Act One

by Moss Hart

  The first scene ended, and as I waited for the lights to come up on the train scene I began to wonder if the old lady at the drug counter might not have been correct; for at that moment I felt as though the daylights had indeed been scared out of me—the palms of my hands were icy and wet with perspiration and my stomach had twisted into a hard knot—but my hiccups had miraculously subsided.

  The curtain rose on the train set, and immediately that most accurate of all barometers gave an unmistakable sign that we were on the right track at long last. The audience broke into understanding and appreciative laughter—not the whoop of laughter that the Pigeon’s Egg always dazzled them into giving, but the more valuable laughter of an audience that was taking the play into its own hands and carrying it along with them. Jean Dixon was seated alone in the Pullman car, but her aloneness in a train that was obviously headed back to New York told them all they needed to know without a line’s being spoken. They made the leap for us themselves without a word of exposition, and the stage, quiet and silent for once, seemed to create by its wordlessness the exact sense of drama and climax that we had previously tried so hard to achieve, without success. The vital scenes of a play are played as much by the audience, I suppose, as they are by the actors on the stage. As surely as one can sense that an audience is lost, I could tell that this one had been captured. The Pullman porter entered and a moment later Mr. Kaufman followed him on. The biggest laugh that tiny audience was capable of giving greeted his appearance, and I knew that our search for the right last act had ended.

  I could barely hear the words being spoken on the stage, but I did not need to. I sat back and listened to the audience. The quiet scene Sam Harris had asked for was playing line after line to the biggest laughs in the play. Even some of the perfectly straight lines seemed to evoke laughter, and the laughter mounted until it became one continuous roar. I closed my eyes and just listened until the scene was over, then I walked downstairs and watched the final scene of the play from the back of the orchestra. With the momentum of the train scene behind it, it played flawlessly. That small audience actually broke into applause once or twice. Those crucial last few minutes had been redeemed. Once in a Lifetime, in Philadelphia at least, was playing like a hit right up to the curtain.

  I left the orchestra rail and leaned against the back wall. The exhaustion I felt was due in large part no doubt to that violent attack of hiccups, but neither hiccups nor the strain of sweating out the last act could entirely account for the almost overpowering weariness that had taken possession of my mind as well as my body. It was a strange inner tiredness of a kind I had never experienced before. I watched Sam Harris and Max Siegel applauding along with the rest of the audience as though they were seeing the play for the first time, and I saw Joe Hyman leave his seat and dash up the aisle in search of me. But I was suddenly too tired to want to hear what they had to say, or to care. I had finally touched bottom so far as Once in a Lifetime was concerned. I wanted the New York opening and Once in a Lifetime itself over and done with, whatever the outcome. For the first time, success or failure seemed not to matter. Without any sense of elation or triumph, I stared at the curtain going up and down and listened to the audience applauding. I seemed to have used up the last reserve of response or emotion. I wanted of all things to go home, and I wanted to go home with the passionate unreasonableness of a six-year-old.

  IT IS ALWAYS a little dismaying to discover that the truth, as one explores it, consists largely of a collection of platitudes. More often than we suspect, the old wives’ tales are not merely a caricature of the truth, but its faithful echo; and among the most banal in a profession where old wives’ tales are commonplace are the proverbial tales of the anguish and frenzy of the last few days before a New York opening. These hours have been portrayed in movies, in novels, and even upon the stage itself, in such hackneyed and platitudinous terms that their banality grates upon the ear with the brassy clink of a worn-out cliché. The distraught playwright, the nerve-torn actress, the harried stage manager, the tight-lipped director, the stubbornly optimistic producer, all are such familiar and stock figures that their anguish has been robbed of reality and their frenzy skirts the edge of farce. Yet the truth in this instance is substantially the same as the parody of itself it has become.

  As the train from Boston or Philadelphia pulls into Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station, returning a company from its tryout tour for the New York opening, each member in this changeless drama relinquishes his sanity, takes his place as a stereotype, and begins to live out his own cliché with almost clocklike precision. The uneasy discovery that the truth bears a strong resemblance to travesty, or to every bad movie or play about the stage one has ever seen, does not alter the nature of the role each performs or the misery which he feels while he performs it. However trite the sufferings of the last few days before a New York opening may seem to the outsider, they usually contain enough real anguish to make them the Book of Common Prayer of the Theatre—and I began to learn it chapter and verse even before the train from Philadelphia reached New York.

  I had watched the last two performances of the play in Philadelphia with a detachment and self-possession that I had never been capable of before. I had been able to look at the matinée and then the night performance, not with indifference, but with so great a loosening of the emotional tie between the play and myself that it made the turmoil of my usual watching seem foolish and remote. It was an experience so new and so enjoyable that I boarded the midnight train for New York convinced that I had come of age. No one, however, comes of age in the theatre. If he does, he takes his place among the disenchanted—or joins the ranks of those Philistines who mistake the theatre’s incoherence and fanaticism for muddle and moonshine. My self-delusion lasted as long as it took me to walk the length of the Pullman car to my seat. Almost every member of the company had bought an early Sunday edition of the New York Times at the station newsstand, and they had the drama section spread out on their laps, revealing, as I walked by, the pictures of the opening on the front page, or the large opening advertisement on the inside page. My detachment and self-possession vanished after the first quick glance, never to return. By the time I turned the key in the lock of our apartment in Brooklyn, I had taken my rightful place in the old wives’ tale, and I played my part exactly as it had always been played—with every platitude intact!

