THE jOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 8, Number 2 Spring 1996

Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts Co-Editor: Jane Bowers

Managing Editor: Vanessa Grimm Editorial Assistants: Laura Drake and James Masters

Editorial Coordinator: jay Plum

Circulation Manager: Beth Ouradnik Assistant Circulation Manager: Julie jordan

Edwin Wilson, Director (ENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THEATRE ARTS

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Editorial Board

Stephen Archer Ruby Cohn Bruce A. McConach ie

Margaret Wi I kerson Don B. Wilmeth Brenda Murphy

The journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th ed., and should be submitted in duplicate. Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection . Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, }ADT, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42 Street, New York, New York 10036-8099.

CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the lucille lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.

CAST A Copyright 1996

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1 044-937X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of C~STA, CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42 Street, New York, New York 10036-8099.

THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 8, Number 2 Spring 1996

Contents

ARNOLD SUNDGAARD, The Group Remembered 1

jULIAN MATES, Experiments on the American Musical Stage in the Twenties 12

GENE A . PLUNKA, Buddhism on the Contemporary American Stage: jean-Claude van ltallie's The Tibetan Book of the Dead 26

DOROTHY H. jACOBS, Mamet's Inland Sea 41

ALVIN GOLDFARB, The Holocaust on the Air: The Radio Plays of the Writers' War Board 48

DOWNING CLESS, Ecology vs. Economy in Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle 59

CONTRIBUTORS 73

journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)

The Group Remembered

ARNOLD SUNDGAARD

In the summer of 1939 the Group Theatre was coming apart at the seams. After eight years of struggle and achievement the Group Theatre was going down in flames. Just short of a decade after it had changed the face of the American theatre forever, the Group Theatre was going up in smoke. Much of this has been eloquently recorded by Harold Clurman in his book, The Fervent Years, but there are a few stray scraps of the Group's his tory that ought to be gathered up before the winds of time blow them away.

I was a guest, and an inadvertent eavesdropper, with the Group that tumultuous but magnificent summer. Like many a guest who finds himself in a household that is breaking up after years of a seemingly rich and rewarding relationship, I watched the dissolution of this remarkable theatrical family with shocked and disbelieving eyes. A sense of tragic loss and nostalgic compassion clung to me for months after that day in September (when war broke out in Europe) and we all went our separate ways.

In June of that year I had received a letter from Harold Clurman inviting me, along with several other young playwrights and actors, to join the company at its summer retreat at the Winwood School near Lake Grove, Long Island. It was to be a time of reflection, a time in which the company would assess and reconsider its artistic goals while evaluating its performance techniques and philosophical foundations . For the Group that meant its continuing exploration of acting methods, if not the controversial Method itself, work on the body from fencing to modern dance, and even a brief embrace of classical ballet as an exposure to elegance and grace, qualities Harold felt the actors lacked.

All this was peripheral, however, to the paramount purpose of the summer and that was to start rehearsals of a new play by Clifford Odets for the coming season on Broadway. It had been the success of the earlier Odets plays that had made the luxury of summers like this one possible. His Colden Boy, particularly, had been a commercial hit, and for the first time in the eight years of its existence the Group felt

2 SUNDGAARD

financially secure. They looked forward to the delivery of his next play, The Silent Partner, on which he had been struggling for more than four years. It was to be a giant leap forward in his already spectacular career, a complete break from the Jewish family milieu in which he had shown such crack I ing bri II iance.

I was one of six young playwrights who, it was hoped, wou ld eventually be added to the circle of young actors and directors around whom the Group would grow and expand. We had been selected by Molly Day Thatcher, the Group's playreader and wife of Elia Kazan, who would serve as our nurturing house mother and mentor for the course of the summer. She provided each of us with an empty faculty office in which we could set up our typewriters and work at whatever pace and on whatever subjects we chose. We were free to attend all classes, sit in on all rehearsals and attend the company's animated and contentious war sessions.

It was a heady challenge for all of us and we felt more than a I ittle awed to find ourselves having breakfast next to Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler (usually in a low-cut peignoir), Frances Farmer (with the supple legs of an antelope), Ruth Nelson, Sandy Meisner, Philip Loeb, Bobby Lewis, Leif Erickson, Roman Bohnen, and the rest of the sterling company.

Among the younger actors were Karl Malden, Martin Ritt, John Kennedy (known professionally as Arthur), Norman Lloyd, Kurt Conway, Alfred Ryder, Olive Deering, and Harry Bratsburg who, in his later Hollywood career became the deep-voiced Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H.

On the first evening we assembled in one of the lecture halls of the school where Harold was to lead a discussion of the Group's plans for the coming season and the reorganization of the Group under a new leadership. I learned for the first time that Lee Strasberg who, with Cheryl Crawford and Harold, had founded the Group, was no longer a part of that triumvirate. As the evening wore on I was able to grasp a few of the reasons why.

