by Moss Hart
I don’t know whether it was because this was the largest audience we had ever played to or because it was an uncommonly generous one, but the volume of laughter was greater than it had ever been before, even for the first act. The revisions we had made in it to make it of a piece with the new second and third acts had tightened some of the arid spots and made the laughter almost continuous. It had always played well, but now it played thunderously. The applause lasted a good half-minute after the curtain came down. It was a little too early to gloat; but if the second act was right, it was going to have its best chance with this audience, and I could hardly wait for them to get back to their seats. Sam Harris made no comment other than a laconic, “That act’s been improved, kid.” Like myself, he was marking time.
It seemed an unconscionably long intermission until the house lights dimmed again. Mr. Kaufman received his usual reception as the curtain rose on the second act and his usual round of applause as he made his exit. I held my breath—the next few minutes would tell the story.
I did not have to hold it for long. They were laughing loudly now in all the places where there had been only silence before, and as the laughter kept on without any sign of diminishing I began to bang delightedly on the back of the orchestra railing with my fists. A blue-suited figure was immediately at my side. “Don’t interrupt them, you fool,” hissed Mr. Kaufman, but I could tell he was as delighted as I was. The wonderful sound of laughter kept coming in wave after wave, and in spite of that pacing figure nearby, I began to laugh with them myself. It seemed impossible not to. I was, I suppose, a little light-headed with relief. The second act came down to even greater applause than the first and an unmistakable buzz filled the theatre even before the house lights came up.
There is something almost touching about the way an audience comes up the aisles when it has been thoroughly satisfied with a play. They beam at each other with pleasure, as though they had been given an unexpected present. It is a rewarding sight. Sam Harris, caught in the crush coming up the aisle, saw me and winked broadly, and right behind him Max Siegel’s smile seemed to be running straight off his face and into his ears. I waved and indicated I would meet them in the lobby.
I was eager to eavesdrop and hear what the audience was saying about the play, though lobby-listening is a dangerous occupation. A playwright is likely to hear last night’s bridge game being discussed instead of his play, or how well little Robert is doing since he changed schools. Lobby-listening even at an acknowledged hit in New York is likely to yield no more than, “I don’t know what they’re raving about, do you?” or, “It’s just an evening’s entertainment, that’s all,” to a playwright’s outraged ears. But tonight they were actually talking about the play. I threaded my way from group to group and heard them saying, “Funniest play I’ve seen in years,” and, “Wait until this hits Broadway,” and reminded myself that this was the time I usually spent in the stage alley, afraid of what I might hear if I remained in the lobby.
I listened so avidly that I failed to meet Sam Harris and Max Siegel—the ushers were already calling out “Curtain going up” by the time I had had my fill. I followed the audience back into the theatre, gathering up the last morsel of comment and relishing every word. I suddenly realized I had also neglected to say a word to Mr. Kaufman, until I saw him beginning to pace back and forth as the house lights began to dim. I went over to him and tried to modulate my excitement to a pitch that would match his own usual conservatism. “They seem to like it, Mr. Kaufman,” I said.
To my surprise, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “You deserve it,” and then quickly walked away. Only the rising of the curtain saved him from one of my commemorative speeches.
The audience’s response to their first sight of the Pigeon’s Egg was almost excessive. They gave a great whoop of laughter and then broke into applause that lasted through the first few lines of dialogue. I took my place at the back of the orchestra rail, prepared to behave with a little more decorum this time and not laugh along with them, even though this was the act we were both certain contained the funniest moments of the play.
Their laughter came promptly as the applause died and the scene went on, but it was not, I quickly noticed, of the same kind. The ear could tell the difference almost immediately. It was a little forced, as though they were unwilling to believe that so good an evening might be going downhill and were perfectly prepared to laugh at costumes and props until the play came to life again. But the play was not coming to life again, even with the best of intentions on the part of this eager-to-laugh-at-anything audience. In spite of themselves, their laughter was growing weaker and more fitful, and finally at about the middle of the act it ceased altogether. I looked around for Mr. Kaufman. For once he had stopped his pacing and was standing staring at the stage as aghast as I was. We had gone terribly wrong somewhere and there was no point in going over and asking him how or why.
He came over to me just before the third act ended and whispered, “We’re too close to a hit now not to get this right. Meet me in the room in half an hour.”
I watched a bewildered and disappointed audience file out of the theatre, and on my way back to the hotel I walked behind a man and a woman discussing something in so aggrieved a tone that I knew they must be talking about the play.
“It sure as hell didn’t hold up, did it?” I heard him say.
And the woman, equally offended, replied, “I don’t understand how the same two people could have written that last act, for the life of me.”
I was tempted to join them and say, “May I introduce one of the idiots, madam?” In a way I felt quite as victimized as they did.
* * *
We had both largely recovered, however, from our own shock and disappointment with the third act by the time we sat facing each other in Mr. Kaufman’s room half an hour later. One thing was inescapable. Two acts were right now, where only one had been right before. It seemed impossible not to be able to lick a last act that was all that seemed to stand in the way of a smashing success. That had been Sam Harris’ sanguine conclusion, Mr. Kaufman reported, and he was staying right on in Philadelphia, a sure sign that he believed it could be done. Mr. Kaufman’s own belief that we could do it was tonic.
