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 (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 (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.

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Ernest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

This Day in Theater History (Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ Hailed as Career Zenith)

Dec. 28, 1923—Even though critics had derided the most recent play of George Bernard Shaw as too verbose and long, the Anglo-Irish playwright’s new comedy-drama was in much the same vein: Saint Joan, which premiered at New York’s Garrick Theatre.

Instead of driving audiences away, however, the six-act (with epilogue), 3½ hour comedy-drama-historical epic about Joan of Arc proved to be a great success. It was acclaimed as the capstone of his nearly three-decade career as a dramatist, propelling him towards the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

At the same time, this success boosted the faith of the playwright in—as well as the box-office take of— the most influential producing company of the 1920s and 1930s, the Theatre Guild, which became the major American sponsor of new work by not only Shaw but also emerging homegrown dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Howard, and William Saroyan.

The Guild—which pioneered the subscription plan as a means of assuring a constant stream of avid playgoers more disposed to experimental, challenging fare—had done well with Shaw's Heartbreak House in 1920. But with Back to Methusaleh, a five-play series that represented the closest the playwright came to science fiction, the company lost $20,000—a failure that Shaw attributed to the Guild's management rather than to himself.

In contrast, the Guild's board of directors was more enthusiastic about Saint Joan. But, as the play approached its premiere, the board became concerned that the same issues that plagued its predecessor would hinder the success of this new entry. 

More was riding on the American success of the dramatist whose wife playfully nicknamed "The Genius." The London production of Saint Joan, starring one of Shaw’s favorite actresses, Sybil Thorndike, ended up being delayed until March 1924, so the Guild’s staging became the de facto world premiere, and news about its effectiveness would be transmitted overseas.

As was his wont, Shaw conducted his business with the American theater from across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Despite the importance of America to Shaw’s long-term commercial viability (it represented his largest source of income from 1894 to his death in 1950), the playwright did not visit the nation until 1933, and in general regarded it, according to L. W. Conolly’s Bernard Shaw on the American Stage, with “a toxic mix of contempt and mockery."

Alhough Katharine Cornell, fast acquiring a reputation as one of the greatest American stage actresses, passed on this initial production, the Guild board of directors ended up delighted with the blue-eyed Brooklyn beauty who took on the title role: Winifred Lenihan, who made of it a career triumph.

First after the dress rehearsal, then again after opening night, the Guild noticed that some attendees, especially from the suburbs, were departing early. Their initial cables urged Shaw to cut some of the dialogue to reduce that, but they received no reply. 

Only after the company management prevailed on the 25-year-old Lenihan to send her own cable with a similar request did the playwright respond. They might not have wished they had sent all these messages when they saw Shaw's follow-up.

To Ms. Lenihan, the playwright’s cable was short and ironic: “THE GUILD IS SENDING ME TELEGRAMS IN YOUR NAME. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THEM.” The organization’s management must have winced at his longer, more lacerating letter to them: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for getting a young actress into trouble with an author like that…. You have wasted a whole morning for me with your panic-stricken nonsense, confound you!”

In the end, it didn’t matter: the public ignored reviewers who complained about the length by purchasing tickets. Despite his waspish transatlantic exchanges with the Theatre Guild's management, Shaw elected to stay with it as the principal American agent for his plays, with a total of 15 plays under its aegis.

Although Shaw wrote over 60 plays, Saint Joan ranks among his most popular, probably trailing only Pygmalion (which has the benefit of not only inspiring the musical My Fair Lady, but is also logistically easier to mount, with fewer characters and sets).

Over the centuries, Joan has provided fodder for a lengthy parade of novelists and dramatists, including William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and others. But it’s Shaw’s depiction that has captured the popular imagination the most.

In the early postwar period, Saint Joan exerted an unusual appeal for colonial audiences that, like France in Joan’s time, was feeling the stirrings of nationalism. 

Yet even then, in the McCarthy period, it was also seen as a broadside against intolerance, and more recently has appealed to those who sympathize with her plight at the hands of men who hope to squash what Shaw ironically termed “unwomanly and insufferable presumption.”

It is a curious fact of Joan of Arc’s posthumous appeal that two religious skeptics like Twain and Shaw could be so powerfully drawn to the story of this saint. Leave aside the odd contention, in Shaw’s preface to the play, that Joan was “one of the first Protestant martyrs.”