The frankness and bitterness with which Lee was attacked by those who had once revered him set my skin to tingling. It was said that he was dictatorial, arrogant, misguided, didactic and wrong-headed. It was also conceded that he was brilliant, inspired, and a bold pioneer in the discovery of the actor's innermost needs. But as a human being he was impossible. Worst of all he was misapplying the acting concepts of Stanislavsky to their particular problems as indigenous American actors. Stella Adler had met Stanislavsky in Paris not long before this, and the Russian master had confirmed her convictions that the Method according to Strasberg was not the method of the Moscow Art Theatre. Now the Group was turning to Harold to set a new direction.

The Group Remembered 3

Harold responded in a style of inflamed oratory unlike any I had ever encountered before. Nor, I might add, any I have heard since. His voice rose in wild swooping crescendos. His eyes dilated and his fleshy jaws quivered and, like a chameleon's, changed color from ashen pale to cyanotic purple. In his steamy exuberance I lost track of entire sentences in the fear he'd drop dead of apoplexy or a heart attack before our very eyes. But suddenly, as though from a reverse infusion of adrenal in, his voice would stop its violent churning and slow to the gentle simmering sound of a steam locomotive pausing at a rural railroad station.

With time I learned that when Harold spoke in this way he was not really angry at all. The seeming frenzy was rather a reflection of an intense intellectual passion. Timidity of expression is not part of the character of a great tragic hero, whether it be Lear raging in a storm or Oedipus blinding his eyes in expiation for his unintended sins. Harold seemed to see himself as just such a character on a wild and blustery stage.

After almost six hours of rancorous haranguing there was a lull in the discussion when Luther Adler rose to his feet and shouted, "Okay, Fuhrer, Fuhrer!"

It was agreed. Harold would be their leader. Lee Strasberg would no longer be a member of the theatre-he who had been instrumental in its founding, who had directed its first success, and who had created the core idea around which its actors had found a revolutionary approach to acting. The breach with the past was complete. Harold now found himself in the position of Moses with a band of half-trusting yet skeptical children trying to find their way out of (or was it into) the wilderness of Broadway.

Shortly after that the meeting broke up and we returned to our various rooms in the school's dormitories. The room I occupied with Alexander Greendale, a fellow playwright, was across the hall from that of Leif Erickson and Frances Farmer who had met and married a year or two before. They had for a pet an English bulldog named Karl Marx who was waiting impatiently for their return. He greeted them with joyous howls and seemed to be asking what had kept them away so long. They took him for a walk on the darkened school grounds, and when they returned almost an hour later Alex and I could hear Leif and Frances in some kind of heated debate. I assumed they were trying, like everyone else, to extrapolate from the evening's turbulent forensics the effect Harold's leadership would have on their place in the Group's future.

I was to learn later that their discussion had concerned itself with another matter entirely. It was a known fact to all in the Group that Clifford, married but separated from Luise Rainer, had found himself attracted to Frances during the run ofCo/den Boy, and Frances had been

4 SUNDGAARD

no less attracted to him. Until now their marriages, like burning oil wells, had kept them at a distance from each other. But the gap was rapidly closrng and would narrow disastrously before the summer was over.

One night a week or two later I was awakened at two in the morning by the sound of someone pounding on the door across the hall. !listened with suspended breath. The sound was not that of fists but of some kind of metal. I dared not look out for fear of intruding on something so private. The noise went on for a full five minutes. Then there was a lul l and the door was opened. Leif-1 knew it was he-was finally admitted by Frances to the quiet of the opposite room.

The following afternoon I met Leif in the hallway as I was entering my room. He looked rather sheepish and said something to the effect that he was sorry if he had awakened us in the middle of the night. His eyes, usually clear and youthfully innocent, looked abysmally sad to me.

" I was a little drunk," he said, and he held out a gold watch in his hand. The face was broken and the hands were bent.

"Frances didn't want to let me in," he explained, "and I tried to break down the door with this. It was a birthday present from her. I was using it as a symbol, a kind of metaphor for our love."

He smiled rather proudly at his use of the imagery, an awareness picked up in a Group discussion, probably. And then summoning up the recollection of his rage, as though preparing for a sense-memory exercise, he smashed the watch one more time against the door.

He looked at me as though he expected to be applauded for his performance. When I gave him a stunned look of dismay at seeing so fine a watch abused, he took it as a sign of approval and made a quick but dramatic exit through the door. It left me wondering when and how this little passion play would find its final curtain.

Although Molly Day Thatcher had made it clear that her six budding playwrights were under no obligation to deliver a finished play during the course of the summer, each of us felt in the privacy of our hearts that it would be pleasant to surprise the company with something that might follow the new play by Odets. There was no thought that he could be superseded (we held him in awe as the primal source of the Group's strength), but there was always the tantalizing hope that something of ours would find a place in the Group's repertory.

The year before I had written the Living Newspaper, Spirochete, for the Federal Theatre in Chicago. It was a documentary of sorts that traced the medical history of syphilis and had led to legislation requiring pre-marital blood tests in at least two states-Illinois and Pennsylvania. It had provoked wide discussion at the time and its theatrical form had apparently attracted Molly to the so-called Epic theatre it represented. In

The Group Remembered 5

addition, I had written a lyrical play called Everywhere 1 Roam that made use of folk songs and country dances while exploring the pioneer expansion and exploitation of the American West. It had a brief but not unnoticed run on Broadway.

