Act One

by Moss Hart

  It was as ticklish a business as I figured it was going to be, not made any the easier by the group of sullen and rebellious faces that stared resentfully at me as I sat at a table in the front of a bare rehearsal room. I knew the cause of their bad temper and I did not blame them. Every single one of them had ardently wished to be with Eddie and not with me. There had been a great vying and jockeying the evening before, when the entire group had been split into two units, one to be directed by me and the other by Eddie, and though their conniving had been painfully obvious, I did not hold it against them.

  Eddie had made a great impression. He had dash, color and an electrifying way with him, and the idea of being shunted off to what must have seemed to them no better than an assistant sat very badly indeed. There were sibilant whisperings (quite palpably meant to reach my ears) of possible withdrawals, some uncomplimentary references to myself, and even outright declarations of how unfair the choosing had been.

  Actually, this was not true. Eddie had not selfishly or greedily chosen the best actors for his own unit, but had quite rightly cast the two groups of plays as he thought best for the plays and for the limitations of the people themselves. Though he had tried to make this clear, the impression remained that Eddie’s was a superior group, and paramount in all of their minds right now was the fact that the favored group was to be directed by Eddie while they, the unlucky others, were to be directed by me.

  Even had I been an experienced director and not a raw amateur, it would have been a difficult situation to handle. As it was, I simply sat stalling for time, and under the pretense of thumbing through the plays on the table before me, preparatory to starting the rehearsal, I kept nervously thinking of how best to get off on the right foot. I rejected a reiteration of what Eddie had told them the night before, knowing that would merely add to their annoyance. I decided quickly against a humorous approach, which, if it fell flat, as seemed likely in their present mood, would confirm their already low opinion of me; and something within me—perhaps my own sense of injured vanity—refused to make the effort to charm them. Instead, I decided to behave with an authority I certainly did not feel, but which I felt I must make them feel, and quickly, too!

  I rapped on the table for silence, and when the room did not quiet immediately, I sent a withering glance at the offenders. I was not going to speak or make a move until there was absolute quiet, and I indicated my irritation by something that approximated a snort of disdain. Not for nothing had I watched Basil Dean use peevishness as a weapon! There was an unpleasant pause and it seemed likely that several of them were defiantly going to keep talking, but I held my ground and in a few moments I knew that my approach had been the right one. The room became surprisingly still and I had their attention, if nothing more. I had won the first round.

  The real test would come when I distributed the parts. Amateur actors are notoriously petty and their malice toward a director is straightforward and unsubtle, for unlike professional actors, they are paying the director’s fee out of their own pockets. And since they usually cannot be “sacked,” they intrigue endlessly against the director as part of the pleasure of rehearsals and quickly sabotage any effort on his part that seems to them not to take into quick account their own estimation of their ability to play a particular part they have set their hearts on. At the time I knew little of this, of course; but I made an instantaneous and lucky guess about actors in general, whether amateur or professional, that was to serve me in good stead then and afterward.

  In some measure an actor is rather like a thoroughbred horse—he knows at once if the rider is afraid of him, and immediately he senses this, he takes the bit in his teeth and the rider is never really in control of him again.

  To gain control of a cast, to get control early and to keep this control in an iron grip, is essential to a director facing a new company for the first time. There will be times—even whole days, perhaps—when a director, if he is a good one, will not always know what he is doing or if what he is doing is actually right for the actors or the play. He must proceed to do it, nevertheless, with certainty and surety and never relax his control for a moment—the more uncertain he feels, the more sure-footed he must appear. He can always change everything he has done at the next rehearsal, but on the day that he is floundering and insecure himself, he must never allow the actors to know it. All is lost if he does.

  Actually, the only bad behavior I have ever witnessed in the professional theatre was that ghastly moment when a star or a cast of actors became aware that their director was not in control of either the play or themselves. It is then that “temperament” sets in and makes rehearsals hideous, but it has always been my opinion that “temperament” is little else than a mask for panic, and when people are panic-stricken, they of course behave badly. Why should they not? Actors know that on a certain not too distant night they will be up there on a brilliantly lit stage, naked and exposed, and if they cannot trust, or have lost faith in, the man who is to guide them and see them through that moment, they strike out in fear and hide their panic in bursts of temper and impossible behavior.

  Watch a cast of actors with a director they trust and who is in control of rehearsals every moment of the day or night, however, and you will observe the atmosphere and the discipline of a research laboratory. It has always seemed to me that the first necessity a director faces is the creation of a climate of security and peace, in which actors can do their best work. And he creates this most surely by assuming and maintaining an ironclad control of the proceedings from the moment the actors pass through the stage door on the first day of rehearsals until the curtain rises on the opening night in New York.

  After all, actors are not acting machines. Rehearsals, and most particularly the early days of rehearsals, bring to the surface of each actor his own special insecurity about himself and the job he faces, and it is part of a director’s task to perceive this weakness as quickly as he can and within the limits of the time at his disposal, to make each actor secure in himself and his part, and establish himself as the person around whom must flow all the hidden but vital mechanism of bringing a play to life on a stage.