Remember instead: the recollection of Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langner, in his 1963 memoir, GBS and the Lunatic, that Shaw attributed the enormous speed with which he wrote the play to Joan herself: “As I wrote, she guided my hand, and the words came tumbling out at such a speed that my pen rushed across the paper and I could barely write fast enough to put them down."

In 1934, Shaw predicted correctly, “It is quite likely that sixty years hence, every great English and American actress will have a shot at ‘Saint Joan,’ just as every great actor will have a shot at Hamlet.”

 Among those who have played Shaw’s version of the Maid of Orleans: Katharine Cornell (catching it on the rebound), Wendy Hiller, Zoe Atkins, Judi Dench, Uta Hagen, Joan Plowright, Lynn Redgrave, and Kim Stanley.

I myself have seen two productions: one at Manhattan's Paley Center for Media, a 1967 "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV presentation starring Genevieve Bujold; the other a 2018 Manhattan Theatre Club performance with Condola Rashad in the title role. 

Both productions shortened the text—an eventuality that Shaw dourly predicted in the preface to the play, when he noted that "well intentioned but disastrous counsellors" would have their way "when I am no longer in control of the performing rights."

This Day in Theater History (Moliere, Stricken Mid-Performance, Dies Offstage)

Feb. 17, 1673—Maybe he was tempting fate, but, just as Moliere was mocking doctors in the latest satire he'd written for his troupe, The Imaginary Invalid, he began to cough and gasp towards the end of the comedy's fourth performance. 

The audience, at first stunned, fell into familiar laughter when they saw the French actor, director, theater administrator, and playwright grinning. But he had been coughing up blood and had to be carried home in a sedan chair.

Moliere frantically urged his company to summon his wife and a priest to hear his last confession, but neither arrived in time before he died, at age 50, succumbing to a seizure brought on by tuberculosis.

Why didn’t Moliere call for a doctor as he expired? I can think of four possibilities:

1) He knew his case was hopeless at this point, as he’d been suffering from TB for several years, refusing to let it curtail his creative activity;

2)    2) He thought doctors were incompetent and/or useless;

3)    3)  He dreaded physicians (an attitude not entirely excluding Possibility #2, given the state of 17^th-century medicine); and

4)    4)  Dialogue he’d written for himself in his new farce, a broad wink to the audience, might have revealed how he thought men of medicine would react to his emergency: “Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: ‘Go on, drop dead!’”

But the choice of the two people that Moliere (the pseudonym adopted by Jean Baptiste Poquelin) did want at his side echoed the two major controversies of his life and career. 

There was a two-decade difference in age between him and wife Armande, at a time when significant age gaps between spouses were even more snickered at than they are now. 

Adding fuel to the wisecracks aimed at him: the rumor that Armande was either the sister of his former mistress or her daughter by Moliere.

(Remember: With no such thing as exercise regimens, understanding of diets, or regular checkups, a 50-year-old man in 1673 was more like 60—at least.)

Moliere was fully aware of what a buffoon he looked like to his critics. The School for Wives (1662), written not long after his marriage, featured the playwright himself as a foolhardy bachelor bound and determined to wed a pretty young thing. 

And in The Misanthrope, the title character is nearly undone not just by his judgmental temperament but by his jealousy of the younger, flirtatious woman he loves.

As for a priest to hear his confession: the Roman Catholic Church came closer to wreaking vengeance on him than the medical profession did. Though Moliere had been careful in Tartuffe and Don Juan to show that he despised religious hypocrisy rather than the practice of religion itself, the Church saw these plays as direct attacks on the institution. 

When he died, his widow had to plead directly with King Louis XIV (someone that Moliere had been careful not to offend) to allow a Christian burial—an appeal only granted on the condition that the ceremony be done with no pomp.

Today, nobody but Moliere scholars knows the names of his critics. But in the three and a half centuries after his death, his work continues to entertain audiences and influence members of the profession for which he literally gave his life. 

Ever since I saw a local production of Don Juan—and a 1970s PBS telecast of Tartuffe starring Donald Moffat and Tammy Grimes—I have marveled at Moliere's slashing wit, as well as his sprightly dialogue rendered in Alexandrine rhymes (and translated superbly by American poet Richard Wilbur). 