Now in the privacy of my cell I was struggling to find a shape for a play called The Early Traveler dealing with an alleged slave rebellion in the heart of New York City in the year 1741. A number of slaves were burned at the stake in a ghastly miscarriage of justice. Its form was comparatively realistic and quite unlike the other two plays I had written, but because of its concern with a social issue I thought it might have an appeal for the Group.

I had only a faint idea of what the other members of our small cadre of writers were up to, and while we spent considerable time together we discreetly asked few questions about each other's work. I know that Ettore Rella . wrote plays in which the characters spoke in tumbling iambics, and he was attempting to evoke the dark side of life in the dying mining town of Telluride, Colorado, where he came from.

Ettore once read me a passage from his play in which a grizzled old denizen of the town mourns the death of a mountain stream from raw sewage and mining waste. It was intended as a symbol of life itself in that bleak community. Today Telluride is a fashionable ski resort and host to a film festival, but in those Depression years the world, and even the earth, looked dark to Ettore. Once I pointed to a glorious sunset seen through a break in the trees from where we were sitting. Ettore looked at it indifferently and said he could see no beauty in nature unless there were some sign of man's hand on it-like a suspension bridge or a radio tower. Yet paradoxically he deplored the polluting of creeks by industry and urban sprawl in his own home town. The hands of Karl Marx had many nimble fingers in those days, and they gently massaged our necks in different ways.

They did not touch the neck of Alex Greendale, however, with whom I shared that room. Alex had been a star water polo player for the Illinois Athletic Club in Chicago, and the virility called for in that sport splashed into his plays. One scene remains vividly in my memory. A character in a demonstration of inspired machismo reaches into a parlor stove and snatches up a white-hot burning coal. He holds it aloft in the palm of his hand and sears his flesh as proof of his fierce masculinity. It is all I remember of Alex's play, but it is enough.

Meanwhile the play on which Odets had been working for so many years, The Silent Partner, was ready for a reading before the entire Group company. Odets was, for me at the time, an intimidating presence. H is eyes, behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, seemed fi xed with enigmatic intensity on a distant horizon. He drove a huge black Cadillac. He had

6 SUNDGAARD

a male secretary named Herman who carried a notebook and brought him things. He was married to Luise Rainer, one of the brighter gamins of Hollywood, to whom he once said (someone told me), "Luise, your instincts stink!" He sent off ripples of self-confidence that lapped on the shores of arrogance. But almost single-handedly he had catapulted the Group to one of the loftier plateaus in the high Sierras of Broadway.

An odd myth surrounding him still intrigues me. It was said (and I heard it from several sources) that he had an uncanny sense of smell. Odors that escaped the nostrils of most ordinary mortals were captured by him with ease and could cause acute pain as well as ecstasy. I attributed it to a skill developed in sense-memory exercises practiced in his fledgling years as an actor. I have since looked at his photographs and there is something about his nostrils that suggests a deer sniffing the air for hidden predators.

As Molly's apprentice playwrights, we had very little contact with Odets. Once when Alex, Ettore and I were piling into an old battered Ford on our way to the beach, he offered us the use of the Cadillac.

"Here, take it," he said, offering Alex the keys. We were already in the Ford and ready to go. Alex hesitated and

then said, "Thank you, maybe some other time." As we drove away I could see that Odets was visibly hurt by our rejection. It was intended, I was sure, as a gesture of comradeship. I felt a sharp pang of guilt for the rest of the day.

A few days later I met him as I was taking Karl Marx, the English bulldog, for a walk. Both Frances and Leif had been neglecting him lately. Clifford stopped to address, not me but the dog. He bent down to touch Karl Marx's thick ruffled neck.

"I don't think this animal likes me," he said. "When Frances came to see me the other day he lay on his belly and growled all the time she was there."

As I remember it, Bobby Lewis read The Silent Partner solo-all the parts and all the stage directions. He was a master at suggesting subtle differences of character while filling in the dynamics of the action. There were forty-three characters in the play, which, like Waiting for Lefty, dealt with a group of workers on strike. Odets was returning to a setting similar in nature to his first great triumph of 1935. Was this to be a regression in his development, or the giant step forward we had been led to believe?

As the reading progressed I sensed an air of growing disenchantment spreading through the hushed audience of his peers crowded into that room. In one scene I still remember a sense of embarrassment I could not quell. In the scene big cans of milk (the ten gallon cans of the time) are smuggled through to the starving workers and their children. The

The Group Remembered 7

women fall to their knees and embrace the milk cans as they would a beloved child . At that moment the hated thugs rush in, rip off the lids, and spill the milk to the ground.

