Act One

by Moss Hart

  What I was finding it impossible to face, I concluded, was the possibility of failure. Too much was riding on the success of Once in a Lifetime for me to be able to bear the idea of its failure with ordinary fortitude or even common sense. I was discounting the dread possibility in a way that Dr. Freud would have understood at once. I was obviously arranging an unconscious barter with the gods—offering up, as it were, my pain as a token of worthiness, making my suffering a silent plea for their clemency. It is not, I believe, uncommon behavior for people under strain and tension awaiting the outcome of an event upon which all their hopes are based; but as I dimly perceived that this was what I might be doing, some of the pain eased, and consumed with the idea that I had divined a startling new truth, I walked out of the hotel and toward the theatre. Like all major discoveries made in a hotel room on the eve of an opening, however, this one lasted exactly the same amount of time—that is, it survived until I reached the theatre and walked through the stage door, where it evaporated and merged into the anxiety-ridden atmosphere backstage.

  The first dress rehearsal, already well under way by the time I reached the theatre, although no one seemed to have noticed my absence, was going badly. The actors, without make-up and in their street clothes, sat numbly in their dressing rooms or hung about in disconsolate silent little groups in the wings, waiting to be called on stage when and if the stagehands had changed a set or after the electricians had adjusted and focused the lights. Little mounds of cardboard coffee containers, of half-eaten sandwiches and stale doughnuts had already begun to pile up in odd corners of the stage, in the dressing rooms and on the empty seats of the dark theatre. A false gaiety, as depressing and as soggy as the doughnuts themselves, punctuated intervals of equally false camaraderie between the actors and the stagehands, and finally disintegrated into a hollow shell of silence in which no one spoke at all.

  The first dress rehearsal, in short, was proceeding in quite the usual way, being neither better nor worse than it usually is, for a large production in the throes of a first dress rehearsal is a disspirited and agonizing process. With it begins the age-old battle to allow the play to emerge in spite of the production, for at this stage of the game each bit of technical virtuosity or stagecraft—that extravagant effort by the lighting expert to suggest a pearly dawn, which takes a good three hours to achieve, and is thoroughly disturbing to the scene being played in front of it; that charming but useless conceit of the scenic artist to have a terrace where none should be, thereby limiting the acting area to a cramped boxlike space in front of the footlights; the extraordinary concoction by the costume designer that does not allow the leading lady to sit down in her evening gown, or a hat that completely covers her face from all but the first three rows of the orchestra—all of these in the first hours of putting a large production together seem to matter more than the play itself, and unless the battle is met head-on with a tough mind and an iron will and the sheer physical endurance to keep constantly alert, fiercely watchful and thoroughly ruthless, a play may be smothered or defeated by the intricacy, the trickiness or even the downright beauty of a production.

  Perhaps sheer physical endurance is the prime requisite. It is almost impossible to convey to an outsider the atmosphere of a theatre during those endless hours of unrelieved tedium. The dismal waiting about, the awesome hopelessness of shouting at stagehands who can hear nothing and are obviously blind as well, the whispered but venomous arguments in the back of the theatre with the scenic artist, the lighting expert and the costume designer—all of this, strung out over a period of three days and nights, is my own private conception of what hell or eternal damnation must be like. There exists among the laity a mistaken idea that dress rehearsals are exciting and glamorous. It needs correction. They are pure hell! This particular hell, fortunately, was Mr. Kaufman’s, not mine, although as an anguished onlooker I seemed to be doing a good deal more turning on the spit than he was.

  I prowled uneasily around the theatre, moved about in the wings among the little groups of weary actors, wandered back and forth between the auditorium and the dressing rooms, finding little comfort on either side of the footlights and growing increasingly more certain that the play would never open by Tuesday, if at all. Mr. Kaufman walked silently up and down the aisle, a dim blue-suited figure, talking softly now and then over the apparatus that connected him with the stage manager backstage; or sat quietly in a seat in the very last row of the theatre, seemingly undisturbed by the chaos that was taking place in front of his eyes; and when I hoarsely whispered to him that the change from the first scene into the second had taken twelve minutes instead of two, he looked at me over the rims of his glasses and replied with a kind of lunatic logic, “I know. I’ve been right here all the time,” and let his unconcerned gaze wander back to the stage again.

