Act One

by Moss Hart

  There is always one performance in the life of a play that is in trouble out of town, where the entire enterprise, from the idea of the play itself right down to its settings and its actors, succeeds in looking utterly ridiculous and gives to everyone connected with it a sense of deep and complete humiliation. We had apparently reached that terminal point in record time. It was on that black evening also that both Sam Harris and Beatrice Kaufman returned to New York, leaving behind them, or so it seemed to my apprehensive ears, an impression of extremely cautious and guarded optimism as to the play’s ultimate chances, in spite of the careful way they phrased everything they said. Nevertheless, that savage and ruthless cutting job accomplished exactly what he had meant it to do: it revealed as nothing else could have the deep trouble we were in, for stripped of its excess verbiage Once in a Lifetime emerged as a play of sound satiric viewpoint but very little substance. It was possible, it seemed, for an audience to laugh long and loud at a play, and yet leave the theatre dissatisfied and disappointed—a phenomenon that I have noted in a good many other plays through the years, sometimes in plays of sound enough ideas, but which remained unhappy casualties because of this fundamental lack of what an audience compellingly demands.

  I was learning in that memorable week still another aspect of how baffling a quarry an audience can be. Some basic human element or ingredient was missing in Once in a Lifetime, and in spite of its high sense of fun and rollicking good spirits, the sum total of the evening did not add up to that magical sense of enjoyment that sends an audience out of the theatre completely satisfied and breeds long lines at the box office afterward. Each night after the labor of cutting was over, we sat in Mr. Kaufman’s room and discussed the nature of the disease, but curing it, as he had tartly remarked after the opening performance, was another matter. The gravity of the trouble we were in was obvious enough; the remedy was not so easily come by. We discussed and quickly discarded any number of devices which we sensed were palliatives rather than the pure oxygen the play needed, and as I watched Mr. Kaufman stride toward the windows at the end of each night to pull aside the curtain and let the dawn streak in, I marveled anew at his resiliency—at his uncommon ability to stand up under the punishing load of work he was carrying and still retain his full zest and vigor.

  I had ceased to be astonished by the freshness with which he would attack each new day’s rehearsal after a night of little or no sleep, but as I made my own weary way down the corridor to my room, my befuddled brain continued to marvel at him. I still do, and I continue to wonder why I have allowed myself to follow the same foolish path. The playwright who directs his own work is playing a fool’s game. The schedule he must keep and the load he must carry is an inhuman one and it does not always work to the advantage of his play. If the play is in trouble—and trouble is the out-of-town norm—he will more often than not be forced to rewrite whole scenes during the night, have the rewrite typed and ready for an eleven o’clock rehearsal, rehearse throughout the day, watch the performance that evening, making his notes to give to the actors after the curtain comes down, as well as judging how well or ill the new scenes played, and then go back to his room to repeat the same procedure over again every night until such time as he is lucky enough or clever enough to have rescued his play. Apart from the labor and tension of the original rehearsals, after two or three weeks of this grueling schedule on the road, the playwright who is his own director would be wise not to go to a doctor for a checkup at the end of it. He is very likely to be unpleasantly surprised at the results of his cardiogram. Yet there is no recovery, it is only fair to say, as quick as the recovery from a hit. The roses appear in the playwright’s cheeks again with amazing swiftness, and the sparkle of health in his eye gives the lie to the lunatic battering he has just put his physical and nervous system through.

  Perhaps it is precisely this unholy knowledge that has caused me to persist in continuing to direct my own plays against all the dictates of common sense, considering that I have teetered along the edge of that porcupine path so many times before. Vanity, I can only presume, inevitably triumphs over plain common sense, for I am certain that some of my plays have suffered at my own hands as director. I have long since reached the conclusion that I am a better director of another’s work than of my own—yet I very much doubt if my egoistic sense of pleasure in directing my own plays would allow me to let another man stage them. It is strange that this should be so, for the rewards to a playwright as the director of his own plays are minor compared to the awareness he has of the price he must pay for this indulgence, but vanity is part of a writer’s strength as well as his weakness. Without vanity a writer’s work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.

  Something of the sort must have held true for George Kaufman, for as I saw him toil under the grind of rewriting and rehearsals I wondered why he usually chose to bear the double burden of play-writing and directing at the same time. It seemed to me a sleeveless errand that vanity alone could explain. More than once as I watched him labor, the thought crossed my mind, “What a social director he would have made,” for he was seemingly immune to weariness and his capacity for working around the clock would have made him the loved and envied of the entire Borscht Circuit. By the end of the first week’s tryout of Once in a Lifetime at Atlantic City, the rigors of social directing seemed to me in retrospect like so much child’s play.

  On the journey back to New York, I wondered sleepily not if or how we were going to be able to fix the play—my brain seemed to go dry and my wits to scatter if I attempted to focus on it—I wondered instead if the new social director at the Flagler was as dog-tired as I was! There was one salutary thing about social directing, I morosely concluded. “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach” did not need a second act, and if I had to pick up social directing again next season, I would remember it. It was cold comfort, and the sight of Max Siegel, unsmiling for the first time, did not make it a particularly warming journey.

