Act One

by Moss Hart

  Gertrude Lawrence, at the first reading of Lady in the Dark, and Rex Harrison, at the first reading of My Fair Lady, plunged into their parts with an electric excitement, from the first line onward, that was contagious enough to make their own excitement spread through the rest of the cast like a forest fire; it made this usually dispiriting experience a thing to be set apart and remembered with gratitude.

  As the end of the first act of Once in a Lifetime ground down to what seemed to me to be a slow death rattle, not only my undergarments were drenched with perspiration but my suit as well. I could feel my jacket sticking wetly to the back of the chair. The stage manager finally called, “Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen,” and I rose from the chair and looked miserably at Max Siegel, not daring to look at either Mr. Kaufman or Sam Harris. Max Siegel came over to me.

  “What’s the matter,” he asked. “Not feeling well?”

  “It sounded so terrible,” I said, “so plain awful.”

  He laughed and his laugh never sounded more reassuring. “But it always sounds terrible at a first reading,” he replied. “Didn’t you know that? The second act will sound a little better, and by the third act they’ll begin to forget themselves and even act it a little bit. You watch.”

  He was correct. The second act did indeed sound like something that mildly approximated a play, and the third act even began to have a hint of amusement in it. I began to breathe again instead of wheezing, and when the stage manager dismissed the company for lunch at the end of the third act, I was amazed to find I even had an unmistakable sign of an appetite. It had seemed to me in the middle of the first act that I would never touch a morsel of food again, and I knew that to be a sign of how badly I had thought things were going.

  By the time the company reassembled for the afternoon rehearsal at two o’clock, I was in high spirits once more and considered myself a hardy veteran of rehearsal behavior. Nothing would throw me now, I thought. But I still had two other disappointments to face that afternoon, one after the other in quick succession, and these I did not recover from as quickly. Mr. Kaufman was famed as a topnotch director and I had been eagerly looking forward to the moment when I would see him in action. I considered I had been cheated out of those little talks on play-writing I had expected to have from him and on which he had remained silent through all the months of working together. I could not see how he could very well do me out of the obligatory discussions he would now have with the cast, however. A day or two of these informal but enlightening talks from the director to the actors, on characterization, motivation and the level of performance that would best express the tone and attitude of the play itself, were what I had been given to understand every noted director did as a matter of course, and I had again come armed with a little notebook in which I intended to jot down the salient points he made while I sat in the back of the darkened theatre. I was an old hand at taking down my own homemade brand of shorthand at the back of dark theatres, and I expected to store up a good deal of valuable information for further use from these first rehearsal seminars.

  To my surprise, the floor of the stage was already marked out with chalk, and the chairs and an old sofa were set out to represent the first scene of the play when the cast returned from the luncheon break. There was, apparently, to be no discussion at all! I could hardly believe what was taking place, but without so much as a word to the actors Mr. Kaufman already had the script in his hand and with no further ado was staging the opening scene of the play. Nor was this all. He spoke in so muted a tone that I could gather nothing of what he was saying—not that he was saying much of anything. He seemed mainly to be seeing that the actors did not bump into each other. The first scene, though not a long one, was nevertheless a scene which I took for granted would take at least two full days to stage, but it was staged in a little less than an hour. I watched astonished and disgruntled. The movement of the first scene marked out, Mr. Kaufman came from the stage down into the auditorium and asked for the scene to be run again so that he could see it from the front. The actors ran through the scene and he walked back up onto the stage once more. Aha, I thought, this is his method, to stage it roughly and then have his talk with the actors. It was merely a question of approach. Now, with the mechanics out of the way, would come the discussion of the playing of it. The motivations of the movement, the psychological background of each character in relationship to the actor himself, and all the rest of it.