He brought out a new box of fudge, placed the manuscript on his knees, poised a pencil above it for the first cuts, and went right to work without further discussion. It was the same old method—cuts down to the bare bones of the last act to get a clean look at it, until we could glimpse what was wrong and had an idea of how to solve it. It was dawn as usual before we finished, for although there was only one act to cut, we spent the last two hours writing a new scene that might get the act off to a better start, and we were encouraged the next evening to find that it did.
We worked through the following night on another scene, and that, too, was an improvement; but nothing we wrote seemed to provide a clue for that straight line we were seeking. New scenes, even if they are wrong, will sometimes point out the direction in which a play should move, but nothing seemed to offer us the slightest hint that we were on the right track. There was something stubbornly wrong with the basic idea of the last act that evaded all our efforts to fix it.
Mr. Kaufman, never a man to spare himself or his collaborator where work was concerned, worked like a man possessed. Something more than just a play seemed to be at stake. His professional pride was involved now and made insupportable the fact that he was this tantalizingly close to a hit and not quite able to achieve it. He drove himself, and me along with him, at a merciless pace and to a point where each night we worked until it appeared that not another word could be dredged up, yet the night’s work was far from being ended. After flinging himself on the sofa for a few minutes and closing his eyes in exhaustion, he would get up and walk to the typewriter again. I lost count of the number of new scenes that were written every night, staged the next day, and played, rough or not, that same evening, only to be tossed out after one performance.
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The actors accomplished prodigious feats of memory, learning and unlearning new scenes for performance after performance, but as a consequence the first two acts were becoming a little shaky and were not playing nearly as well as they had played. When actors walk into a first act with a new last act in their heads almost every night, it is not unnatural that it should play havoc with their overall performance. Actors cannot be expected to remember new lines each night and still give the old ones their proper value.
By the end of the first week the first two acts had begun to lose that wonderful sheen and precision of the opening performance. On Monday night of the second week there was scarcely a third of the orchestra filled, and the theatre again began to take on that cavelike quality which had appalled me so when I had had my first look at it. A week of disappointed audiences and uncertain performances was beginning to take its toll at the box office. Out-of-town audiences are extremely sensitive and well aware of the role they play. They do not resent being used as guinea pigs to test out a new play, but they pride themselves on their ability to pick winners. Word is passed around rapidly among out-of-town theatregoers, and they can stay away from a play on which the report is bad with an obstinacy that borders on the sinister. The word had evidently gone out on Once in a Lifetime, although we told each other that the heat was actually the villain that had caused our business to drop with such frightening swiftness. A new heat wave had engulfed Philadelphia with such scorching intensity that it dwarfed the New York heat waves I had grumbled about and made them seem almost elfin by comparison. The city emptied under our eyes. By the third day of it, offices and shops were sending their employees home at one o’clock in the afternoon, and the baking streets seemed to be bare of everything except traffic policemen, children dousing themselves under fire hydrants, and water sprinklers endlessly sloshing water over the dusty pavements.
No one could work through such heat and remain unaffected by it, but I began to doubt that the heat was the sole cause of Mr. Kaufman’s moody and restive manner with the company as he rehearsed during the day or his increasingly pessimistic air as he watched the play each night. Imperceptibly at first, and then unmistakably, I began to detect little telltale signs of discouragement which seemed to grow larger as I watched for them. He worked through the nights and days without letup, but he was strangely silent now when the result of all our labors was being played night after night to audiences of sometimes less than a hundred people. It was disheartening to watch a new scene that had seemed promising in rehearsal spin itself out before rows of empty seats, and programs waving listlessly to and fro in the heat. Laughter is contagious and does not spread easily among people huddled together as if in self-protection against the emptiness around them. We were literally working in the dark—it was impossible to tell from these audiences what was good and should be saved or what was bad and should be tossed out. What little laughter there was came strangely and in curiously isolated spots, and sometimes laughter came where none at all was called for. Though I would not have admitted it to anyone, I began to mistrust everything we were doing. We had either lost control of the play or the last act was incurable. Mr. Kaufman’s silence might very well mean that he had come to the same conclusion and was as loath to put it into words as I was, but while it remained unspoken, miracles were still possible. Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.
* * *
As our third and last week in Philadelphia began, however, I could sense that whatever his thoughts might be they were not too far from my own. Very few plays are without faults of one kind or another, but few plays succeed with a bad last act. The best kind of fault for a play to have is first-act trouble, and the worst kind last-act trouble. An audience will forgive a slow or even a weak first act, if the second act grows progressively better; and a third act that sends the audience up the aisles and out of the theatre with the impression of a fully rounded evening, can sometimes make that hair’s-breadth difference between failure and success. A bad third act or even a poor last fifteen minutes of a play can be ruinous. It can somehow wipe the slate clean of all that has gone on before and completely negate the two acts preceding it, and if a playwright is not in control of his last act in the final week of the tryout, it is unlikely that he ever will be.