  The comforting figure of Sam Harris was nowhere to be seen. I learned from Max Siegel, smiling as usual, that Mr. Harris had cast an experienced eye on what was obviously going to be a rocky series of dress rehearsals and had retreated to a chair on the boardwalk or to his hotel room and would not be visible now until curtain time on opening night. “He likes to keep himself fresh,” said Max Siegel. “Why don’t you do the same thing?” he added. “You can’t do any good here standing around and looking green. You’re just scaring yourself and the actors. Why don’t you go out and get some air?”

  I turned away without answering and wandered backstage again. In a little while I wandered listlessly back into the auditorium and slumped down into a seat for what I thought was to be five minutes of closing my eyes against the mayhem that was taking place on the stage, but which turned out to be two hours of the best sleep I had had in two weeks.

  I seem to have no clear recollection of the next forty-eight hours. The scenic and light rehearsals went on, the dress parade took place, the actors began to appear in their proper costumes in the right scenes and at the right time. My memory of those hours is actually of a feeling or a sensation—of a curious illusion which is still vivid and remains remarkably clear in my mind to this very day. During those last two days before the opening I seemed to be under a constant hallucination that I was floating down an underground stream whose dark waters seethed and eddied with the faces of actors, stagehands and Mr. Kaufman—where the shore was lined with endless mounds of discolored coffee containers, half-eaten sandwiches and doughnuts—and that I was being borne swiftly and implacably toward an improbable island over which the precise, invariable voice of Mr. Kaufman echoed and re-echoed with a sepulchral clarity, although I could not always understand what he was saying.

  I returned to reality, if indeed it may be called that, with the arrival of Joe Hyman in my hotel room at six thirty on the night of the opening. He found me standing in my underpants in front of the washbasin in the bathroom, with my hands outstretched beneath the electric light bulb over the washbasin mirror; I had pulled the cord of the light bulb, then fallen into some bemusement of my own, and instead of turning on the water taps I had remained standing with my palms upturned under the bulb waiting for water to gush forth. “Of all nights for the water to be turned off without warning,” I said bitterly to him by way of greeting. “How am I going to shave? I can’t go to the opening looking like this!”

  Joe Hyman turned on the water tap and said, “Hurry up and shave and I’ll buy you a good dinner. If things are as terrible as you look, you’ll need one.”

  There was always a gentle hint of mockery in everything Joe Hyman said, even when he was being most grave. It was the most immediate and personal thing about him and it either attracted or repelled people who knew him only slightly. It was just what I needed right then. It cleared the air of actors, stagehands, even of Mr. Kaufman himself, and brought the real world back into focus. To my surprise, I ate and thoroughly enjoyed the large lobster dinner he bought me, and aided by his brisk matter-of-fact presence I even talked sensibly for the first time in weeks about the play. I had been right to allow him and no on
e else to come down to the opening. By urgent pleadings and a few not so veiled threats, I had persuaded all of my little coterie—Eddie Chodorov, Dore Schary, Lester Sweyd, et al.—not to come down to Atlantic City for the opening, but to wait until the following week at Brighton Beach. I wanted Joe Hyman and no one else with me tonight.

  * * *

  The initial performance, the raising of a curtain on a play before its very first audience, is for me at least the worst two hours of that play’s existence, whatever its subsequent fate may be. No one really knows anything much about a play until it meets its first audience; not its director, its actors, its producers, and least of all its author. The scenes he has counted on most strongly, his favorite bits of fine writing—the delicately balanced emotional or comedic thrusts, the witty, ironic summing up, the wry third-act curtain with its caustic stinging last line that adroitly illuminates the theme—these are the things that are most likely to go down the drain first, sometimes with an audible thud. The big scene in the second act, or the touching speech that reflects all of the author’s personal philosophy—that cherished mosaic of words on which he has secretly based his hopes for the Pulitzer Prize or at the very least the Drama Critics Award—such things the audience invariably will sit silently but politely through, patiently waiting for the reappearance of that delightful minor character, who was tossed in only to highlight the speech, or for an echo of that delicious little scene which was written only as a transition to the big one.