As a scene in a Russian film it might have proved effective, but to the cluster of urbane Group actresses who would be playing the scene it seemed daunting to say the least. The blatant villainy and melodramatic denouement were hardly what they had expected. The work was like a huge block of granite on which Odets had been chiseling for years and that evenog 5t crumbled ~nto so many shards~

A few days later Harold announced that he and Clifford had agreed to postpone all production plans for the time being. I dared not contemplate the agony and pain that went into that decision. I had no way of knowing its effect on Clifford, but he remained in his room on campus and attended some of the evening hallelujah sessions led by Harold. Once he spoke of his original love for the Group, that it was this love that had sustained him when filled with doubt and loss of faith. The Group would always be his home and n;s famHy~. maddening though they might be.

He and Harold seemed to see in their relationship a parallel to the one enjoyed by Anton Chekhov and Stanislavsky. One evening Clifford chided Harold by saying, "I will say one thing about Stanislavsky, when he came to see Chekhov he brought Chekhov cigars. He didn't steal cigars like some people I know."

Harold was quick to reply. "Ah, yes," he said, "but then Chekhov didn't drive a Cadillac either."

Not many days later Harold woke to find a shiny new Chevy convertible in the dr~veway before the cottage he frequently shared with Stetla Ad[er. On tne steerrng wneer was a note that read, "For Harold with love, Clifford."

It remained on the driveway for most of the summer. Neither Harold nor Stella drove a car. However, it had a good radio and Stella could be seen in the front seat every morning at eight twisting the dials for the grim news now coming out of Europe. The rising clouds of war were growing darker with each new day and the German m i I itary menace was deeply troubling to us all.

The day it was announced that Russia had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany a wave of disbelief and consternation spread like a heavy fog through the compound. Tears, anger, and cries of disillusionment were followed by wild and conflicting speculation. Russia had been a shining beacon for many and the extinguishing of that light was a plunge into darkness none had ever expected. When war broke out in Europe less than ten days later, everyone knew the world would never be the same again.

8 SUNDGAARD

At breakfast a few days later I happened to be sitting across the table from Stella Adler when she looked around the room and said to no one in particular, "Of course we all know the best people are in Europe."

And then as an astonishing non sequitur she smiled sweetly at me and said, "Of course I don't mean you, darling."

That I should be equated with the "best people in Europe" in Stella's eyes came as a surprise to me. I'm not sure she even heard what she was say1ng.

Stella defied easy description. She was stunning, and possibly beautiful, but there was so much theatrical artifice in her style and manner it was difficult to tell what was real and what was performance. Her skin was smooth as a bleached peach, but the never-absent make-up was just a shade too gaudy. She had managed to create a pentimento in which a duchess was superimposed over a Park Avenue madam. She gave the impression that she considered most members of the company somewhat beneath her, both in ta lent and breeding.

Harold seemed to share this feeling somewhat. Once when Maria Ley, Irwin Piscator's wife, was teaching a class in ballet he was amused to see his actors floundering in frustrating pirouettes across the gymna-sium floor. He stood to one side flourishing one of Clifford's huge Cuban cigars and remarked, "It'll do 'em good working with her. She's a lady."

But Stella was an aristocrat, too. Her high intelligence and her sensitivity to the actor's craft and the playwright's text made her one of the supreme teachers of performing art in our time.

Harold loved her with the hopeless, helpless swooning of a school-boy. Elia Kazan called my attention to the fact that Harold was one of the few people he knew who could not shave himself without leaving a thicket of nicks and scrapes on his face and chin. Often at breakfast I noticed it-the tell-tale dabs of Styptic pencil intended to staunch the flow of blood. Cadge (Kazan) said it was solely the result of Stella's disqu iet-ing effect on his equilibrium.

After the collapse of The Silent Partner, the Group had hoped to take up the slack with a new play by Irwin Shaw. They had had a warm relationship with him in the past and looked forward to the new work he had promised them. One evening at dusk Kermit Bloomgarden, the Group's company manager, drove out from the city with a recently delivered script. He did not stop on the driveway but drove across the lawn and stopped under an apple tree where Harold and a group of actors were sitting. As he stepped out of the car he handed the script to a noticeably anxious Harold. In a low voice I heard Harold ask, "How is it?"

"You read it," Kermit said.

The Group Remembered 9

The noncommittal way in which he spoke told the whole story. Like The Silent Partner the Irwin Shaw play proved to be a sad disappointment and was reluctantly rejected by Harold.

How was the summer to be salvaged? With a show of thinly disguised bravado Harold announced the fall season would open with a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters in a new acting version prepared by Clifford Odets. This came as a surprise to us. Odets as the adaptor of someone else's work when his own enormous gifts had so recently been at their height somehow seemed an artistic surrender. And yet why not? He had been compared, after all, to the Russ ian playwright in his mastery of subtext and indirection.

A few days later rehearsals began. Harold was to direct, but it was announced that Stella would be his co-director because of her affinity for European drama. The arrangement seemed to suggest that Harold was unsure of himself in dealing with a classic. It seemed to do little to inspire confidence in the company who were often disturbed by the chaotic nature of the couple's relationship.

