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.

This Day in Theater History (‘Pal Joey’ Introduces the Musical Heel)

December 25, 1940— When it premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Pal Joey opened Broadway to more mature subject matter as the first American musical about an anti-hero. Without it, I would argue, you would never have the monstrous stage mother in Gypsy, the emcee in Cabaret, or the all-too-human leads in Stephen Sondheim’s landmark musicals like Follies.

When people think of names associated with Pal Joey, the ones that come to mind are its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. But the person often overlooked on the production team is the person who came up with the idea, the creator of the libretto and the original source on which it was based: John O’Hara.

In a way, that’s symbolic of what has happened to his place in American culture since his death 45 years ago: Once a bestselling novelist and short-story writer, he’s now hardly remembered in comparison with his good friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Some readers of this blog may know of a song from Pal Joey called “I Could Write a Book.” Well, O’Hara could—and did—write lots of them—novels, short stories, essay collections—and that’s not even counting plays, unproduced screenplays, or letters.

Pal Joey may have had the most unusual genesis of any of his works, as a series of about a dozen sketches in The New Yorker written in the form of letters to a friend from his “Pal Joey” Evans, a two-bit nightclub entertainer.

The sketches themselves were slight, but like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, O’Hara took a virtuosic delight in slang such as “take a powder” (get out), “making with the throat” (singing), “joint,” “crib,” and “angle.” Oh, yes—and the most delicious malapropisms until Archie Bunker came along, including my favorite, Joey’s account of his annoyance: “I lost my composer.”

When he was well along in this series, O’Hara wrote to Rodgers to see if he and partner Hart would want to adapt it into a musical. Rodgers recalled years later that he quickly said yes, because it would not only be different from anything they’d ever done but also different from anything anyone had ever done in a musical. Now, what did Rodgers mean?

Much of it stems from the slang word that Joey may use most frequently, and certainly, most enthusiastically: “mouse,” or young woman who’s caught his eye. Nowadays, we would call Vera Simpson, the rich, older society woman who pays for his clothes and his Chicago nightclub where he is emcee while making him her kept man, a “cougar.” These terms suggest predators and prey.

Virtually everybody in this animal kingdom uses everyone else, except for one sweet young woman, Linda, who still carries the torch for Joey. It’s a mark of the musical’s cynicism that Linda is as dumb as a rock.

Surprisingly, O’Hara’s interest in the musical faded after he first came up with the idea. George Abbott, a veteran director and script doctor, liked to have playwrights at out-of-town tryouts to make last-minute changes, but O’Hara went AWOL. So Abbott was left to make most of these changes, and he was also the one who helped create the plot: the affair between Joey and Vera. 

Pal Joey was not a great success in its first run, because of its risqué subject matter, its lack of a sympathetic lead or happy ending, and its premiere during a musicians’ strike that limited the radio exposure that songs in new musicals needed at that time. The critical quote that most succinctly summarized the state of opinion at that time came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who queried, "Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?"

Over time several songs, especially “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” became standards, and a cast album and revival in 1952 (which featured a young but already brassy Elaine Stritch) really thrust the show and its music into the popular consciousness. (Less successful were the 1957 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, and a 2008 “revisal”—i.e., a rewritten book—produced by the Roundabout Theater and starring Stockard Channing. See my review at the time of the latter here.)

The original 1940 production was also notable for launching young talents. Three of them ended up at MGM Studios: the actor Van Johnson; a chorus-line dancer who became a noted director-choreographer, Stanley Donen; and the show’s lead, who impressed just about everyone with his dancing: Gene Kelly (with a dancer in the image accompanying this post). (Kelly can also be found, in all-too-brief form, in this YouTube clip--taken from a patron who surreptitiously taped the show at the time.

This production, as well as its 1952 revival, which he also worked on, gave O’Hara a yen for the theater that he never really got over. One of the hardest-to-find O’Hara books is one that came out in 1964, Five Plays. They were unproduced, and they remain so, partly because he didn’t take well to director’s suggestions. But he was still working on another play at the time of his death in 1970.

As for the songwriting team that created it: “It was the most satisfying and mature work that I was associated with during all my years with Larry Hart,” recalled Rodgers in his autobiography. It would also be their last. The notoriously unreliable, alcoholic Hart was in no condition to work on the next project Rodgers had in mind, and its setting—rural life in the late 19^th century—was far removed from the contemporary urban milieu in which the lyricist excelled. Oklahoma launched a new partnership between Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that would be even more wildly successful than either of them--than anybody, really, certainly including the fictional Joey Evans--had ever known before.