  It is a humbling process, and the truculent author whose pride or vanity seduces him into believing that his play is above the heads of its out-of-town audience, is due for a rude surprise when his play reaches New York. There are, of course, plays that have withered out of town and then blossomed in New York, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. By and large, an audience is an audience is an audience, as Gertrude Stein might have said, and the acid test of a play is usually its very first one. It is that first audience that I most fear, for regardless of what miracles of rewriting may be undertaken and even brilliantly carried out, the actual fate of a play is almost always sealed by its first audience.

  A New York opening night is not something to be borne with equanimity, but after four weeks out of town, unless one is willfully blind and deaf to the unmistakable signs that an audience gives to even the most sanguine of authors, the ballots are already in and counted—the ball game has already been played and lost. Audiences do not vary that widely, nor for that matter, do critics. The New York notices will generally be more perceptive of the author’s intent, more astute in distinguishing the first-rate from the cleverly contrived, but they will fasten on the weakness of a play or a performance with the same kind of exasperating genius that out-of-town audiences have shown from the first performance onward. It is permissible, of course, to believe in miracles as one makes one’s way to the theatre on the night of a New York opening; but it is safer and less painful in the end, I have found, to continue to believe that miracles, like taxi accidents, are something that happen to other people, not oneself.

  We strolled slowly along the boardwalk to the theatre, my dinner-table calm suddenly giving way to a mounting excitement and dread, distributed in equal parts at the pit of my stomach. Even Joe Hyman, walking beside me, lapsed into a strange loquaciousness to cover, I realized, his own excitement. Neither of us said one word about the play. I discoursed learnedly and at length on one of my favorite topics, the evils of poverty; and Joe Hyman, paying no attention whatever to what I was saying, held forth on the superior taste and chewing consistency of salt-water taffy in the days of his childhood over the present poor makeshift specimens that we passed in store after store as we walked along. The lobby of the Apollo Theatre, when we reached it, was a reassuring sight. It contained within its jammed confines that happy buzz that I had come to associate with an audience about to enter a theatre for an evening of already assured pleasure. Pushing my way through, I heard “George S. Kaufman” and “He always writes hits” with punctuated regularity, and just before I reached the ticket taker a man behind me announced loudly, “I’ll lay you two-to-one right now this show is a hit—I’ll put my money on Kaufman any day of the week.”

  Joe Hyman presented his stub to the ticket taker, who nodded his head to me in recognition as I passed through. Joe and I shook hands silently, and I watched him proceed to his seat in the fourth row on the aisle, with the lingering, beseeching look a child gives to its parents when he is about to have his tonsils removed, but Joe did not look back. I turned and looked over the heads of the crowd at the back of the theatre for a glimpse of Mr. Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman, Max Siegel had informed me, never sat for the performance of a play—the first performance or any other one. He stood at the back of the theatre, not looking at the stage, but pacing furiously up and down and listening. Under the mistaken idea that he might expect me to do the same thing, I had not arranged for a seat, but stood dutifully waiting, anxiously casting about for him to make his appearance.

  The house lights dimmed to the halfway mark, warning latecomers to get to their seats. There was still no sign of Mr. Kaufman. I wondered if I had misunderstood Max Siegel—I had not been understanding more than half of what was said to me these last few days—and I had a moment of wild panic, feeling certain Mr. Kaufman had met with an accident on his way to the theatre and that the curtain would rise without him, leaving only me in charge. Then, from somewhere over my shoulder quite close by, came an unmistakable snarling voice: “Stop talking and sit down, you son-of-a-bitches.” A group of latecomers, rather a large group, gave one startled glance at the grim figure staring at them over the rims of his glasses and scurried silently down the aisle. If Mr. Kaufman saw me, he gave no indication of it.

