This Day in Irish-American History (Playwright Philip Barry Scores 1st Broadway Hit With ‘You and I’)

Feb. 19, 1923— Starting a career that would see him become an integral part of the “Golden Age of American Theater,” Philip Barry achieved his first Broadway success with a comedy written for a college class that won him a prize—and enough money to assure he could make a living from the theater to marry the woman he loved.

You and I, premiering at the Belmont Theater in its first of 174 performances, launched the 26-year-old playwright on a quarter-century run as one of the leading lights of the Great White Way, with several of his plays—The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, and The Animal Kingdom—adapted into classic films.

Those works, like his first, were comedies of manners in which razor-sharp repartee was joined to piercing insights into the lives of the rich and well-born.

Barry also served as a key signpost of Irish-American success in the worlds of theater and literature. He made his Broadway debut the same year—and with more success—than F. Scott Fitzgerald would achieve with his play The Vegetable; a year after George Kelly enjoyed a long, profitable run with his comedy The Show-Off; and in the same decade that Eugene O’Neill steered American theater away from its former shallowness into more probing, psychologically oriented considerations of the human dilemma.

While the quartet were most consistently popular in the 1920s, the overturning of traditional norms during that time—and the subsequent collapse of the bubble prosperity with the Great Depression—led them to deeper, more pointed examinations of how personal conduct could survive under such an onslaught.

At that point, popular and critical regard for their work became harder to come by.

The unstable Fitzgerald became a casualty of this more negative reevaluation—and O’Neill would require superb posthumous productions of his last plays (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten) to remind people of his greatness. Kelly, a member of the famous Philadelphia clan that also produced his brother John, an Olympic medalist and wealthy contractor, and niece Grace, lived with restraint and carefully managed his income.

The fickleness of success seemed far away for Barry when You and I packed the Belmont Theater. His play, colored by the anxiety of long-term failure, simultaneously celebrated a commitment to one’s muse and to one’s heart.

It was a triumph Barry knew intimately. He had followed his ambition to writing drama, even in the face of strong opposition from his brothers, who wanted him to take over the family’s stone-quarry business. He had followed his heart just as strongly, as hinted in his stage directions for the play’s ingenue, based largely on his fiancée and eventual wife, Ellen Semple—herself a talented artist:

She is about nineteen, slim, of medium height, with a decidedly pretty, high-bred face, lovely hair, lovely hands, soft, low-pitched voice  —whatever she may be saying. Heredity, careful upbringing, education and travel have combined to invest her with a poise far in advance of her years. She has attained the impossible—complete sophistication without the loss of bloom. Her self-confidence is an added charm —free, as it is, from any taint of youthful cocksureness.

The solid Broadway run of You and I also brought much-needed credibility to Barry’s Harvard drama instructor, George Pierce Baker. Barry had revised and renamed this play he had conceived of for Barry’s class, the “47 Workshop.”

By winning the prestigious Richard Herndon Prize for the comedy, the playwright was not only guaranteed a Broadway production, but also was able to vindicate the instructional methods of Baker.

Students in the latter’s class gained practical experience by mounting their plays on a makeshift stage far from the unforgiving eyes of New York critics. Many in the Harvard faculty had viewed Baker’s class with condescension and disdain.

But Barry’s success signaled that such a pedagogical approach could work in a real-world setting, and such other “47 Workshop” alumni as Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon effectively answered the naysayers, as I noted in this prior post on Baker.

You and I sprang from the urbane, witty side of Barry that not only captivated audiences but won him friends like artist Gerald Murphy, novelist John O’Hara, and Wall Street financier and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. There was another side—less successful, more experimental and preoccupied with religious and ethical concerns—that came to the fore in later years.

But, in whichever vein he worked, Barry was a diligent craftsman on whom nothing was lost or wasted.

In 2018, You and I enjoyed its first New York revival in 95 years at the Off-Broadway Metropolitan Playhouse. COVID-19 and the social disruptions of the last few years have led to more change in the New York theater scene than I recall during my lifetime. 

But when all is said and done, I hope theater producers and directors will look at Barry with the same fresh eyes they are using to assess everything else with.

This Day in Theater History (George Pierce Baker, Teacher of US Drama Giants, Dies)

Jan. 6, 1935— George Pierce Baker, an academic who influenced more than a generation of notable American playwrights—including Nobel, Pulitzer and Oscar winners—through innovative theater courses at Harvard and Yale, died in New York City at age 66.

I alluded briefly to Baker in a prior post on the unsuccessful playwriting experiences of student Thomas Wolfe, who caricatured him as “Professor Hatcher” in his 1935 novel Of Time and the River. But I have felt that the professor deserved a more extensive treatment that did justice to his career—and made his name known to people who had no idea he existed.

Before Baker arrived, the U.S. theater scene, influenced by Henrik Ibsen, was moving away from melodrama, spectacle and farce and more toward realism, but there were no significant counterparts to Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Synge, and other European giants of the stage. Starting in 1905, however, with the introduction of his famous Workshop 47 course, the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon began to write in a strongly personal mode while learning the rudiments of practical dramatic construction in his class.