Mr. Kaufman brought it out into the open finally on the Tuesday night of that last week. He was taking the midnight train to New York to meet the boat that was bringing Beatrice Kaufman back from Europe the following morning, and he would return in time for the matinée tomorrow. He tossed the new scene we had played that evening into a wastebasket in the corner of the dressing room and removed the last of the make-up from his face before he turned to me directly.
“I think we ought to face the fact that we may have to settle for what we’ve got,” he said. “We must give the company a chance to play the same show four nights in a row before we open in New York,” he went on, “and I’ve got to have a good crack at getting back the performance of the first two acts to where it was when we opened here or we’ll stand no chance at all. I’m going to freeze the show as it stands on Thursday night—no more changes—that’s it. Hot or cold. That all right with you?”
“What do you think our chances are in New York with this last act, Mr. Kaufman?” I asked.
“Not wonderful,” he replied, “if you have to have my honest opinion.” He was silent for a moment and then continued. “Comedies usually have to be ninety-five per cent airtight—at least that’s been my experience. You can squeak by with ninety per cent once in a while, but not with eighty-five, and according to my figures, not to keep any secrets from you, this one just inches over the seventy mark. I don’t know what son-of-a-bitch set up those figures, but there you are. Well, no one can say we didn’t try. We’re freezing the show Thursday night, Sam,” he called over my shoulder to Sam Harris, who had appeared in the doorway. “And good-bye—I’m just going to make that train.”
Sam Harris looked after the figure hurrying down the stairs and laughed. “You know, I think he’s glad to duck out of town, kid. He runs down those stairs like he just heard tonight’s receipts.” He laughed again. “A hundred and four dollars and eighty-five cents,” he said. “We jumped eighty-five cents over last night. That just about pays for what the actors eat in that night-club scene.” He glanced briefly at the wastebasket and the typed pages scattered over the floor around it. “Come on out with me and have a beer, kid. This is your first night off, isn’t it?” I nodded. “Do you good to forget the show,” he said and started down the stairs. “Never saw two guys work harder. That last act’s a little bastard. I’ve sat through quite a few tough ones in my time but this one is something special. A couple of beers will do us both good.”
* * *
Serendipity is a word that has fallen into disuse, but there are few words in the language that so graphically characterize the combinations of fortuitous and random circumstances that make up the behind-the-scenes history of almost every play. It describes precisely what happened that night and afterward as a result of my evening with Sam Harris. In the little speakeasy just around the corner from the Ritz Hotel, we sat drinking beer after beer, our tongues loosened and our minds, a little drunkenly after a while, going over the play, scene by scene and almost line by line.
I was surprised in the beginning at Sam Harris’ loquaciousness, for I had never before heard him talk at such length. His comments on the play were usually tersely worded typewritten notes, delivered to Mr. Kaufman’s room by Max Siegel every evening after the performance. Mr. Kaufman did not suffer gladly a nightly conference with a producer, even if that producer was Sam Harris. It occurred to me for the first time to wonder if even Sam Harris might not be a little intimidated by George Kaufman. Tonight, with Mr. Kaufman on a train bound for New York, Sam Harris’ criticism of the play was far more explicit than his notes had ever been, and I listened as intently as my fuzzy-mindedness would allow after the third bottle of beer. He was
a sound and shrewd judge of a play and an old and crafty campaigner in evaluating its chances, but his talk—pithy though it was, and full of the insight of his years in the theatre—did not always make clear his meaning. His turn of phrase was somewhat cryptic and his conversation followed an enigmatic and circuitous course. Though I kept nodding my head in agreement, I was not always certain that I had grasped the significance of what he was saying.
Just before the place closed, when the waiters were piling the chairs up on top of the tables all around us in a last despairing gesture of getting us to leave, my ear caught a phrase he had used once or twice before, but whose meaning had escaped me. “I wish, kid,” he sighed, “that this weren’t such a noisy play.”
“Noisy, Mr. Harris?” I said, determined to understand what he meant by that word. “What do you mean by a noisy play?”
“It’s a noisy play, kid,” he reiterated without explanation. “One of the noisiest plays I’ve ever been around.”
“But why, Mr. Harris?” I persisted. “It’s no noisier than any other play.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” he replied. “Just think about it. Except for those two minutes at the beginning of the first act, there isn’t another spot in this whole play where two people sit down and talk quietly to each other. Is that right, or isn’t it?”
I looked at him, a little stunned, and said, “Is that what you mean by noisy?”
“Maybe noisy is the wrong word,” he said. “But I’ve watched this play through maybe a hundred times, and I think one of the main things wrong with it is that it tires an audience out. It’s a tiring play to sit through, kid … I can almost feel them begin to get tired all around me. That stage is so damn full of actors and scenery and costumes and props all the time they never get a chance to catch their breath and listen to the play. Sure they laugh, but I think they’re longing to see that stage just once with maybe two or three people on it quietly talking the whole thing over. Give them a chance to sit back themselves and kind of add the whole thing up.” He signaled the waiter for the check, then laughed. “Once this show gets under way nobody ever talks to each other. They just keep pounding away like hell and running in and out of that scenery. It’s a noisy play, kid, you take my word for it.”