  Nothing of the sort occurred. Mr. Kaufman sidled up to Aline MacMahon in what seemed to be some slight embarrassment and began a whispered colloquy with her. She nodded in agreement to whatever he was whispering; then he moved to Hugh O’Connell and began to whisper in his ear. I began to squirm around in my seat with irritation. I had carefully sat myself down about three rows from the back, well over to one side of the theatre, so as not to have Mr. Kaufman feel that I was breathing down the back of his neck while he worked, but now I got up and moved down to the third row on the aisle. He had walked over to Grant Mills and was now whispering into his ear in the same infuriating fashion. Even in the third row I could not hear one word of what was being said. It would not have done me any good, either, to move up onto the stage itself, for he spoke so quietly that not a word of what he was saying could be overheard even at arm’s length away.

  He proceeded in just this fashion not only for the rest of that afternoon, but for the rest of the three weeks’ period of rehearsal. By the third day I glumly put my notebook away before I left the house to go and sit morosely through still another day of watching what might well have been a silent movie of a man directing a play—directing the first play, moreover, about the “talkies,” I thought resentfully.

  Gradually, however, and in spite of my annoyance, I could begin to see the pattern of his direction emerge. He gave no lessons in acting nor did he use the power some directors wield to hold a cast helpless before him while he discusses his own interpretation of the playwright’s meaning, or with becoming modesty performs each part for each actor in turn to show how easily it might be played to perfection with just a modicum of his own talent. Instead, he seemed to allow the actors to use him as a sounding board. He watched and listened and without seeming to impose his own preconceived ideas of how a scene should be played, he let each actor find a way of his own that was best for him; and slowly, with no more than a whispered word here and there, the scenes began to take on a directorial quality and flavor that was unmistakably his. The sovereign motif of his direction seemed to be an artful mixture of allowing actors the freedom to follow their own instinctive intelligence and taste, and then trusting his own ear for comedic values—an ear that had the unerring exactness of a tuning fork. With no directorial vanity or ego of his own, he was able to indulge the actors in theirs, and an actor’s ego in the early days of rehearsal is like a blade of new spring grass that will grow and reseed itself if it is not mowed down too quickly by a power-driven lawn mower—the lawn mower in most cases being the overenthusiastic imposition of a famed directorial hand. Unlike a newer school of directors, he made no pretense of being either a built-in psychoanalyst, a father figure or a professor in residence of dramatic literature—a combination of roles which is sometimes assumed by directors and which always plays havoc with the stern business of getting a play ready to open.

  The results of what seemed to be his detached and reticent direction were remarkably effective. The actors, a little at sea at first, gradually found their own balance; and since it was theirs and not a false one imposed by the director, they flourished and blossomed, and the play quickly began to establish an architecture of its own. All too often, or so it seems to me, a play has been so minutely directed to within an inch of its life early on in rehearsal, that some of its more simple and basic values are sacrificed to a showy but costly series of brilliant directorial moments, and these values are never thereafter recaptured. To my jaundiced eye, the best-directed play is the one in which the hand of the director remains unnoticed—w
here the play seems not to have been directed at all, but merely mirrors the over-all perception and sensitivity of a hidden hand that has been the custodian of the proceedings on the stage, not the star of them. Though it was dull to watch and I continued to feel that I had somehow been cheated out of my just due, I could not deny that each day he accomplished more than I would have thought possible, and on the evening of the eighth day of rehearsals, the first complete run-through of the play was given for Sam Harris.

  Max Siegel, as usual, accompanied him, but no other person was allowed in the theatre. Mr. Kaufman did not hold with the theory or the practice of having run-throughs for his friends or friends of the cast, or even for people whose judgment he respected and trusted. He held firmly to the idea that no one person or collection of persons, no matter how wise in the ways of the theatre, could ever be as sound in their reactions as a regulation audience that had planked down their money at the box-office window, and in the main I think he was correct. There is perhaps something to be learned from a run-through for friends or associates; but more often than not, it can be as fooling in one way as it is in another. I have witnessed too many run-throughs on a bare stage with nothing but kitchen chairs and a stark pilot light and seen them go beautifully, and then watched these same plays disappear into the backdrop the moment the scenery and footlights hit them, to place too much reliance on either the enthusiasm or the misgivings of a well-attended run-through. The reverse can be equally true. However well or ill a play may go at a run-through, there are bound to be both some pleasant and some unpleasant surprises in store for the author when it hits its first real audience.

