WHAT goes on backstage and in managers’ offices before the curtain goes up on a Broadway production is usually a deep mystery to the public at large. Most members of the theatrical profession feel it should remain so. Hence the flood of discussion provoked by The Curtain Falls (Harcourt, Brace, $2.75), Joseph Verner Reed’s utterly candid and highly readable tale of his five years as a New York producer. For once the public is given a glimpse of the way stars, playwrights, stagehands, and producers really behave behind the scenes. Many of Mr. Reed’s victims are indignant. But the book is not written in a malicious spirit. It is full of discrimination and good humor, and many of the author’s most revealing shafts of light are directed toward himself, with never the suspicion of a whine over the fact that his experience with the commercial theatre cost him a quarter of a million dollars.
A Yale graduate of the class of 1926, endowed with an ample supply of worldly goods, Mr. Reed felt in 1928 that he could endure Wall Street no longer and plunged into the rapids of the Great White Way. For a year he went the rounds of all the managers’ offices trying to get any job in which he could gain experience. It was Winthrop Ames who finally advised him to jump straight into producing if he could find a partner who could be trusted. ‘Provided you’re personally independent, or that you have a cash sum that you can stake in the theatre, no matter whether you lose it or not, I advise you to go into business for yourself,’ said Mr. Ames. ‘This way you can learn in five years what it will take you twenty-five years to learn from apprenticeship.’ So Reed took Ames’s advice and Kenneth MacGowan as a partner. MacGowan had enthusiasm. He enjoyed putting three or four irons in the fire at once. He detested being picayune (with his partner’s money) and is now an official with RKO in Hollywood, which Reed ever so delicately hints is where he belongs. Certainly his incompetence is revealed in this book as being on the grand scale which the film capital demands.
The firm organized to some extent, MacGowan and Reed produced Children of Darkness, Twelfth Night, When Hell Froze, Art and Mrs. Bottle, Lean Harvest, The Lady with a Lamp, and Springtime for Henry. On all of them they lost money, but their crowning achievement in ineptitude was Springtime for Henry. This was a four-character play in one setting; it ran for months to crowded houses, but the producers had been so liberal with salaries, royalties, and booking terms that everyone except themselves profited. Through Mary Ellis and Jane Cowl young Mr. Reed learned about ‘artistic temperament,’ and his descriptions of how those ladies carried on are hilarious to say the least. Finally, in 1933, he decided he had had enough. He realized ‘all too clearly that this checkbook had been my only asset as a worker in the theatre.’ That is an overstatement; The Curtain Falls is a valuable contribution to theatrical literature, and this reviewer would like to suggest that much of the dialogue in the book is so dramatic that the author should try to write a play — to be produced with someone else’s money.
The theatre from a different point of view is taken up in a tour de force by John Mason Brown, dramatic critic for the New York Post, called Letters from Greenroom Ghosts (Viking Press, $2.00). It was Mr. Brown’s notion (suggested partly by Stark Young) to write letters from past theatrical figures to their presentday counterparts. Thus Sarah Siddons writes to Katharine Cornell, Peg Woffington to Ina Claire, Christopher Marlowe to Eugene O’Neill, Sheridan to Noel Coward, and Inigo Jones to Robert Edmond Jones. Each letter is composed in a parody of the style of the dead celebrity, and each recounts his successes while alive and ends with constructive suggestions as to what the living recipient should do for the rest of his career. This formula results in a good deal of monotony, and the author’s ear for parody is none too acute. The book nevertheless does contain sound criticism, notably in the Marlowe and Sheridan passages. It is hardly, however, to be recommended to the general reader.
OTIS CIIATFIELD-TAYLOR