Act One

by Moss Hart

  As the first-act curtain descended to an ominous silence, I sat for a moment trying to clear my head of the two martinis. I had no wish to go up the aisle and see Mr. Pitou, Mrs. Harris or Priestly Morrison, but I wanted to be told by somebody that it hadn’t gone as badly as I thought it had. I decided to mingle with the audience in the lobby and listen for their comments. It was a mistake. I moved as rapidly as I could from group to group, and it was as though they had not been at the theatre at all. They were talking about everything else under the sun, but of the act they had just seen not one person said a word. I think I would have felt better about it if I had heard someone say, “Isn’t it terrible,” or, “Worst thing I’ve ever seen”—but I did not. The contemptuous dismissal of what they had seen as not being worth discussion was much harder to bear.

  In too short a time for comfort, the gong in the lobby signaled them back into the theatre. I was reluctant to go back to my seat, but I had no place else to go. I had not then discovered the release of pacing endlessly up and down at the back of the orchestra, nor the trick of ducking into a bar down the street for that stiff drink which enabled one to face the punishment that was coming. I sat through the second and third acts in the same grim silence the audience did. As the final curtain fell, a mass exodus started, as though twenty-dollar gold pieces were being distributed free in the street outside. There was not even a smattering of applause. The actors bowed to a solid phalanx of retreating backs, and the stage manager, his prophecy proved true at last, mercifully raised the curtain only once.

  I made my way slowly backstage, in order to postpone for as long as possible that inevitable face-to-face meeting with Mr. Pitou and Mrs. Harris, but when I got there they were nowhere to be seen. The stage manager, cheerful for the first time since rehearsals began, waved a hearty greeting to me. “Never saw one go worse,” he said smilingly. “I’ve seen them go all kinds of ways,” he continued, “but this was like spraying ether. You looking for the management?” I nodded. “They fled before the curtain came down. They said to tell you there was a conference in Mrs. Harris’ room at the hotel and to get over there as fast as you could.”

  As I started to walk away he called after me, “I wouldn’t wait up for the notices, if I were you. I know one of the critics here and he waits all year for one to come along like this.”

  I managed a miserable smile back at him and made my way out, but not before I had been accosted by the character man, who shook my hand fervently and said, “Went rather well, didn’t you think?” I stared at him, not quite certain if this were not some sort of cruel joke, but he seemed to be quite serious.

  There is always one actor in every company, I have found, who no matter how badly a play has gone always thinks or pretends to think that it has been received splendidly and moreover takes the trouble to waylay you and tell you so. He stands next to you at the hotel desk as you ask for the key to your room. He seeks you out in the drug store as you purchase an extra supply of headache tablets. He’s invariably in the elevator with you late at night as you wearily and at last wend your way to the solitude of your room, and always with that ingratiating smile on his face and those absurd words on his lips. Whether this is done with an eye on future plays the playwright may have up his sleeve or simply to endear himself to those in power at a moment of crisis, I do not know; but this barefaced and foolish lie is always somehow harder to bear than the forthright disdain of an honest stage manager.

  I was prepared for the very worst when I knocked on the door of Mrs. Harris’ suite, but to my surprise I heard the ringing laugh of Mrs. Harris coming unmistakably through the transom.

  * * *

  I opened the door on my first theatrical conference. The conference back at the hotel after the opening-night performance out of town is a theatrical tribal rite, whose unchanging ritual persists through the years like the Hopi Indians’ rain dance. The setting is usually the producer’s or the author’s suite, and depending upon the fame of the author or the importance of the play, it is attended not only by those most intimately connected with the production but also by what is technically referred to as “the wrecking crew”: those friends or well-wishers who have journeyed up from New York in order to be the first ones back with the news of the play’s chances of success or, preferably, in order to provide a more juicy ride back on the late train, its probable failure.