  His wild pacing had already started. Back and forth across the back of the theatre he paced at a tremendous clip, staring down at the carpet and heedless of what or who might be in front of him. The ushers threw him a sidelong look and gave him a wide berth. He paced up and down like a man possessed, as indeed he was possessed at those moments, by a demon that only the laughter of an audience in the proper places could exorcise. For an uncertain moment I considered falling into step beside him, but another look at that formidable figure made me think better of it. Instead, I started my own pacing from the opposite side, so that we passed and repassed each other as we both reached center.

  Thus began accidentally, for me, at any rate, a ritual that has persisted ever since. I have never since that night sat in a seat for a performance of one of my own plays. How many hundreds of miles I have paced in how many countless out-of-town theatres I hesitate to think. The mileage, to say nothing of the wear and tear, has been considerable. Moreover, my ear and my brain, attuned since that first memorable pacing, have never had the enjoyment of hearing the audience laugh—they are trained to hear only the silences when laughter is supposed to come but does not. It may account for my look of very real surprise when people have said to me, “It must be wonderful to hear a theatre full of people roar with laughter at something you have written, isn’t it?” I have always answered, “Yes, it is,” but actually I have never really heard it. I have always been listening ahead for the next line or the next scene, when laughter may not come.

  The theatre went dark and the audience fell silent as the footlights glowed on. The curtain rose to a spatter of polite, obligatory applause, but I resolutely kept my face from the stage, fiercely determined to emulate my hero, whose eyes were glued to the carpet and whose legs were taking even longer strides as he came toward me. Aline MacMahon made her entrance and a second or so later, with her third line, the entire audience broke into a roar of laughter. It marked the first time I had ever heard an audience laugh at something I had written.

  I stopped dead in my tracks as though someone had struck me hard across the mouth, and the Lobster Newburg resting fitfully in my stomach took a fearful heave and turn. I was near the stairway fortunately, and I raced down to the men’s room, making it
only just in time, and there I remained for the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I could hear applause and knew that the first scene had ended, and could tell by the other kind of applause that Blanche Ring had made her entrance in the second scene, but I dared not go upstairs. Each time I tried to leave I got only as far as the bottom of the stairway, and then returned to be sick again.

  Finally, in the middle of the second scene, I could bear it no longer. The audience was laughing almost continuously now and it was intolerable not to be able to drink it all in. I raced up the stairs and for a few seconds stood gaping at the stage, grinning foolishly and then breaking into delighted laughter myself as the audience laughed.

  I might have stayed that way for the rest of the act, or indeed the whole show, but for the figure that loomed up suddenly beside me and interrupted his pacing just long enough to remark thinly, “There were plenty of places where they didn’t laugh while you were doing whatever the hell you were doing.” He made a grenadier-turn and was off like a whippet to the opposite side of the theatre. Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I resumed my own pacing; and we passed and repassed each other without a word until the curtain fell on the end of the first act.

  I could barely wait for Joe Hyman to get up the aisle, but I could tell from the applause and from that wonderful buzz that came from the audience itself on all sides as the house lights went on, that the first act had gone wonderfully. Joe Hyman did not stint. For once he “gave satisfaction,” as my mother would have said. “If the rest of it keeps up like this, my boy, you can give up the lecture on the evils of poverty,” he said, his face wreathed in one big satisfied grin. I looked around for Mr. Kaufman, but of course he had gone backstage. He was to be discovered already seated as the curtain rose on the second act, and he would be putting on his make-up now. I moved about trying to find Max Siegel or Sam Harris; but Max Siegel was nowhere to be found and Sam Harris was surrounded by a large group of people. He caught sight of me over the edge of the group and winked broadly. There could be no doubt that he was immensely pleased.