Before the Opening
By RUSSELL MALONEY
$4.80 Worth of Chaos
Once or twice in a decade, perhaps, there is a really great play, a play that leaves the audience feeling the way Aristotle thought an audience ought to feel after a play. Somewhat oftener, maybe once or twice in a season, there are good plays, happy theatrical occasions which combine the talents of writer, producer, scene designer, director, and actor to produce what the critical fraternity calls “an evening in the theater” (meaning an evening free of really intolerable boredom or intellectual outrage). By and large, however, the playgoer’s only choice is between one bad play and another bad play.
Now a bad play is simply the end-product of a process which it would be inaccurate to call theatrical production; it is a light - hearted gambling game, in the course of which, incidentally to the winning or losing of money, a play is produced. The play is a by-product. The tumultuous two or three months which precede the opening of a play are inherently more stirring and dramatic than the fabricated problem we eventually see on the stage. The heroine’s distress at learning, on the eve of her marriage, that she is a quadroon is pallid indeed compared to the real agony of the producer in the throes of raising the final fifteen hundred dollars necessary to open the show.
We have in the theater, then, a paradoxical situation; the purchaser of a ticket more often than not leaves the theater feeling cheated, while the layman who has been financially interested and has seen the play through its gestation seldom has any complaint, whether the play runs or not.
When the curtain falls at. 10.50 P.M. the heroine has turned out not to be a quadroon after all, but the customer has not been persuaded to care; an investor, by the time the curtain falls on the opening performance, has experienced the classic Aristotelian catharsis. He has been wrung dry of hope and doubt and anger and fear, and is a man at peace — a little out of pocket, to be sure, but healed.
The Last Bohemia
These facts are a necessary background to an understanding of the American theater. You can’t find out anything about the American theater just by going to plays; a cursory reading of contemporary dramatic criticism makes that obvious. The critic sooner or later reaches a stage of plain astonishment at the kind of plays he is forced to see; and there he sticks. It is because he knows nothing of what is called “show business,” the process which results in this almost unbroken string of bad plays.
The typical situation in show business is not a play looking for a producer, but a producer looking for a play — any play. The producer is the fundamental cell-structure, the amoeba of the Rialto. Of course, there are just enough exceptional producers to confuse the picture — George Abbott, Gilbert Miller, Max Gordon, Herman Shumlin, the Shuberts, the Playwrights Company (Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, and Robert Sherwood), and a few others who stand above the crowd by reason of great wealth, superior taste, or ordinary common sense. When I say “producer,” I mean someone you have never heard of and are not likely to hear of, ever.
He is usually a youngish man who resides in one of the small and sinister mid-town hotels, lives on drugstore coffee and hope, and has only a negative cultural influence. Here he sits, in a dirty little office which he rents by the month. Around himself —as an oyster, with infinite and repeated irritations, secretes a pearl — this man is going to bring into existence some sort of dramatic entertainment. And you are going to see it, the next time you’re in New York, because you can’t get seats for the two or three good shows. His motive is simple and vicious. While the play is in production, he will have thousands of dollars of other people’s money to spend. To be sure, he must account for it, and there must at last be a play presented: but meanwhile what fun he is having, being a producer!
As vague and as artistically negligible as this producer are the authors of the “scripts” that are circulated among him and his fellows. There are half a dozen or so good playwrights, and the work of these men is contracted for before it is written. Outside this closed circle, there is a dearth of what are called “good scripts”—that is, scripts which might turn into successful plays if rewritten by S. N. Behrman, directed by Guthrie McClintic, and played by Helen Hayes and Fredric March. However, the shortage doesn’t worry our producer. For his purposes, one script is pretty much like another, and there is a vast pool of bad plays on which he can draw - semi-literate, semi-professional work which has been making the rounds for months or even years, the work of newspaper reporters, Hollywood gag-men, students in play-writing courses, retired clergymen, and the like. He isn’t going to put any money into the play he selects, beyond the twenty-five dollars a week necessary to keep the option on the play until he can get it into production.
With his new script in hand, the producer now approaches his prospective backers; and I hope nobody has confused backers with angels, those glamorous figures who flitted through high-life novels of the nineteen-hundreds, underwriting entire extravaganzas and keeping ingenues up until all hours with ehampagne-and-lobster suppers. If a backer took an ingénue out for a champagne-and-lobster supper, he would cease to be a backer: he wouldn’t have enough money left. (Even in these inflationary times, two or three hundred dollars will buy a “piece” of a Broadway show. Some shows have had upwards of fifty or sixty backers.) Definitely a more modest type than the angel, the backer might he described as a horse-player who likes to see a race run in slow motion. A backer suffers all the excruciating and ecstatic emotions of a horse-player watching his choice neck-andneck for the lead in the home stretch, except that it takes three months for a play to be presented. Neither the horseplayer nor the backer makes money, by and large, but both are philosophical about it for the same reason: the odds were so good that they never really expected to win. A man who would be pretty sore if a sober business venture failed to pay off a promised 8 per cent merely shrugs when a hundred-to-one shot fails to come in.
(Far more plays than horses have paid off at a hundred to one, and the odds have worked out to be consistently more generous.)
A Lesson in Uneconomics
The astute Mr. Bernard Baruch has a pet phrase, uneconomic area, which he applies to situations, such as world wars and depressions, in which the ordinarily accepted laws of economics do not seem to be in operation. The Broadway theater is a permanent uneconomic area; theatrical folk read their Adam Smith backwards, as witches do the Lord’s Prayer.
For instance, at one time last autumn there were more big musical plays in rehearsal and breaking in out of town than there were theaters in New York to accommodate them. The last two producers who went into production with musical shows budgeted around a hundred thousand dollars were not sure of getting a theater in New York big enough to assure themselves a profit. However, by Broadway standards, they insured themselves against this embarrassing disaster. They hoped that it wouldn’t happen, and, by George, it didn’t. Several of the musicals were so bad they closed out of town.
If you have been worrying about the position of actors and technicians in this setup, you can stop. I known an actor who was in four straight flops one season, appeared on New York stages for a grand total of something under forty performances, and yet. flourished. The worse the play, the longer the out-oftown break-in tour; the play wanders desperately from city to city, looking fora cure, or at least a friend. Meanwhile, the actors’ salaries are guaranteed by a union contract backed by a cash bond. If it hadn’t been for the three extra rehearsal periods, during which the actors receive t he nominal salary of I wentyfive dollars, my friend would have come out of the season just as profitably as if lie had had a prosperous six-month run in the first; play.
After all, what does the audience know of the excitement of the theater? The girl’s a quadroon, she isn’t a quadroon — who cares? My advice to the intelligent playgoer is to stop being a playgoer before it drives him nuts. If he saves up his theater-ticket money for a single season, he can become a backer and begin to live.