I could not let this post go without discussing a bit more about the most dramatic exit he ever made. Have any other entertainers died under similar circumstances?

Well, yes. Interestingly enough, quite a few opera singers died onstage. (I suppose that the enormous vocal demands of their work—and, sometimes, the singers' big frames—left them vulnerable.)

But there have also been several notable cases of other comic actors who, like Moliere, were struck down during a performance:

• Redd Foxx, the example that sprang immediately to my mind, died of a heart attack in October 1991 during rehearsals for the sitcom The Royal Family—and cast and crew, remembering his many feigned attacks two decades before on Sanford and Son, did not immediately suspect anything was amiss this time;
• Dick Shawn, perhaps best remembered as the hippie actor "LSD" in Mel Brooks' film The Producers, suffered a fatal heart attack during a performance at the University of California, San Diego's Mandeville Hall; and 
• Al Kelly, a vaudeville comedian, died in the audience in 1966 right after delivering a Friar's Club roast of Joe E. Lewis.

(For more details on Moliere's death, see this fascinating 2013 post by French literature scholar and novelist Maya Slater, on the Oxford University Press blog.)

This Day in Theater History (Death of Maureen Stapleton, ‘Triple Crown’ Winning Actress)

Mar. 13, 2006— Maureen Stapleton, who overcome what she called “fat, unhappy teenhood” to win the coveted acting “Triple Crown” (Oscar, Tony and Emmy) as an adult, died at age 80 in Lenox, Mass., of chronic pulmonary disease.

Confiding in neither her Irish-American parents nor her friends in parochial school in upstate New York, Stapleton kept her acting aspirations to herself until she revealed it to her Uncle Vincent, who encouraged her. Appearances in high-school plays kept the dream alive.

But the key to conquering her self-doubt may have been her decision to model. Darryl Reilly, in a post for the blog “Theater Scene,” focuses on what transpired after she came to New York at age 18 with only $100 in 1943 and yielded to a friend’s suggestion that she pay her bills by posing.

The work—involving not high-fashion outlets but nude posing at the Art Students League—required that she shed self-consciousness about her body as well as her clothes. In her 1995 memoir A Hell of a Life, Stapleton credited this morning work with allowing her to look for acting jobs in the afternoon.

But the modeling assignments may also have helped her in other senses. She learned the value of holding a pose, of the prolonged, necessary concentration required to react to other actors in a scene.

Along the way, she was also learning the importance of toughness—or, as she told Lillian and Helen Ross when interviewed with acting peers for The Player: A Profile of an Art: “Actors are a much hardier breed of people than any other people. We have to be as clever as rats to survive.”

She demonstrated it for the first time in 1946 when she phoned Guthrie McClintic about the leading female role in a revival of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. His curt brush-off led her to respond that she “didn't give a damn who was playing it.” That plain-spokenness may have allowed the veteran director-producer to see qualities required for the production. Eventually, he cast her not only as a supporting player but also understudy to the lead in her first Broadway production.

At night, Stapleton took lessons as part of the original 1947 class of 20 in the Actors Studio, along with the likes of Marlon Brando, David Wayne, Patricia Neal, Mildred Dunnock, Tom Ewell, Kevin McCarthy, Sidney Lumet, John Forsythe, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. It was illustrious company, but time proved that Stapleton could hold her own with the best of this elite group.

All of this was necessary preparation for a career that resulted in her 1981 induction into the Theater Hall of Fame, as she became the go-to actress for playwrights as varied as Tennessee Williams (a Tony-winning turn in The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending), Neil Simon (Plaza Suite, another Tony for The Gingerbread Lady), and Lillian Hellman (Toys in the Attic).

In contrast, film acting was not an easy adjustment for Stapleton to make. “I found it somewhat demoralizing, not being able to act the way I felt I must act,” she told the Ross sisters. “There are so many reasons for that. For one thing, you sit around for hours, and then, suddenly, you're told you're on. I was never ready. I was too accustomed to the discipline of going on at eight-forty. In the theatre, when you don't have to do one of those guts-away parts, it makes it much easier on your private, away-from-the-stage life.”