The cast was announced. Stella would not only be co-directing but also would be playing Masha, with Phoebe Brand and Frances Farmer as the other two Moscow-longing sisters. The rest of the cast came from the Group's core of established actors-Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler, and others. None of the younger actors who had been asked to join the company for the summer were offered parts. And those of us in Molly's stable of playwrights had come to realize we would not be filling the void left by Odets and Irwin Shaw.

With great hesitation I had decided to turn my own play over to Molly. She read it in a day. I have no recollection of what she said except that she would pass it along ~o Harold. A few days later he asked to see me. I went to his office with a burden of anxiety clinging to me like a leaden blanket used to shield one from the lethal effects of an x-ray.

Harold was kind. He said he was sure The Early Traveler would find a production somewhere, but it was precisely the kind of political play the Group no longer wanted as a reflection of its work. The compelling reason for inviting me to join the company, he added, was the belief that I would w rite something in the lyrical style of Everywhere I Roam, something that would challenge them in new and experimental direc-tions. The Odets and the Shaw plays had been requested for the same reason. The world of social realism was changing before our very eyes.

He urged me not to feel dismayed; the Group would be happy to read anything else I cared to submit in the future. He invited me to attend the rehearsals of The Three Sisters.

I am able to recall the first day of those rehearsals because it confirmed the feeling of fragility one felt about Harold's relationship to

10 SUNDGAARD

Stella. In his evening talks earlier in the summer he spoke with such fiery conviction that the element of doubt seemed absent from every ringing syllable. But in his opening remarks to the cast that day, a crisp and lovely morning, he seemed as ill-at-ease as a high school orator in his first debate. He kept looking in Stella's d irection as if to make sure his words were meeting with her approval. Perhaps this was his tacit acceptance of the fact that she was his co-director, but the effect seemed more like that of a man submitting to an act of emasculation. My attention soon strayed. I kept looking away at the leaves turning crimson on the scrub oaks outside the classroom window.

By now the summer retreat was over. Rehearsals were halted while the company straggled back to the city. I had no place to go and decided to stay on for a few days in one of the empty dormitories. Leif Erickson said he would give me.his bicycle if I would take care of Karl Marx until the following Sunday. At that time Bill Kellam, the Group's stage carpenter, would come by to pick up the dog and take him to his home in New Jersey. Leif had promised him to Bill who wanted the dog as a compan ion.

In a day or two the campus was empty except for me, Ruth Nelson and a friend of hers who had decided to stay on for a few days as well. One afternoon wh ile exploring the countryside on Leif's bicycle I came upon a beautifu l country road near St. James, about ten miles away. To my surprise it was called Three Sisters Road. The road was flat for half a mile and then it plunged so precipitously downward that I had to jam on the brakes to keep from spilling into a d itch.

When I returned I said to Ruth, "I came across a road today that I hope is not prophetic." And I made a gesture in the air to describe how Three Sisters Road made its abrupt plunge to the bottom of a steep hill.

Ruth clapped her hands across her mouth as her eyes seemed to be saying, "Oh no, no, no, don 't tell me!"

She had been cast as Natasha, the grasping wife of Andreyev played by Luther Adler. When I saw the look of anguish in her eyes, I wished I hadn't mentioned it. In the theatre, who knows where a new superstition may be lurking?

As it turned out my encounter with Three Sisters Road did prove to be an ill omen. Rehearsals in the city did not go well and the production was canceled within the month. I never fully learned the reasons for the cancellation except that Stella had withdrawn from the cast and had resigned from the Group. I also learned that Clifford Odets had returned to Luise Rainer and Frances Farmer, that lovely creature, was committing acts of desperation in her vast despair. She did not even have her Karl Marx to console her. Leif had given him away.

The Group Remembered 11

Bill Kellam called that Sunday with his wife and daughter to take Karl Marx to their home in New Jersey. I had grown very fond of the beast by th is time and it pained me to see him go. I wished I had not agreed to Leif's offer.

"We'll have to change his name," Bill Kellam 's wife said . "I don't think we can let anybody know his name is Karl Marx."

"Just call him Karl," I suggested. "He'll answer to that." When they tried to get him into the car, Karl refused to budge. He

dug his front paws into the ground and resisted all efforts to move him. Bill and I finally lifted him into the back seat where he reluctantly settled down. He looked at me with great sad eyes as if to ask how I could have participated in such an act of betrayal.

I cou ld not bear to look any longer. I hurried into my empty room and fell upon the bed and wept.

Little more than a year later, the Group Theatre closed its doors forever.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)

Experiments on the American Musical Stage in the Twenties

JULIAN MATES

Marc Connelly once wrote, "The New York Theatre never saw palmier days than in the 1920s. Seldom could one find any of the city's more than one hundred theatres tenantless." 1 And Stanley Green points out that at no time did the number of musical shows drop below thirty-seven per season .2 With so much going on it would be unusual not to find a number of experiments in our musical theatre. Before looking at the surprising number of these new ideas, it may prove useful to glance briefly at the slow development of our musical theatre, before the 1920s brought an explosion of ideas and ushered in a new era on the American stage.