  We received neither enthusiasm nor misgivings from Sam Harris at the end of the first run-through of Once in a Lifetime that evening. I was disturbed by his silence, but his curious non-communicativeness did not seem to disturb Mr. Kaufman at all. “You’ll seldom hear praise from Sam Harris,” he explained, “you’ll only hear what he doesn’t like. I don’t think he was too displeased tonight or we’d have heard a little more from him. I imagine he’s waiting until the play shakes down into a better performance before he says anything much.” And with that I had to be content. Mr. Kaufman was too busily engaged with all the many details of production that engulf a director from that moment onward to give much time to the business of reassuring an increasingly nervous collaborator. The end of the afternoon rehearsal usually saw him in conference with the scenic designer, the costume designer, the prop man or the electrician, and the same conference with one or more of these same gentlemen took place again at the end of the evening rehearsal.

  Once in a Lifetime was a large production. It called for six elaborate sets, a flood of costumes and a quantity of rather bizarre props, including a half-dozen live pigeons and two Russian wolfhounds. The pigeons and the wolfhounds were already being used in rehearsal to allow the actors to grow used to them, or to allow them to grow used to the actors. But since neither the pigeons nor the two wolfhounds seemed to respond as readily to Mr. Kaufman’s whispered murmurings as the actors did, and as his patience with humans did not spill over into the animal world, I thought it politic under the circumstances not to add to his burdens by voicing my own moments of uncertainty. Part of the daily panic I was feeling, I suppose, was due to the fact that after the first easygoing week, the production of a play suddenly increases in tempo until it becomes a headlong rush to meet the deadline of opening night, and with a complicated production there is never enough time to do the necessary little things—mainly because of some impossible rulings by the unions that hedge the theatre in on every side and effectively strangle the concentrated and creative work a play should be allowed to have in rehearsal.

  It was all going too fast; there were a hundred things still undone that I knew could not be done now before we opened. What I had not yet learned, and would have to learn the hard way, was that once in rehearsal a play—and everyone and everything connected with it—is sent spinning down a toboggan slide on which there is no stopping or turning back. Whirling down the slope one can only take the twists and turns as they come and hope to have sufficient luck to land safely. It is a marvel to me that so many do, for there are no exceptions made—the same rule applies to everyone—and the toboggan slide is especially iced for each new play.

  * * *

  Before I could believe it was happening, I was dazedly packing my suitcase to go to Atlantic City for the dress rehearsals and the opening. My own numbing anxiety was in no way helped by the attitude of my family, all of whom had made a complete turnabout. After their early conviction that the $500 I had received as advance royalty on Once in a Lifetime was highly suspicious and that eventually I would be asked to give it back, they were now as firmly convinced that the rosiest of futures awaited only the rising of the curtain. My mother in particular was in a state of blissful certainty that somehow I had at last stumbled into a profession which, while she did not profess to understand it, at least gave the appearance of being respectable; and in the eyes of her friends, a profession that was perhaps only a rung or two below that of lawyer or dentist. For quite some years now she had labored under the burden of being unable to explain to her friends exactly what it was her elder son did for a living. My summers were not too difficult to explain, though nothing, God knows, to be proud of, measured against sons who were studying medicine or dentistry or the law; but the work I did in the wintertime completely defied explanation or understanding. She had maintained for a while that I gave “speech” lessons in the evenings; but a son who lay around the house all day and did something so outlandish at night was obviously nothing to boast about. She had, I knew, always refrained from any mention of my “homework” as seeming to put an official stamp on my difference from other people’s sons, but now suddenly she could point to that difference with pride.