Eventually, Stapleton got the hang of it, gaining three Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress in Lonelyhearts, Airport and Interiors before taking home an Oscar trophy for her role as radical Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Stapleton’s Emmy came for the 1967 TV drama Among the Paths to Eden. She just missed joining the elite company of EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winners, as she was also nominated for a Grammy in the Best Spoken Word category for her recording of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Her bluntness, even occasional raunchiness, only occasionally masked her insecurities, which over the years found outlets in alcoholism, pill-popping, weight gains and phobias (fears of elevators, airplanes and even being killed by audience members).

Any of these could have been fatal to her career (at her first Hollywood party, she took a drunken swing at Burt Lancaster). But therapy eventually helped her cope with these problems, and the humor and lack of pretentiousness that turned colleagues into friends also kept success from going to her head. As she noted in A Hell of a Life, “I've been asked repeatedly what the 'key' to acting is, and as far as I'm concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake.”

This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Gets Mixed Reception in Moscow Premiere)

Jan. 31, 1901—The three title characters at the heart of Anton Chekhov’s newest play may have yearned endlessly to go to Moscow, but the playwright himself might have been forgiven for wanting to stay as far away from the city as possible when news reached him while he was touring Italy of the dismaying reaction to The Three Sisters.

The audience’s wintry reaction may have been sparked to no small degree by the theater company tasked with giving life to the playwright’s words, the Moscow Art Theatre. The troupe had been instrumental in steering audiences to Chekhov’s attempts at a “new drama” with The Seagull and Uncle Vanya.

But this latest “drama in four acts”—even less dependent on plot and more reliant on character and atmosphere than his two recent successes—was proving harder for him to write, even though—perhaps even because—he had molded the character of the talented but moody middle sister, Masha, on an actress in the troupe with whom he was romantically involved, Olga Knipper (who eventually became his wife).

When the actors and producers gathered to read the just-finished play, then, they shook their heads. How were they going to work with this? This was unplayable, with “no roles, only hints.”

Once they swallowed their misgivings and sought to stage it, the results seemed to bear out their skepticism. At this first performance, there were 12 curtain calls after Act I but only a half-hearted one after Act IV. Critics expressed mysticism about the central dilemma of the play: Since the sisters were wealthy enough, why couldn’t they just buy tickets and go to Moscow instead of complaining about not doing so?

Chekhov had his own ideas of what the matter was with the play. Though it admittedly had a longer-than-usual gestation period, he attributed most of the production’s problems to the Art Theatre’s co-founder, K.S. Stanislavsky. While the playwright preferred that the poignancy of situations emerge from understated acting, Stanislavsky wanted those scenes overplayed.

It would help, Chekhov decided, if he were on hand to right the production. Returning from Italy, he revised where he thought it appropriate, but placed much of his effort on attending rehearsals, where he could explain his intention and conception of how the roles should be played. He took a particular hand in producing Act III.

That September, the revamped production of The Three Sisters opened to a far more enthusiastic reception, with Chekhov especially gratified for receiving two curtain calls right after the section he had handled, Act III. Twenty-two years later, the Moscow Art Theatre brought it to the United States in another ecstatically received production.

Since then, the play has joined The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard as his most performed—and most artistically successful—plays.

None of this is to say, however, that the problems inherent in staging The Three Sisters have been permanently solved. Much of this difficulty stems from the acute perception by Adam Versenyi, dramaturg of the PlayMakers Repertory Company of the University of North Carolina, that The Three Sisters “has its own geometry that uncovers its chain-of-events, its ideological orientation, its characters but does so beneath the surface by presenting us with the cycles of the seasons, and the continuous movement from day through night that defines our daily lives, not their exceptional moments.”

Not all productions have been unable to navigate that landscape. I found Laurence Olivier’s movie adaptation from the 1970s, for instance, to be inert. At the other end of the extreme was a performance I saw a decade ago at the Chautauqua Institution (reviewed here) that was filled with bizarre directorial encrustations.

Perhaps the happy medium was achieved in an all-star Roundabout Theatre Co. production from 1997 featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Lily Taylor as the title characters, with other roles fully inhabited by Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, and David Strathairn. In it, the dilemma of characters trying to break free of their enervating provincial lifestyle emerged in all its quiet but devastating melancholy.

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.