The musical had been a large part of America's repertory from the first companies to arrive here in the eighteenth century. The Beggar's Opera not only introduced ballad opera to American audiences but was itself produced all over the colonies in every year in the eighteenth century by the first troupes to arrive. Soon after pasticcios and comic operas were imported, we began to create our own. The same was true for pantomimes and melodramas, with their extensive use of music to set the mood, underscore and accompany specific actions, and provide a substitute for dialogue. 3 Even the acting of melodrama was closer to

1Marc Connelly, "Once Upon the Palmy 1920s, The Dramatists Guild Was Born," The Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Spring 1976), 8.

2Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy (Da Capo Press reprint of 4th ed., San Diego: A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc., 1980), 131.

3Anne Dhu Shapiro points out that the ways music was used in melodrama "were transferred yery directly into music for the early silent film," thus providing a continuum with our early musical theatre. Anne Dhu Shapiro, "Action Music in American Pantomime and Melodrama, 1730-1913," American Music, Vol. 2 No.4, (Winter 1984), 66.

The American Musical Stage 13

dance than to traditional stage movement. 4 Dance, whether on a slack wire or in pantomimes, became an important part of our repertory.

The nineteenth century displayed all these forms created by Americans in addition to imports from England, France, and Germany. Our major contribution was, of course, the minstrel show. At first, the form utilized well-known songs, as the ballad opera had; soon, however, American composers-Stephen Foster and Dan Emmett, for exam-ple-wrote original music for minstrel shows, and by the end of the century, Black minstrels and Black composers had found an outlet for their abilities Oames Bland comes to mind, with his "0 Dem Golden 51 ippers" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny") .

Extravaganzas, with elaborate scenery, little dialogue, and lots of music, were popular as soon as technological development permitted lighting and stage effects-from Cherry and Fair Star to The Black Crook. The Mose plays (Mose was a Bowery fireman) added music and songs to stories about characters with whom the audience could easily identify and carried the comic opera past the 1840s. "Farce-comedies" tied variety acts together strung on a very thin clothesline ("a day in the country," for example). The form began with Nathan Salsbury's The Brook in 1875 and last~d many years, eventually surfacing again with the intimate revue. Fritz, Our German Cousin led to a series of "Fritz" plays well into the 1880s, and all provided spots for performers to interpolate songs.

The Harrigan and Hart Mulligan Guard plays made a leap toward the twentieth century with musicals depicting life in and around Corlear's Hook in Manhattan . It is worth noting that Harrigan and Hart's background was in the minstrel show and their Mulligan plays were a strong influence on George M. Cohan. Cohan's brash musicals with their super-patriotism (" Can you write without the flag?" he was asked; "I can write w ithout anything but a pencil," he replied) and realistic language were one strong element in this country and operetta was the other (the latter usually taking place in a never-never land, with unreal people and situations and music closer to opera than to popular song). The Princess Theatre shows (1915-1919) began the process of integrating book and music.

In dance, the major revolution came with Isadora Duncan, but when she d ied she left no school, no legacy of modern dance. The twenties would complete the revolution and in addition bring modern dance into the popular musical theatre.

4See Alan S. Downer, " Players and Painted Stage, Nineteenth Century Acting," PMLA, Vol. 61 , No. 2, Uune 1946).

14 MATES

Vaudeville, burlesque and revues flourished before the twenties, but their very popularity allowed them to experiment with song and dance during the twenties. In fact, new forms constantly appeared and new experiments were tried, but, as Margaret Knapp writes, in some of our musical stage forms "such as burlesque and comic opera, the book was an important aspect of the production, while in forms such as extrava-ganza and minstrel shows, the book was secondary to music, dance, comedy and spectacle." And the twenties, particularly, included comic opera, operetta, burlesque (both in its original meaning and in its later guise), extravaganza, and the revue. "By permitting these numerous forms"-she omits opera, dance, and vaudeville-"to flourish side by side, the musical theatre of this era literally offered something for everyone."5

In fact, audiences were willing to accept experiments in part because of the long tradition of musical theatre mentioned earlier, going back to the eighteenth century. The ballad opera, the pasticcio, and the comic opera dominated the repertory and the musical theatre became our longest-standing tradition.6 Americans were not only used to musical theatre but were willing to go along with experiments.

If, for example, the twenties saw an extraordinary concern with commercialism and business, the musical stage was quick to reflect this. Ron Engle and Tice l. Miller's The American Stage notes the appearance of benevolent men at the top of business in Letty Pepper (1922) which clearly demonstrates that success in business and love are designed to journey hand in hand.7 Helen of Troy, NY (1923) was concerned with advertising and big business in a musical comedy. The musical Clinging Vine (1922) dealt with gender conflict in business. Plays heavy with music-Processional, for example-attacked the entire capitalist system.

It was largely in the twenties that women found careers in the theatre other than acting. Anne Caldwell enjoyed success as a playwright and librettist, Rida Johnson Young wrote nearly thirty plays and musicals, and Fanny Todd Mitchell wrote twenty-six plays and musicals, many in the twenties and many starring Jeannette McDonald and Archibald Leach

5Margaret M. Knapp, "Integration of Elements as a Viable Standard for Judging Musical Theatre," in Henry F. Salerno, ed., Focus on Popular Theatre in America, Bowling Green, Ohio: journal of Popular Culture, 114.