  I do not know how I knew any of this then, nor even how I glimpsed a small portion of it, sitting at that table with my knees knocking together with nervousness; but it was lucky for me that I sensed the essential part—to gain control early—for from down the hall came the sound of Eddie in rehearsal, and echoing into my own rehearsal room came his roars of anger, his crows of delight, and then the excited laughter of his group as they reveled in the pleasure of the electric personality who was directing them. It was lucky for me, too, that I had not chosen to compete with Eddie on his own terms, for I could only have emerged a miserable second best. Instead, I distributed the parts in the three plays in my best Basil Dean manner; and without taking any notice of the protest and outrage that was all too plain on several faces, I proceeded to plunge into the rehearsal of the first play.

  The rest of that first evening was a grim business indeed. I matched their hostility with a sullenness of my own and I equaled their bad manners with a contempt for their behavior that I did not attempt to conceal. When the rehearsal ended at eleven o’clock, I was limp with exhaustion from the effort of imposing my will on a group of people resentful of my very presence; but I was determined to hold on to the job in spite of them.

  Eddie was correct—a summer free with a salary and all expenses paid was a goal worth fighting for, and it would have taken a good deal more than one grisly evening to make me throw in the sponge. Nevertheless, when I met Eddie outside the building late that night and we walked toward the subway together, I could easily have punched him in the nose with a great deal of pleasure. He was fresh as a daisy—indeed, he was exhilarated enough to have conducted an all-night rehearsal then and there. And his first words to me were, “See? I told you how easy it would be. It’s almost a shame to take the money, isn’t it?”

  I was too weary to answer. I g
runted something in reply and listened to him hold forth above the clatter of the subway wheels on the Meyerhold theory of expressionism without saying a word until we changed trains at 149th Street and went our separate ways.

  * * *

  Rehearsals took place three times a week, and the next one, though not exactly pleasant or marked by any special esprit de corps flowing between director and cast, was at the same time less painful for me than that initial baptism of fire. For one thing, they had all turned up—a fact which I sharply noted as I walked into the room. I had actually expected several resignations and was quite prepared to deal with them; but apparently they had all gone out for coffee after that first rehearsal, talked me over among themselves, and decided they were sufficiently intrigued to come back once more and see what would happen next.

  The fact that they had all turned up gave me my cue. If anything, I was more high-handed and testy than I had been two evenings before. I must have been relaxed enough, however, shortly before the rehearsal ended, to have made an imaginative leap in the scene I was directing that ignited a spark of excited interest or grudging admiration among them. It is a lovely and rewarding moment when this happens. I could feel it happen with the actors I was talking to and in the rest of the group who were watching me from various parts of the room. Though there was nothing but silence in the room except for the sound of my own voice, it was almost as though applause had broken out—a special kind of applause that is reserved for unexpected victory. I was conscious of it almost immediately, but I was wise enough not to push the advantage. Though it was not yet quite eleven o’clock I said, “That’s all for tonight,” and picking up my hat and coat, put on my Basil Dean manner again along with my overcoat, and walked out.

  I knew now that I could drop that fatuous pose whenever I saw fit to do so, but it had served me well enough. I had begun to weld them to me as a group and on my own terms. Though I might not teach them very much about acting, they would at least learn to mind their manners with the next hapless fellow who directed them and give him a decent chance. As it turned out, I think I learned a good deal more from them than they did from me. Although they were amateurs, and not very talented ones at that, it is almost impossible to direct a group of people for the stage without learning something valuable about the theatre somewhere along the line.

  In my own case, I became aware almost for the first time of the inner structure of a play, for the good and simple reason that I had to. After a good many false starts and quite a bit of stumbling around, I was finally forced to go back to study the author’s intent in each play I was directing—to gain a knowledge of how each play was built to achieve the effect the author wanted and to decide on how best to translate what I had learned into a performance that maintained an audience’s interest without foreshadowing or destroying the climax, and at the same time preserving the entity of the play as a whole. This was a good deal more than just seeing to it that the actors did not bump into each other, which was more or less what I had been doing and which I soon discovered would not work.

  I was directing three one-act plays—one by George Kelly, one by Lord Dunsany and one by Susan Glaspell. They were as unlike as three playwrights could possibly be and I began to be fascinated by the problems each play brought with it. The mechanism and construction of a play began to hold far more interest for me than the actual staging of it, and all through that winter I read every published play I could get my hands on. When my neighborhood library in the Bronx ran out of published plays, I went down to the main branch at 42nd Street and sat in the reading room all day long, completely and utterly absorbed. With my days free, I suppose I could have and should have taken a job during the day to supplement the paltry sum I was earning in the evenings, but I could not tear myself away from my obsession with the mechanics of play-writing.