  Once in a Lifetime was booked to play a week in Atlantic City and a week in Brighton Beach, and the theatre in Brighton Beach was not too far from where we lived. The neighborhood was already well plastered with billboard posters announcing its coming, and my name, along with George Kaufman’s, was prominently displayed. My name had also appeared in newspaper announcements of the play, and even the more theatrically obtuse of her friends could no longer be unaware that her son might be of some consequence at last! I truly believe that it was not the possibility of anything so unbelievable as riches coming out of all this, but simply the fact that my activities, always so mysterious and faintly spurious in the eyes of her friends, had taken on the aura of respectability. I knew very well that, having now seen my name on those billboards, she would be unable to accept the fact that my brand-new “respectable” profession might easily vanish within the space of two weeks, and I did not mention it. Her pleasure and her satisfaction were so apparent that I could not bear to disillusion her, and for much the same reason I said nothing to discourage my father’s and my brother’s equally unrealistic optimism and high expectations.

  I kissed them all good-bye and took the subway to Pennsylvania Station, where I joined the company on the Atlantic City train. The “opening night” glaze already filming my eyes was apparent enough to make Max Siegel take one look at me, laugh, take a flask from his hip pocket and usher me quickly into the club car for a stiff drink.

  ATLANTIC CITY in the spring of 1930 was bursting at the seams. Every hotel seemed to be filled to capacity and overflowing into the boarding houses that dotted all the side streets. The boardwalk, always crowded during the fashionable strolling hours, was even jam-packed during the late afternoons, so that the people on its outer edges seemed in some danger of being pushed onto the sands below.

  I stared down from my hotel window at the sparkling ocean and at the pleasant pattern the strollers made along the sun-splashed boardwalk, and alert as always for omens, good or bad, I told myself that these holiday-minded folk were bound to be a good audience for a new comedy. Though I could not see their faces clearly, I preferred to imagine them as already wreathed in smiles o
f good will. After all, I thought reassuringly, Atlantic City was the top tryout town of the Eastern Seaboard, and the audience that would file into the Apollo Theatre on Tuesday night would not only be a knowledgeable one but an understanding and forgiving one as well, for they were used to tryouts here and did not expect a new play to be airtight. They would accept its lacks as part of the whole holiday spirit that pervaded the resort itself. And unlike that bitter winter’s day in Rochester that ushered in the opening of The Beloved Bandit, today was mild and balmy and sweet with a lovely tang of freshness as the breeze rolled in from the ocean.

  I stood by the open window breathing in the day and looking down at the bright panorama spread out below me, and for a few moments my spirits soared and my faith in omens worked its usual magic. Yet as I turned away from the window and walked toward the bed to unpack my suitcase, I could begin to feel gloom settle over me once more, and try as I would, I could not shake it off. It was a misery as unreasoning and persistent as it was unshakable. I had wrestled with it all through the last week of rehearsal, through the wakeful hours of each night, on the train coming down, and now I could feel the same unmistakable flicks of anxiety and panic uncoiling and welling up within me.

  “No one,” I said aloud to the empty room as I slammed my things furiously into the bureau, “no one is worried but you, and they all know a hundred times more than you do, so stop it!” Saying it out loud helped for a moment, but for no more than a moment. The gloom deepened into the frozen panic that Max Siegel had seen clearly mirrored in my eyes as I stepped onto the train a few hours earlier. I threw myself on the bed and lay staring up at the ceiling. I knew little of psychoanalysis—its methods and its meaning were unknown to me—but instinctively I felt that I must make a final effort to try to understand the state of terror I was locked in, or it would take over and immobilize me completely. I lay on the bed for almost an hour, and the conclusion I came to, while not a very satisfactory one, at least had the virtue of presenting me with a calmer exterior and the ability to get out of the room and go to the theatre to face whatever I might have to face with some degree of composure.