6 See Oscar G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America, (New York, London, Boston: Library of Congress, 1915), and Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 7800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962).

7Ron Engle and Tice l. Miller, eds., The American Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 175-189.

The American Musical Stage 15

(who would later change his name to Cary Grant). Mitchell's A Wonder-ful Night in 1929 utilized what may have been the first revolving stage in America. One of the most successful musical collaborations was that of Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnell; she wrote the book and lyrics for, among other works, Blossom Time in 1921 and The Student Prince in 1924. And Dorothy Fields began her illustrious career by writing the lyrics for Blackbirds of 1928, the longest running all-Black review in Broadway history.8

Women helped the dance world throw off its stodgy image. "The earliest date usually set for the modern dance is the beginning of the twentieth century, when [Isadora) Duncan with her natural movement and Denishawn with its exoticism broke with the forms of conventional ballet."9 Duncan danced for the last time in the United States in 1923, but her autobiography of 1927 gave a key to what was happening: "Why should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and servile dance, the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of false sentimentality of the Waltz? Rather let them come forth with great strides, leaps and bounds ... to dance the language of our Pioneers .... " 10

Others insist that the origin of modern dance does not go any further back than the expressionism of Martha Graham that emerged in the twenties. 11 Her work helped to provide a popular audience for dance. She had been teaching and studying at Denishawn when, in 1923, john Murray Anderson saw her and engaged her for an edition of the Greenwich Village Follies. Graham's continued search, her experiments, her programs of 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 displayed what one biographer called "a new form and style in dancing" in such dances as Desir (1926) and Adolescence (1929). 12 Whether one credits Duncan or

8See Felicia Hardison Londre, "Money without glory: turn-of-the-century America's women playwrights," Chapter 9 in Engle and Miller. Also see William A. Everett, " Barbara Frietchie and My Maryland: The Civil War Comes to Operetta," The Passing Show, Newsletter of the Shubert Archive, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2-8; and, in the same issue, Priscilla Cunningham's, "Fanny Todd Mitchell," 8-17.

9Selma jean Cohan, Next Week, Swan Lake (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 128. The Denishawn company and school, formed by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in 1915, pioneered the use of primitive and ethnic dance, often with religious themes, as sources for serious theatre.

101sadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 343.

11 See Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham (New .York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 141 ,142 .

12George Beiswanger, "Martha Graham: A Perspective," in Morgan, 142.

16 MATES

Graham with originating modern dance, one of its most fascinating aspects was its appeal to popular audiences as it made its way into revues and, later, musical comedy.

Still another experiment influenced both audience and production, and that came with the resurgence of Black theatre, especially with Sissie and Blake's Shuffle Along, in 1921 . There had been many "greats" in Black theatre before the 1920s. Bob Cole and Billy Johnson's A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical written, directed and performed by Black artists. George Walker and Bert Williams had starred in several Broadway shows by 1910 and had enjoyed phenomenal success with In Dahomey in 1903. Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson had written songs for Broadway musicals. Ernest Hogan had set up a touring company for Black musicals. Allen Woll, in his Black Musical Theatre, points out how difficult it is to establish a historical continuity for Black theatre, "since the creation, evolution, and shape of the Black musical has changed so abruptly and so often since the turn of the century."13

These early examples of Black musical theatre notwithstanding, it is still true that the major breakthrough for Black theatre came with Shuffle Along in 1921. Not only was the cast assured of future starring roles but the show made the Black musical legitimate; managers and producers realized that audiences would pay to see a Black show, and "Black musicals became a Broadway staple."14 langston Hughes felt the show launched the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that spread to books, sculpture, music and dancing.

Eubie Blake wrote the music and Noble Sissie the lyrics for Shuffle Along. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey lyles, collaborators since their student days at Fisk University, wrote the book and also starred in the show. 15 The plot is skimpy but allows plenty of room for the performers to use vaudeville sketches they knew. The minstrel show's influence was displayed in dialect, slapstick, and what Robert Toll calls the "empty-headed, convoluted use of words."16 The jazzy score ("love Will Find A Way" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry" were two of many hits in the

13AIIen Woll, Black Musical Theatre (Baton Rouge: louisiana State University Press, 1989), xiii.

14/bid., 60.

15Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 288. .

16Robert C. Toll, On With the Show (New York: Oxford Un iversity Press, 1976), 134.

