with it, would, nevertheless, have to admit that the playwright had done his deepest, greatest works with her as his mate.

But Carlotta cannot necessarily be seen as the only individual responsible for her abrogation of her husband’s wishes. One of O’Neill’s biographers, Barbara Gelb, believed that he had even expected Carlotta to do so. After all, she told the makers of a PBS documentary about the Irish-American playwright, he knew well what kind of woman Carlotta was—and, more specifically, that she was fully capable of turning around almost immediately after his death and releasing the play to the world.

In a sense, Carlotta may have released this tragedy populated by the ghosts of her husband’s family because she herself felt haunted by his memory. Jose Quintero, who directed Long Day's Journey for its first Broadway production in the fall of 1956, told New York Magazine in a 1977 interview that, before she gave him the exclusive American rights to stage the show, Carlotta met him in her apartment, where she conducted raging arguments aloud with O’Neill, whose ghostly presence she was certain was in the room even then.

After the final curtain at the Broadway premiere of Quintero’s production, the cast stepped onto the stage for their bows. For more than a minute, an unsettling silence fell over the Helen Hayes Theatre.

What the cast and crew may not have realized is that there was such a heavy silence because so many sobs were being stifled in the audience. As soon as this could be processed, what began as scattered claps gathered in intensity into a continuous roar. One curtain call after another followed for the five-member cast, exhausted by their four-plus hours onstage with perhaps the most emotionally shattering lines they’d ever had to learn and repeat. 

Then something even more extraordinary followed: For the first and only time in his six-decade theatrical career, Jason Robards Jr. (who played the character based on O'Neill's older brother, Jamie) remembered, a mass of theatergoers flocked toward the stage.

Theatergoers that night sensed correctly that O’Neill had dispensed with masks, drumbeats, stream-of-consciousness soliloquys, and the other devices of his earlier plays. There was no distance between them and this raw material, any more than there was between them and the actors this night.

Long Day's Journey Into Night won for O’Neill, posthumously, his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as a Tony Award for the Best New Play in 1957 (and another Tony for Best Revival of a Play in 2003). No matter the circumstances in which it came before the world, we have his third wife and literary executrix to thank for it.

Theater Review: George Kelly’s ‘Fatal Weakness,’ at the Mint Theater

Over the last several years that I have been attending performances at the Off-Broadway venue The Mint Theater, I have never known it to take a misstep—until now, with The Fatal Weakness, a comedy-drama that closed this past weekend. Even in this case, the fault lies less with the cast or crew than with the source material.

Last year, Philip Goes Forth, another play by George Kelly, had triumphantly demonstrated how good the Mint could be in its mission of reviving interest in unjustly neglected works. (See my post on that occasion here.)

I had high hopes, then, for The Fatal Weakness, and not a little of interest. After all, it was the last play by Kelly (a Pulitzer Prize winner for the 1920s drama Craig’s Wife, a playwright who, oddly enough, might be better known today as “Grace’s Uncle”). How would the play work, I wondered?

As it turned out, not terribly well. Reviewers are fond of writing that a play is “dated,” but that presupposes that audiences found the material compelling at some point after it premiered. But The Fatal Weakness never really gained traction, with critics or audiences, and its closing not long after its November 1946 Broadway opening hastened Kelly’s retirement. Its conflicts and themes haven’t dated with time—in fact, in certain ways, it feels like an uncanny barometer of America’s moral future, in terms of how it viewed the marriage bond—but, for once, there are cracks in Kelly’s dramatic masonry.

Perhaps the Mint saw in the play the same quality that its original star, Ina Claire, and the star of a 1976 PBS telecast, Eva Marie Saint, glimpsed: the opportunity for a middle-aged actress to shine, in a role of some complexity. Upper-class Ollie Ospenshade, married nearly three decades, is, as the play begins, afflicted with the “fatal weakness” of incurable romanticism—so much so that one of her favorite pastimes has become attending weddings, even those involving complete strangers.

Before long, it becomes clear that she may not be altogether clear-sighted about a situation close to home. Best female friend and perennial busybody Mabel Wentz has picked up scuttlebutt that Ollie’s husband Paul might be two-timing Ollie. In some of the most farcical minutes of the show, the two friends play amateur detective, conducting surveillance on Paul to see if he is indeed going to the golf course, as he claims.

A subplot involves the Ospenshades’ daughter Penny, a wife whose notions of proper marriage are being undermined by new pseudo-intellectual fads. She is very much her father’s girl, making Ollie wonder how much of Paul’s inclinations may have rubbed off on her.

The acting, as with prior Mint productions, is first-rate. Cliff Bemis, so good as an unbending but upright father in Philip Goes Forth, does well with another patriarch here, albeit one looser and more amiable. Victoria Mack makes Penny a fascinating compound of boredom, privilege and half-baked pretension. The Irish servant Anna becomes, in the hands of Patricia Kilgarriff, a droll prism for audiences wondering how the affluent can be so foolish.

Nor does any fault for this production lie with leading lady Kristin Griffith, who manages Ollie’s transition from flibbertigibbet to mature woman—and the play’s swing from comedy to drama—with manifest skill.