  If the play has the earmarks of a hit, the room is jammed, noisy, blue with cigarette smoke and agents, and the telephone rings with the constancy of election night in campaign headquarters. If the play has gone badly, it is as though the room were suddenly radioactive and only the author and the management were immune to the deadly fall-out. A hardy soul or two from New York, their faces wreathed in gritty smiles of pitiable determination, will appear long enough to declare with a false brightness, “It needs work, of course,” and then flee, the sigh of their relief blowing them halfway down the corridor like a gust of March wind.

  There is always a table from room service in a corner of the room, on which stand beer bottles, whiskey, sandwiches and endless pots of coffee, glacially cold and notably rancid. Since room service in hotels in most tryout towns closes down at nine o’clock, this tribal repast is always ordered by the company manager at about four o’clock in the afternoon; and although the food is not delivered until midnight, the sandwiches have been made in late afternoon and wrapped in a damp napkin, where they repose cold and wet until the conference begins. The sight of these pathetic bits of bread, no longer white but now a pale gray color, with slivers of rubbery ham and soapy cheese limply overlapping the wet edges, is enough to turn an author’s stomach if the play has gone well—but the sight of them after a bad opening out of town is enough to make him physically ill. Usually, the butter has been placed separately in little disk-shaped china butter plates so dear to every hotel dining room, and during the conference, these become scattered all over the room. Cigarettes are stubbed out in unused pats of butter, and chewing gum is also disposed of thereby. If the conference has been held in the author’s suite, the next morning, as he makes his way to the door to pick up the newspapers and read the first bad notices for the show, he is greeted by the sight of empty beer bottles, half-finished glasses of Scotch, and cigarette stubs swimming in melted butter. I have always considered it an appropriate setting in which to perform this grisly ceremony, and in some way I cannot clearly define, the horror of the room seems somehow to relieve, rather than add to, the pain of the occasion.

  This first hotel-room conference that I was to participate in differed only in degree from all the others that were to stretch down the years. Since both author and play were equally unimportant, there were no well-wishers up from New York to witness the opening performance, and since the debacle at the theatre had been complete, all faces with the exception of Mrs. Harris’ bore the imprint of a deep sense of guilt and a look of public disgrace, as though one among them had raped a ten-year-old girl and buried her body in the woods, and the others had helped to dig the grave. Other than that, however, the ritual was the same. There was the table in the corner, with the beer bottles, the pots of coffee, the limp sandwiches with the gray bread already beginning to curl around the edges, the little china butter plates with a goodly supply of half-smoked cigarettes already stubbed out in the butter, and the butt of the company manager’s cigar floating unconcerned in the half-full highball glass that stood at his elbow.

  Mr. Pitou sat slumped in a chair, a heavy figure of gloom, and Priestly Morrison seemed engrossed to the exclusion of all else in a series of elaborate drawings he was executing on the blotter of the desk. But Mrs. Harris, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and a glass of beer in her hand, strode up and down the room as chirpy and cheerful as though the audience had acclaimed the play with sixteen curtain calls. She waved a hand to me as I came in and continued with what she had been saying.

  “I’ll tell you something, boys,” she said, addressing me now as well as the ot
hers, “the way it went tonight doesn’t bother me one bit. Not a bit. You know why? First, this is Rochester—and what the hell does Rochester know about anything except Kodaks? Second, this is an audience play. I knew it when I read it and I still believe it. Give this play a chance with its own audience, boys, and you won’t know you’re watching the same play you saw tonight.”

  There was a heavy silence for a moment and then Priestly Morrison spoke in a mild voice. “Just what city do you think the audience for this play is hiding in?” he said, without looking up from his doodling.

  “Chicago,” cried Mrs. Harris triumphantly. “And after Chicago, New York. I don’t have to remind you of Abie’s Irish Rose, do I, boys?”

  A grimace of pain flitted across Mr. Pitou’s face and he shifted uneasily in his chair. He said nothing.