  One thing, however, was never to be the same again. My brother and I became friends at last, and that simple fact did much to see me through the time-honored anguish and frenzy of the next few days. It is hard to estimate the way or the moment in which two human beings are able to reach one another. The process, of course, is a gradual one, and perhaps my own unreadiness had always been as great as his; but the moment of my homecoming from Philadelphia marked the beginning of closeness between us. Perhaps events themselves create their own readiness, for I was immediately conscious the moment I opened the door, that this homecoming was different from any other. I had lived for so long as a stranger with my family that it had never occurred to me to seek counsel or comfort among them, but tonight I was secretly pleased to find them all waiting up for me. I am by no means certain that blood is thicker than water, but an opening the following week can thicken it as nothing else can. I warmed my hands and my heart in their affection and wondered why I had never found solace with them before. There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.

  I felt closer to my mother and father than I had in years, and my brother in particular was a surprising source of comfort. I began to look at him and to listen to him with a sense of wonder and discovery. The last year had changed him greatly, and it was the year, of course, that I had seen the least of him. His diffidence had vanished and with it his withdrawal from me and his silence. We sat at the kitchen table talking together for almost an hour after my mother and father had gone to bed, drinking the last of the coffee and finishing off the sandwiches. It
was the first time such a thing had happened between us, and as we talked, I became slowly aware that behind his unusual talkativeness, behind his innumerable questions about the play, lay a secret pride in me. He had cut out all the picture spreads and ads from the Sunday papers, and presumably as a joke, had tacked them all over the kitchen walls for my homecoming. He had also collected every word that had appeared anywhere about Once in a Lifetime, and as I turned the pages of the neatly pasted scrapbook he presented to me, it was my turn to be silent. I, who was never at a loss for words, suddenly could not find my tongue. The stranger at whose side I had slept for so many years was offering his friendship and I did not know how to bridge the gulf between us. I managed to thank him, after a moment, and we talked on easily enough, but behind the casual words we spoke, each of us in his own way was reaching out across the years to the other. I lay awake for a while in the dark after he had gone to sleep, relishing the new idea of having a brother. It was enjoyable enough to send me off to sleep for the first time in many a long night without thinking about George Kaufman.

  The golden rule for the last three days before an opening is that a company must be kept together as constantly as possible, even if some of the rehearsals that are called are purely trumped-up ones and fool nobody, including the company itself. If it is impossible to rehearse on the stage because the scenery is not yet set up, or the scenic designer is still lighting it as he always interminably is, then the rehearsal is held in the lounge of the theatre or in a rehearsal hall. Almost nothing is accomplished, for the actors walk through these rehearsals in a state approximating somnambulism, but the rule and the theory behind it is a sound one. Left to their own devices, a company might conceivably gain the impression that the world had not stopped in its tracks for these three days and that all life did not hang in the balance of those two and a half hours three nights hence. Moreover, misery does indeed love company, and there is nothing so soothing, not to say downright invigorating, as the shared misery of people in the same boat. Tempers may flare and patience reach the vanishing point, but temper or even the drudgery of walking through the play in an empty rehearsal hall can be a safety valve for taut nerves, can prevent the panic that can rise in a company left to wander too loosely in these last days.

  If I had been inclined to doubt the rightness of this procedure, all of my reservations would have vanished by the afternoon of the day following my return from Philadelphia. I had passed the morning easily enough in telephoning, but by mid-afternoon I could scarcely stay in my skin. Though I knew no rehearsal was scheduled until the next morning at eleven, I could not remain away from the theatre. I had no idea why I felt it imperative to be there, but I took the subway into town, and at the first glimpse of the scenery piled up on the street outside the Music Box as I turned the corner of 45th Street I felt immediately better. I moved toward it with a lift of the heart and hurried through the stage door as though I were leaving enemy territory for the safety of the U.S. Marines. There are few things duller to watch than scenery being set up on a stage, but that afternoon I found this dull business comforting beyond measure. I watched every bit of it with pleasure and even fascination. I sat or walked up and down in the aisles of the empty theatre hour after hour, or wandered baskstage and swilled coffee with the stagehands, and knew that this peace I felt would last only as long as I remained here.