In an introduction to a collection of the plays of Barry, States of Grace, New Yorker critic Brendan Gill noted that students in Workshop 47 “met in cramped quarters in Lower Massachusetts Hall and acted out plays on a makeshift stage in the little Agassiz Theatre at Radcliffe.” The quarters were unprepossessing, but this also meant that the stakes were low.

The advantage that meant to his students was summed up by one, drama critic John Mason Brown, nearly 30 years later: “As a rule, the good plays that Baker's more famous pupils wrote were written long after they had ceased to work with him. They were helped in writing these good plays because of the patience he showed in dealing with the bad ones they had written for him.”

The photo accompanying this post gives a pretty good impression of Baker in class: peering gravely at students from behind his pince-nez. That look, initially, could appear cold. But students soon found what they needed here: a forum where, free to experiment, they could make mistakes and learn, and, throughout the process, encouragement to continue.

Baker’s perception could, in fact, be quite acute. In Barry’s case, he urged the young man to “amuse in such a way that one is thinking about the play afterwards—not exactly in amusement, but thoughtfully and pleasantly.” This, in fact, became the template of the creator of such sparkling but rueful comedies as The Philadelphia Story, The Animal Kingdom and Holiday.

A graduate of Harvard himself, Baker began at his alma mater as a professor of rhetoric. Especially in the first years of Workshop 47 (named for its place in the school’s catalog), many in the university’s administration undoubtedly wish he had stuck with rhetoric, for they remained suspicious of the utility of his playwriting class.

In 1925, after a generation of wearily enduring this placement at Harvard’s periphery--and unable to persuade it to offer a degree (not just a class) in playwriting--Baker took up Yale’s offer to become first chair of its Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts. There he remained until 1933, when illness forced him to cease teaching.

Howard, who had his first Broadway success a half dozen years after taking Workshop 47—and who would go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted as well as the screenplay for Gone With The Wind—paid tribute to Baker by observing that “he taught his students truths more valid than technique. He taught them that plays are important and hard to write; that few subjects are worthy of dramatization; that characters must be imagined beneath their words; that art is an obligation, not a Sunday suit."

This Day in Literary History (Thomas Wolfe Acts in Own Play)

December 12, 1919—A strapping young giant from the mountains of North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe, drunk enough on words that he was already editor-in-chief of his student newspaper, The Tar Heel, now turned his hand to something that few readers of his later nakedly autobiographical novels could imagine: not just playwriting but acting in his own production, The Third Night, with the Carolina Playmakers.

If you think of another literary genre for Wolfe besides the novel, I’ll bet that the first that comes to mind is poetry, right? He always aimed for the lyrical in his work, after all.

But when he set his sights beyond his mother’s boarding house in Asheville, Wolfe intended to be a playwright. He devoted his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduate school at Harvard before switching his energies to the novel.

At Chapel Hill, Wolfe studied under Professor Frederick Koch. As described by Wolfe biographer Andrew Turnbull (taking his cue from the novelist, who later thinly fictionalized him as “Professor Hutch” in Look Homeward, Angel), Koch was “long on encouragement and short on criticism.”

Koch (nicknamed “Proff” with two f’s) is considered one of the founders of folk drama in America, a kind of theater that looks to native American traditions rather than European genres. He founded the Carolina Playmakers, a group that over the years spawned such later literary or entertainment figures as playwright Paul Green, Andy Griffith, band leader Kay Kyser, Damn Yankees composer Richard Adler, and novelist Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn).

The Third Night was the second of Wolfe’s plays staged by the Playmakers. Morton I. Teicher’s Looking Homeward: A Thomas Wolfe Photo Album contains pictures from both of these productions. I haven’t been able to come across a description of the plot of The Third Night, but its subtitle, “A Play of the Carolina Mountains,” shows that it was fully in keeping with Professor Koch’s aim for the course. The picture of Wolfe in Teicher’s book from this show is pretty amusing, as the future novelist sports a Snidely Whiplash mustache.

Wolfe must have been a real handful for the UNC faculty. For a class he took with one professor, he submitted an essay on toilet paper, claiming that was all he had on hand. As Wolfe read the paper aloud, his English teacher, Professor Edwin Greenlaw, stopped him, remarking that the essay was indeed written on the right kind of paper.

Koch evidently was more patient, encouraging Wolfe to go on to Harvard and take the famous “47 Workshop” taught by Professor George Pierce Baker. The latter, who had earlier taught Eugene O’Neill and whose more recent prize pupil had been Philip Barry (later most famous for writing the Katharine Hepburn vehicle, The Philadelphia Story), tried to be helpful but ended up continually butting heads with the talented but socially awkward and argumentative young Southerner.

The unsuccessful production of a play that Wolfe submitted to the Theatre Guild, Welcome to Our City, ended his hopes of making a living from the stage. After that he turned to teaching for a few years, then, after Look Homeward, Angel, to fiction.

Nineteen years after their exhilarating work with the raw but exuberant aspiring writer, Professor Koch and a fellow actor in The Third Night, Jonathan Daniels, served as pallbearers at Wolfe’s funeral at First Presbyterian Church in Asheville.