  For the first time in my life I found myself walking down to the subway at Times Square with a sense of actual relief. I needed to be alone, to escape from Once in a Lifetime—to look at no one connected with it, to have no one ask me about it, or ask me to think about it. I needed to shut it out of my mind and psyche, if only for the measure of a subway ride back to Brooklyn. Brooklyn, however, was holding a surprise in store that I had not quite reckoned with and one that was hardly likely to promote forgetfulness.

  I KNOW OF no group of people as idiotically confident of success as a playwright’s family while his play is still in its tryout stage. In spite of everything I had said over the telephone to my mother from Atlantic City, in spite of my insistence that they must all think of the play as still “trying out” and not as an assured success, I was welcomed home on a note of unqualified triumph. Everything short of flags and a brass band greeted a returning hero, whose own doubts about the play jangled like sleighbells in his ears as he listened to the neighbors’ fulsome congratulations and their repeated assurances that they could hardly wait to get to the theatre. My mother could barely wait to get me inside the apartment to proudly parade for my inspection the two new dresses she had bought to celebrate. These twin purchases were explained by the fact that since she expected to attend every performance throughout the week, as well as the opening one, it was hardly to be expected that she could appear all week in the same dress. My father and brother had settled for new ties and shirts and would wear their best blue suits every night, but since different neighbors would be attending the play on different nights it was no more than seemly that she be dressed as the occasion merited. I could only gather that she meant to alternate the dresses, as alternate neighbors attended the performance, for at the end of an hour of listening to lightheaded plans and dreams of the rich, full life we were going to live, I nodded “yes” to everything. It was plainly hopeless to try to persuade her or my father or brother, for that matt
er, that Once in a Lifetime might turn out to be a little less than the shower of gold they had already concluded it was.

  To do them justice, this conviction, which seemed so firmly rooted and fixed in all of their minds, was not entirely without a basis in reality. For one thing, the notice in Variety had been a surprisingly good one. If one took the trouble to read the notice carefully, however, the reviewer’s certainty that a hit was in store for Broadway the following season was based almost entirely on George Kaufman’s accepted wizardry of being able to pull a large number of rabbits out of his play-doctor’s hat. For another, Dore Schary, Eddie Chodorov, Lester Sweyd, in fact everyone who should have known better and curbed his tongue, had called and offered congratulations in my absence. To my vast surprise, they continued to misread the Variety notice when I talked to them myself on the telephone, and they put down my reservations and rumblings to what they laughingly termed, “success modesty.” Obviously, the reports that had seeped back to Broadway from Atlantic City had all been good: “Kaufman is working on it night and day,” the grapevine had reported—and that was enough for Broadway to know.

  By Monday afternoon, the day after my return and the day of the opening at Brighton Beach, I too had succumbed to the general elation. The same self-delusion that had enveloped everyone connected with The Beloved Bandit, as it transferred from Rochester to Chicago, fell into place again and operated with equal magic. I reread the Variety notice and managed to translate what it plainly stated into something it did not say at all. By the time I left the house that evening and took a trolley car to Brighton Beach, I was in high spirits. I got off the car four or five blocks before I reached the theatre, for I was early and I wanted to enjoy this sudden and unexpected tranquillity. I wanted also, in my usual way, to seek some omen that would make secure my high hopes for tonight. Reason or logic has little to do with these moments of self-deception, which come into play at moments of crisis. We all wear these atavistic wishing caps in one form or another. I still search for opening-night omens, good ones or bad ones, and I invariably find one. I found one now.

  Hurrying along the boardwalk I came suddenly upon the bathhouse that had once been the night club my grandfather had taken us all to on that far-off midsummer night. The facade had been altered almost beyond recognition, but there could be no doubt that it was the same building. That night and this place had been too sharply etched in my memory for me to mistake it. I stopped and stood in front of it for a few moments. Everything else but the memory of that night and of my grandfather vanished from my mind. It had been a long time since I had consciously thought of him or of my Aunt Kate, but they came back sharply now. Much of what I was and what I had done, this very journey that was taking me along this boardwalk and past this bathhouse, to a theatre where a play of mine was to raise its curtain in less than an hour—a great deal of both of them was embedded in every step of that journey. And if I needed an omen for tonight, there could scarcely be a better one. This shabby relic of middle-class gaiety had been for my grandfather a cry from the heart against his lot. He would be pleased at the journey I was making, no matter what happened tonight. I hurried past it, my spirits soaring higher than ever.

  The crowd that filled the lobby of the Brighton Beach Theatre looked surprisingly like a cross section of a Broadway opening night. I was startled by the turnout. It was stupid of me to have forgotten that the Broadway regulars would of course have waited to test themselves against the play at Brighton Beach, rather than make the journey to Atlantic City. The sight of them lowered my spirits by a good fifty per cent. Agents whose clients had been turned down for parts in the play buzzed softly to scenic and costume designers, who likewise had lost out on their own bids. Even some of the very actors who had auditioned for us, unsuccessfully, were present, to prove to themselves, I suppose, how prejudiced and unseeing authors and managers can be. They would be bringing no great good will down the aisles with them when they went to their seats. Rival managers whose agenda for the new season also included a topical comedy had come to have an appraising look at the possible competition. They would judge and compare silently, without benefit, if possible, of laughter. The jungle drum beaters were also represented in almost their full strength—those faceless folk on the periphery of the theatre to whom it is all-important to be in the know and to know in advance just how good or how bad the incoming merchandise is likely to be.