  I do not believe that play-writing can be taught any more than acting can be taught, and I am quite certain that I did not consciously think of play-writing seriously in relation to myself, for all during that time it never occurred to me to read a book on how plays are written. I simply read the plays themselves. I read the published version of plays that I had seen and then plays that I had never seen, sitting there day after day like a bacteriologist trying to isolate a strange germ under the beam of a new and more powerful microscope. Whether I was conscious or not that I wanted to write plays myself is perhaps academic, for there is no doubt that a good deal of this exploration rubbed off on me whether I knew it or not. I began to perceive and place in proper perspective the distinction between plot and character, the difference between tricks of the trade and honest craftsmanship, and though I was hardly aware of it, I began to discern the gradual steps by which a play is built and, in the really good plays, the wonderful economy with which each salient point is made and not a moment on the stage wasted.

  Another thing I seemed to be unaware of, though it was taking place under my very nose, was that my group had made a complete reversal in their feelings about me. They liked me now! It was, as Eddie pointed out, shaking a finger at me, obvious to everyone but myself. I suppose I had become so absorbed in my daytime life of reading plays that I was hardly conscious of the three evenings each week I rehearsed with the group, except as a necessary interruption to earn money.

  But as the days of the actual performance approached and we rehearsed four and sometimes five evenings a week, I could not help noticing how eagerly each word of mine was listened to and how highly charged the atmosphere had become with a kind of grave dedication on each actor’s part to give me his best. Finally, on the evening of the first dress rehearsal I received what I suppose was the accolade of their change of heart—I was asked to go out for coffee with them after the rehearsal. I did not have sufficient character to refuse and it was too close to the actual performance to tamper with the fine ensemble spirit I had apparently engendered. I got a bit of my own back by having not just coffee but a full-sized meal and letting them pay for it. I felt I had earned it.

  The performances, which took place on four successive nights, two evenings being allotted to my group and two to Eddie’s, were an unqualified success. Though Eddie’s group made by far the greater impression, my own acquitted itself quite well, and both groups were, we were assured on all sides, the best ever seen on the stage of the Labor Temple. We had hoped under the flush of such success that there would be immediate word forthcoming, from the gentleman who owned the summer camp, about our promised jobs for the summer; but he was wily enough to insist that we do another group of plays for the spring season before he made up his mind. There was nothing for us to do but continue; for in spite of Eddie’s high opinion of himself, there was no great clamor for his services in the professional theatre, and certainly none for my own, but I was determined now to have that summer job.

  A vague sort of plan, too hazy and unclear even in my own mind to discuss with Eddie, was beginning to formulate itself as a course of action whereby I could attach myself to the theatre again, and the first step was to make certain of landing that job for the summer. Perhaps it was a desperate effort to insure it that led me to so foolish an undertaking as I now embarked upon. I can think of no other reason compelling enough for me to make so complete a fool of myself. It is astonishing how wanting anything badly enough can invariably suspend judgment, intelligence or plain common sense, in all sorts of people, from those who want a job for the summer to those who want to be President.

  A few evenings after the final performance, the group met as a whole to discuss the new series of plays to be done for the spring season. Eddie suggested, again unselfishly, that we switch groups, and I was touched and pleased to find that my group elected by unanimous consent to stay on with me. A little drunk with power at this obvious testament to my directorial charm, and overzealous now about protecting the summer job, I decided not to do another group of one-acters, but to do a three-act play instead. This was idiocy of an inspired kind, for neither the group nor I was ready
to tackle a three-act play yet. To compound the felony, I chose, of all things, that most difficult of plays to do even for professional actors—Ibsen’s Ghosts. The dour Norwegian and my inexperience as a director met head on and there was never any doubt as to who would emerge triumphant.

  Rehearsals were a misery both for myself and the cast from the moment the first line was uttered, but I was either too stubborn or too cowardly to admit my mistake and switch to something more feasible. Instead, I bluffed and blundered and took refuge in displays of bad temper, thereby not only undoing all the good I had done, but making it altogether impossible for us to do anything but go steadily along to the disaster I had chosen.

  I am certain, too, that it was no one’s fault but my own that a week before the performance the leading man threw his part down on the floor, kicked it across the room, and walked out. It was far too late now to attempt to get anybody else up in the part and I decided in another moment of lunacy to play Oswald myself! There could be no question of calling the performance off—with my eyes fixed on that summer job, I would have played Camille if necessary. I doubt if I or the audience would have fared much worse had I done so. I suppose I secretly felt that a brilliant performance of Oswald by myself would save the day; but Eddie, attending the first dress rehearsal at my request, soon dispelled that illusion. He came backstage shaking with helpless laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the whole thing is ridiculous, and you, my boy—to put it in the kindest fashion possible—are ludicrous.”

  “I don’t care about that,” I said miserably. “Is it bad enough to make us lose that job?”

  “It’s bad enough, all right,” he replied, “but it’s too late to do anything about it now.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve got something else in mind, anyway—even better. So don’t worry. But for God’s sake,” he went on, “as long as you’ve got to go through with it, can’t you do something about making that final moment when Oswald says, ‘The sun, Mother, I want the sun,’ sound a little less like you were asking for Grape Nuts for breakfast? It’s bloody awful.” And he went off into gales of laughter again.