  It must have been eight or nine o’clock in the evening when to my surprise I saw Mr. Kaufman wander slowly across the stage, and I immediately rushed back to talk to him. He seemed equally surprised and a shade embarrassed to see me and quickly mumbled something about wanting to ask the stage manager if we could use some hand props at tomorrow morning’s rehearsal, but I knew at once that he, like myself, had been impelled to seek such comfort as he could find, and the only place to find it was here. We had been talking for only a moment or two, when Sam Harris appeared suddenly from behind a piece of scenery, and our presence was evidently as disconcerting to him as mine had been to Mr. Kaufman. He muttered something about stopping by on his way to dinner and beat a hasty retreat. Mr. Kaufman disappeared shortly afterward, but I was delighted to know that as the time drew near for each one to take his place on the firing line, veteran and neophyte alike was affected in much the same way; I had merely arrived earlier in the afternoon.

  The company, when they assembled for rehearsal the next morning, greeted each other with the hungry affection of exiles returning to their native land. They had evidently spent a completely miserable day with their husbands, their wives, their cats or their tropical fish, and were happy to be back among their own kind, amidst people who were using the only language they cared to hear spoken at this particular moment.

  Unfortunately, it was also the moment that saw the end of Mr. Kaufman’s forbearance and patience. The frenzy, in other words, was starting exactly on schedule. Its cause was simple enough. Though the stagehands had worked through the night, it now turned out we could not get the stage, although more than enough time had been allowed and a free stage had been promised for eleven o’clock this morning. The lighting as usual had held everything up, and Mr. Kaufman, who hated to rehearse in a hall or in the lounge, was furious. This was just the sort of small crisis that threw him into a temper—and Mr. Kaufman in temper was a formidable figure. A genuine crisis he met head-on and with enviable calm, but small irritations he had no capacity whatever to meet. In addition, his chief weakness, even beyond inept waiters and people who insisted on telling him jokes, was what may be best described as “inanimate object trouble,” and a rehearsal hall or a theatre lounge inevitably brought out the worst in him. His difficulty with inanimate objects seemed to be that all kinds of furniture contrived to take on a malevolent and almost human design the moment he entered the room. Chairs, lamps, ashtrays and tables seemed to move imperceptibly out of line and craftily place themselves in his path. His progress through a room would begin peaceably enough, but by the time he had stumbled against a chair, knocked against a lamp and banged his elbow against the ashtray as he sank down onto the sofa, his threshold of irritation had been breached. He would sit muttering oaths under his breath and stare malignantly at the furniture, and the same pattern more or less would be repeated when he left the room. It put him in foul humor for a good while afterward, and I had learned to steer clear of him until he had rubbed the bruised knee or elbow sufficiently and was out in an open space where no furniture could move toward him.

  I held my breath now as we all filed into the rehearsal hall, for a rehearsal hall is just that—a large empty hall with nothing but chairs in it, and usually old and rickety chairs at that. Every one of them seemed to perk up and form an invisible phalanx of enmity as Mr. Kaufman entered the room, and then move quickly into position. I cannot swear that I saw them move, but they seemed to tremble with anticipatory glee. Mr. Kaufman usually surveyed the furniture in a strange room with equal enmity and distrust, trying to gauge, I always thought, from which side the attack would come or which chair he would bang himself against first. But he was deeply engaged in conversation at the moment with the two stage managers and he passed through the doorway without looking up. He did not go very far. Though the stage manager on either side of him did not so much as even brush against a chair, Mr. Kaufman ran smack into one before he was ten steps into the room. He gave a howl of surprise and rage and kicked the offending chair clear across the room, stubbing his toe, of course, in the process. He snarled viciously at one of the stage managers who tried to help him and limped toward the table, where he promptly banged his elbow as he sat down; and, as he sat, there was a sound of ripping cloth and one and all knew that a protruding nail in the seat of the chair had torn a hole in his trousers. Not a soul laughed. Indeed, everyone looked stricken. His whole aspect in these moments was so terrifying that I firmly believe that if he had ever slipped on a banana peel in Times Square the entire area would have been clear of people before he rose to his feet again, for he somehow managed to convey a sense
of individual blame to anyone who happened to witness this unending warfare with inanimate objects.

  There was complete silence in the hall now, for there was every indication of heavy weather ahead, and to make matters worse, Mr. Kaufman began to sneeze and could not stop. He was susceptible to drafts and convinced that the merest puff of air could lay him low, and a great scurrying took place to close the offending windows. Some of them would not close, others were too high to reach, a window pole could not be found, and the two stage managers were wet with perspiration by the time the windows were wrestled with and all the chairs shifted to the far end of the hall away from the draft.

  It was not the best of circumstances in which to start the final days of rehearsal, and Mr. Kaufman’s mood was not improved by the news which arrived in midafternoon that the stage would not be available until tomorrow. It was the company’s turn now to lose their tempers, and they proceeded to do so each in turn and according to the size of their billing in the program. It was hard to blame them. Actors like to adjust their voices and pitch their performance to the size of the theatre they are going to play in, and the sooner they are able to do so, the more secure they feel. They are correct, of course, for a performance suited to the Lyric in Philadelphia might well be out of scale in the Music Box. The news that they would have only one day on the stage of the Music Box, instead of the two days they had every right to expect, cut through, for good and all, the heavy cream of false politeness that had so far acted as a cover for panic and nerves.