No, the fault with this comedy-drama lies not with any of the cast, nor even with director Jesse Marchese, but with Kelly himself, whose admirable attempts to circumvent clichéd contemporary views of marriage were undermined by sudden lurches in tone, not to mention plot points that strain credulity (e.g.,. a major transition in Ollie’s life transpires a dozen times quicker than it ever could in real life).

This Day in Theater History (Kelly Dramedy ‘The Show-Off’ Premieres)

February 5, 1924—At the height of a decade when a President of the United States said “the business of America is business,” George Kelly (pictured) satirized the empty clichés behind the monied class—and puffed-up aspirants to it—with The Show-Off, which premiered at Broadway’s Playhouse Theatre on this date. 

Hailed by critics as perhaps the finest comedy of its age, it was selected by a panel of judges for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But Columbia University, as it would occasionally do over the years, overruled the panel’s recommendation—in this case, awarding the prize to a member of its own faculty—proving once more that in academe, charity begins at home.

Perhaps out of a sense of guilt—in much the same way, in that decade, that the Pulitzer for fiction was awarded to Sinclair Lewis for Arrowsmith, after he had been snubbed on earlier occasions—Kelly did receive the award for his next work, Craig’s Wife. 

In the 1930s, as one production of his after another flopped on Broadway, he turned briefly to Hollywood. He came back to Broadway in the 1940s, but the glow from two decades before had worn off, and thereafter, if he was known at all, it was as the beloved uncle of Grace Kelly.

There are signs, however, that interest in him might be reviving. Last year, the Mint Theater dusted off one of Kelly’s ‘30s failures, Philip Goes Forth, and proved that contemporary critics underestimated it. (My review is here.) Earlier in the year, Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse mounted an acclaimed production of The Show-Off, awakening a new generation to the fine dialogue and subtle characterization of this long-neglected playwright.

The title character of The Show-Off is Aubrey Piper, who so ardently courts young Amy Fisher that she disregards the scornful warnings of her family that her new beau is just a humble clerk, not the railroad department head he claims to be. 

As Amy finds out after their marriage, he is really a junior-league Babbitt, a backslapper who turns people off with his spendthrift ways and the sanctimonious nonsense he’s picked up from books. At the same time, he is a lost soul, and, privately, admits it.

A son and brother of Irish-Americans who made it big in Philadelphia, Kelly has often been deemed a snob, even by later critics who otherwise praised his stage craftsmanship. To be sure, he did not trumpet sympathy with the proletariat the way, for instance, that Clifford Odets (whom he despised) did. 

But The Show-Off, despite being a comedy, retains much of its original power because of his harrowing, if unsentimental, treatment of a North Philadelphia rowhouse family on the financial edge. 

For years, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, their son Joe and daughter Clara have striven to stay afloat. The entrance into the family of the Micawberish Aubrey is resented so fiercely because his problems threaten to capsize everyone.

The Show-Off enjoyed a very healthy 571-performance original run. The Pulitzer panel recommended it as an “extremely good and original American play.” 

Yet for some reason, a docent of the administrator of the prize, Columbia University, wrote a letter to the school’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, protesting against presenting the prize to Kelly. 

That individual, though neither a member of the panel of judges nor of the award’s advisory board, had enough sway to tilt the prize in favor of Hell-Bent fer Heaven, by Hatcher Hughes.

Ever hear of that play? That playwright? I haven’t, and I have a sneaking suspicion that you haven’t, either, Faithful Reader. Kelly might be a neglected playwright, but Hughes seems, nearly seven decades after his death, to have utterly fallen off the theater landscape.

I mentioned that The Show-Off had a well-received revival in Connecticut recently. But there’s a good possibility that it has been viewed more widely (albeit in different form) on Turner Classic Movies.

Two years after the start of its Broadway run, it was turned into a silent film, with future siren Louise Brooks as one of the Fisher daughters. With the coming of talkies, it was transformed into the 1930 film, Men Are Like That, and, under its original name, with Red Skelton in 1946.

But the most intriguing—and most important—version might have been in 1934, in what might be termed “A Tale of Two Tracys.” 

MGM had intended to turn Kelly’s play into a vehicle for Lee Tracy, a member of the original cast. But that actor lost his shot at the role—and his job at the studio—because of his misbehavior during location shooting of Viva Villa in Mexico. (At very least, he insulted a Mexican cadet during a Revolutionary Day parade; but the most notorious rumor is that, after one of his legendary drunken binges, he urinated off a hotel balcony.) 

He was replaced by Spencer Tracy, who, only a few days before, had received a favorable notice for his work in a Hollywood trade publication.

On loan from Twentieth-Century Fox to make the film, Spencer Tracy made the most of what turned out, in effect, to be an audition for MGM, the studio that liked to brag that it had “more stars than there are in the heavens.” The film succeeded with critics and, even more important, audiences. 

The actor was promptly signed by MGM, where he ended up making the lion’s share of the nine movies that won him Oscar nominations, including the two for which he won Best Actor (Captains Courageous and Boys Town).

A final note on the play. As I have read it, I couldn’t help but agree with the assessment of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who called it “a comic masterpiece, an airtight manipulation of domestic values and the outside world’s economic success. And just like any comic masterpiece there is something hauntingly sad about it.”