  “I tell you what I’m going to do, Gus,” she went on, addressing him directly, “and I’d advise you to do the same. I’m going to get out of here on the morning train. I’m not just going to sit and look at a play for a whole week that I know more about than the audience does. Priestly and Moss can watch the performance and do whatever they think necessary. Then you and I will jump on to Chicago next Monday night, and if the Chicago audience doesn’t eat this play up, I’ll eat my hat in the lobby. Come on, Moss, have a glass of beer and some sandwiches—you look pea-green, or it’s these lights.”

  Again I found that extreme emotion induced a monumental hunger, and I wolfed more than half of those horrible sandwiches and drained two bottles of beer almost without stopping to breathe. I dared not look at Mr. Pitou and I sat as far away as possible from him. Mrs. Harris chatted merrily on and my relief was enormous when Mr. Pitou finally arose from the chair and said, “Well, Priestly, I’ll see you and Moss in Chicago next Monday. If it goes any better during the week give me a call. Otherwise, I’ll be standing in the lobby in Chicago watching Mrs. Harris eat her hat.” He laughed mirthlessly at his little joke and slammed the door behind him.

  * * *

  The week that followed in Rochester was perhaps the most dismal week I have ever spent with a play. There have been other weeks in my theatrical life out of town that involved more pain and moments of crisis, but I can remember none that was so completely melancholy. There is something infinitely sad about a theatre with an audience of perhaps twenty or thirty disconsolate people scattered through its seats, and there is a touch of the sepulchral about actors booming out their lines into the vast reaches of an almost empty auditorium. I have often wondered what curious necessities bring these few masochistic souls to sit and watch what they have obviously been warned against as a dreary and unsatisfactory play. And why twenty or thirty? Why not two or ten or two hundred? Yet inevitably with even the worst play there are always somehow twenty or thirty people sitting almost obscenely alone in a large theatre and making it obligatory for the curtain to rise.

  During the entire week in Rochester I do not believe that more than thirty people at the most ever filed through the doors into the theatre for a single performance, and the sight of them, huddled in lonely groups of two and three, cast a pall of misery over the theatre even before the curtain rose. They sat in silence throughout the performance, and as the final curtain fell, they clumped silently up the aisle and left the theatre in the same glum fashion they had entered it, leaving behind them the mystery of why they had bothered to come at all. By the end of the week, my very bones ached with the monotony and the indescribable boredom of watching The Beloved Bandit through each and every performance—for I felt I was honor-bound to sit through each performance and make what suggestions I could to Priestly Morrison.

  I have never been able to understand the enjoyment of some playwrights who are able to visit the theatre night after night during the run of a play in New York and with obvious relish sit entranced before the magic of their own creation. True, The Beloved Bandit was not a play to fill an author’s heart with pride, but I have never been able, once a play of mine has opened in New York, however great a success it may have achieved, to sit through an entire performance. I have been able to drop into the theatre and watch a favorite scene or two, but I know I would find it torturous to watch the play in its entirety, or even to watch a large portion of it with any degree of pleasure. It may be that The Beloved Bandit filled me with a lifelong antipathy for watching my own works performed, and if this is true, it is the only mark in its favor that I can find.

  Somehow the days dragged through until Saturday night—there is an old and fond phrase in the theatre which actors whisper to each other on opening nights: “Eleven o’clock always comes”—and with something like a relief and even a glimmering of hope, I got onto the sleeper to Chicago with the company. Chicago certainly couldn’t be worse than Rochester.

  We arrived at Chicago late Sunday afternoon and I made straight for the Adelphi Theatre, where The Beloved Bandit was to open the following night. Performances are played on Sunday nights in Chicago, and as the author of the incoming play, I was entitled to the courtesy of “free tickets” for Sunday evening. Beggar on Horseback, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, was playing its last performance and I wanted very much to see it. It was one of the hits I had not been able to wedge my way into during its New York run. I ate a hurried dinner and then went back to the theatre. What a difference it was to stand in this crowded lobby and listen to the buzz of anticipation of a fashionable audience eager to go through the doors to their seats and enjoy the play. The very atmosphere crackled with that unmistakable and wonderful sound of an audience certain of the fare about to be spread before them and eager for the curtain to rise. It is one of the jolliest sounds in the world.