  I stared resentfully at the ones I knew and realized with something of a start that I myself had been an enthusiastic member of the same club, though it did not seem possible that my own eyes could ever have glistened with the same cannibalistic glee that seemed to shine from every countenance at the possibility of imminent failure. This same anticipatory buzz would have sounded equally in key, it seemed to my ears, rising from the throats of a group of savages grouped around a tribal pot, over whose rim rose the steaming heads of George Kaufman and myself. Ticket brokers, columnists, a delegation of some of Mr. Kaufman’s Algonquin set, as well as the faces of some of my own friends, appeared and disappeared in the throng. One heart-sinking look was enough to send me quivering backstage, my pulses pounding. I crouched against a piece of furniture that I knew would not be used until the third act and I remained there until I heard the curtain rise and the first laugh waft backstage.

  Mr. Kaufman was already pacing furiously when I stole back into the theatre and he did not recognize my presence by even that one lifted finger in traditional greeting. His race across the carpet was if anything more frenzied than it had been at Atlantic City. His long strides had a hint of the pursued in them and his head seemed sunk into his shoulders. He knew, of course, far better than I did, the composition of tonight’s audience, and that the closer one drew to Broadway, the larger the lacks in a play loomed. Tonight was as close as one could get without actually opening on Broadway, and this audience would pounce on every lack. I listened for a moment or two and then stopped my own pacing and stared at him. The actors were giving a nervous and strained performance—cutting into their own and each other’s laughs, their timing sky-high, and their voices pitched at that taut level that always heralds a shaky performance. Yet the audience, even this audience, was responding to the play with unrestrained laughter. “They like it,” I whispered to him as he passed me. He did not reply, but continued his pacing.

  As he passed me again a moment or two later, he stopped long enough to state flatly, “They’ll like it better when they stop laughing. They haven’t long to wait.” I looked after him wonderingly. Was he never satisfied? What more could he want or ask? He was right, however. The ethics of the wrecking crew, curiously enough, are as strong as their malice. They adhere to a strict code of theatre behavior that contains its own kind of rough justice. The two things are not mutually exclusive, though they may seem so. In operation it is unfailing. If in the first fifteen minutes a play begins to play like a hit, no matter what ill will or personal animus they may have brought to it as single members of the audience, they give it as an entity their unalloyed blessing and reward it with laughter. This does not deny the fact that individually they might be better pleased if the opposite were true, but once the indications are clear that a hit is about to be revealed before them, the excitement of being present and part of the event itself is enough to outlaw their personal feelings and make them a good audience—sometimes better, in fact, than an audience of friends and well-wishers. For one thing, they are sharper and more acutely aware of the skills of the playwright and the actor, and their very malice creates an electricity of its own. It heightens and sparks both play and performance, so that a positive crackle of wills and wits pervades both sides of the footlights, and when the battle is joined, the evening is a memorable one for all concerned.

  The first act of Once in a Lifetime played like a hit of vintage rare, and when the curtain descended at the end of it, it was greeted with spontaneous and ungrudging applause. As Mr. Kaufman had prophesied, the faces coming up the aisle were not particu
larly happy faces. It was as though a hundred pairs of shoulders had shrugged in unison with the unspoken message: “A hit is a hit. You can’t stop it. Might as well get on the bandwagon early.” But their faces relayed in the same silent fashion that they didn’t have to be happy about it either, by God. “Just be patient—it won’t be too long,” I thought, paraphrasing Mr. Kaufman’s cynical assessment of their laughter and their applause, and scurried backstage to avoid the folly of the premature congratulations I saw plainly mirrored on the faces of some of my friends as they struggled up the aisle toward me. They caught a glimpse of me and raised their arms above their heads in congratulation, but I turned on my heel and ran. Let them put it down to nerves, mock modesty, or what they would—I preferred not to face them just yet.

  The second act played exactly as it had in Atlantic City, with the exception that from Mr. Kaufman’s exit onward the silence was deadlier. There were no willing, scattered laughs now. There was instead a kind of rapt attention, as though they must make thoroughly certain that no sound disturbed the passengers while the crew sank the ship. This, in a sense, was what they had come for, and their silence had the breathless hushed quality of a death watch. The curtain fell to a thin round of obligatory applause, but the faces coming up the aisle were relieved and smiling this time. It did not comfort me or make me feel any the less bitter to know that I had been guilty of exactly the same behavior at other people’s plays. The theatre breeds its own kind of cruelty, and its sadism takes on a keener edge since it can be enjoyed under the innocent guise of critical judgment. Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one’s own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.