  Before I knew quite what had happened, I forgot my own perilous state and lost myself in the glow of the crowded theatre and the sudden hush that pervaded the audience as the footlights dimmed. Beggar on Horseback remains still one of the landmarks of satirical writing for the American stage, and I sat rapt and bug-eyed with admiration in front of it. Its gifted approach to the satirical and the fantastic aspects of our national life and culture must have awakened some kinship to the satirical and the fantastic within me, and for the first time I glimpsed that there might be a deeper sense of fulfillment in the art of the writer than in that of the actor. It was a fleeting thought only, but on the way back to the hotel I thought again of what the world of Kaufman and Connelly must be like as opposed to the world of John and Lionel Barrymore.

  The next morning, Mr. Pitou and Mrs. Harris arrived, and I learned with some dismay that I was being moved into Mr. Pitou’s room. When the gods were not smiling, Mr. Pitou was apt to cut corners rather sharply to effect every possible economy, and I reflected with no little tinge of dread what it was going to be like to share a room with Mr. Pitou if the play went badly tonight.

  That evening there was a gay and merry dinner for all in Mrs. Harris’ suite, and while it was not quite so uninhibitedly convivial as the first dinner in Rochester, by the second martini and the third toast of mutual congratulations, even Mr. Pitou seemed to fall anew into the trap of false hope and glittering optimism. He even laughed aloud and joked in the taxi on the way to the theatre, and such is the ulfaltering faith of theatre folk that an unlikely miracle is certain to occur on opening nights, that by the time we reached the theatre we were one and all of us quite blind to the fact that this was the very same play that had played with such dire results in Rochester the week before.

  My heart sank a little as I glanced over the audience coming down the aisle. There was a goodly smattering of evening dresses and black ties among them and they seemed to have that look of threatening benevolence so native to all first-night audiences. They would not, I thought, be nearly as polite in their disdain as the opening-night audience in Rochester. I was not wrong.

  In Rochester they had greeted that appalling set in astonished silence, but as the curtain rose in Chicago, after an initial gasp of disbelief at what greeted their eyes, they broke as one into a gale of
derisive laughter. The laughter lasted long enough to drown out the opening lines of dialogue, but just as the audience grew quiet again, Joseph Regan made his entrance in a way that he had never done before. It was his own impromptu invention and he never bothered, then or afterward, to explain why he did it. He came in through the fireplace and interpolated a line of his own authorship, the delicacy of whose phrasing I have forgotten, but which said something to the effect that: “Every day was Christmas when the Irish came to town.” The sight of Joseph Regan creeping in through the fireplace had numbed me to everything else for a few moments, but now I was conscious of a murmur going on all around me. The audience was laughing again, only now they were whispering to each other at the same time, and suddenly I became conscious of a gray-haired gentleman rising from his seat in the third row and walking up the aisle. A large portion of the audience seemed to follow his progress with such interest that I turned to Priestly Morrison and whispered, “Who is that and why is everyone watching him?”

  “That,” said Priestly Morrison, not even bothering to whisper, “is Ashton Stevens, Chicago’s leading critic, and I believe he’s going home.”

  What followed after is told quickly enough, for it happened with frightening rapidity. Before Joseph Regan had intoned too many more “macushlas” and “mavourneens” the audience started streaming up the aisle, and by the time the curtain of the first act fell, the seats all around me were empty and I knew that their occupants, like Ashton Stevens, were undoubtedly going home. This time I spared myself the anguish of going back into the theatre for the second and third acts. Instead, I walked around to the stage-door alley and remained there, walking up and down, until eleven o’clock.

  Some perceptive fellow once remarked, “They find the draftiest place in town and then build a theatre around it.” He was right. The wind from Lake Michigan whistled up the alley as though it had been sent there expressly by Ashton Stevens to find the author, but I hardly noticed it. Now that the worst had happened, I could think only of just how and when the blow I most feared would fall.