The American Musical Stage 17

show) and the dances, steps that had been featured in the Black vaude-ville circuit-time-steps, buck and wing, soft shoe and others-made the deepest impression. Toll writes: "With its foot-tapping music, its wacky comedy, and its dazzling dances, the show literally burst with explosive energy. Shuffle Along revitalized musical comedy in the twenties ... . " 17

Shuffle Along made other innovations. Not only did the show find a Black audience, but the rigid barriers of segregated seating in the theatre also broke down. Blacks were no longer restricted to balcony seats. With each succeeding Black show on Broadway during the twenties, segregated seating for Blacks became less common. The stars and replacements of Shuffle Along-Florence Mills, josephine Baker, and Paul Robeson among others-helped form a talent pool for the many Black shows to follow. Woll says that Shuffle Along legitimized Black musical theatre on Broadway. In three years, New Yorkers saw nine musicals written by and starring Black performers. Black composers wrote the songs for three shows with white casts. "Shuffle Along was a milestone in the development of the Black musical, and it became the model by which all Black musicals were judged until well into the 1930s."18

If Shuffle Along was the most important Black theatrical enterprise in the 1920s, it was the music and dance that gave the production its power. 19 Most of the routines showed a direct descent from the minstrel show and vaudeville. Robert Toll points out that most popular dances of the period emerged from Black theatre-dances like the Charleston, truckin', the shimmy, the black bottom, and the Lindy hop-dances "that symbolize the twenties."20 They were all featured in the Black musicals following in the success of Shuffle Along. Lewis Erenberg points out that "the source of dances like the Charleston and the black bottom lay in Black culture, and they found wide introduction in New York after the popularity of Shuffle Along."21

Gradually, the book tended to disappear in Black shows, and the revue format took over (revues, thanks to Ziegfeld and others, were the

17/bid., 136.

'6Woll, 75.

'

9Huggins, 288.

20"foll, On With the Show, 133; also see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1890-1930 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1981), 151 .

21 Erenberg, 250.

18 MATES

rage on Broadway). The revue capitalized on the most popular elements of the Black musical show and blurred the line between nightclub and theatre. Tryout performances were also less expensive for revues, and the focus was on the talent. After Shuffle Along's conquest, a large number of Black revues had success on BroadwayY Shuffle Along had provided fresh entertainment for the audience and an outlet for Black talent unknown before the 1920s.

The theatre of the twenties provided other groups with a means of achieving success, of escaping the slums. It is worth taking a brief glance at burlesque and vaudeville. Charles Hamm, in Music in the New World, points out that "songs were an essential element in vaudeville" as indeed they were in burlesqueY Ballad singers offering popular songs of the day, singers in blackface, dialect singers, juvenile singers, character singers-all were featured. They reflected the audience even as they appealed to it, and again we see that experiments in the twenties are important to the history of American musical theatre.

Burlesque had long waged a battle between "clean" and "dirty" shows (the clean derived from the original meaning of a travesty or satire, and the dirty derived from the earnest desire to display as much female flesh as possible). By the twenties the "dirty" had won out, and the shows had achieved a kind of sameness that threatened to kill the form. William Green points out that the Minskys in the early twenties instituted a variety of innovations in the basic format; they "threw out the traditional three-part structure which had rigidly compartmentalized where in the production the comedy, musical and specialty acts could come."24 The Minskys included a musical director on the permanent staff. They installed a runway so the dancers could be in closer proximity to the audience. Yes, the comedy acts were essential, but the added stress on music and dance had audiences flocking to Minsky burlesque. A further experiment included placing "serious dramatic sketches in the midst of the cooch dancing and rowdy comedy."25 In the mid-1920s the striptease came into being and this was the last stage, and possibly the

22Woll, 95.

23Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1983), 258.

24W illiam Green, "The Audiences of the American Burlesque Show of the Minsky Era (CA. 1920- 1940)," Das Theater und sein Publikum, 1977, 229.

25/bid., 232 .

The American Musical Stage 19

cause, of burlesque's demise.26 But for a few years in the twenties, not only was burlesque popular with a wide range of audiences, but it also served as a training ground for singers, dancers, and comedians who went on to the revue and to musical comedy.

Vaudeville also frequently served as a training ground, though more often it was an end in itself. It was able to attract a heterogeneous audience with an incredible variety of performers and material, "from trained animals to opera singers, from sexual impersonators to ballet dancers, from ethnic humor to production numbers."27 It drew material from and gave material to musical comedy, burlesque, drama, the minstrel show, and the circus. Lewis Erenberg suggests that in the 191 Os and 1920s, most of the stars were of recent immigrant origins, especially the dancers and singers. 28 john Dimeglio writes that vaudevillians were America in microcosm. He finds that vaudeville refused to experiment with successful acts, but that until success was achieved vaudeville allowed performers to experiment freely.29 Vaudeville probably reached its peak in the twenties, but thereafter its life was brief: Radio and movies signaled its demise in the thirties.

A large part of the experimenting in the twenties on the musical stage was in the revue. True, Ziegfeld had started the vogue in 1907, but it was in the twenties that revues were created constantly and that experiments were tried whose effects are still felt today. Robert Baral says that over one hundred revues opened in New York in the twenties and thirties.30 The Ziegfeld Follies featured several of the revue's most glorious editions, and one could attend George White's Scandals, the Earl Carroll Vanities, Artists and Models (the Shubert entries), the Greenwich Village Follies, the Grand Street Follies, the Music Box Revues (Irving Berlin's shows), the Carrick Gaieties (here is where Rodgers and Hart joined forces), the Blackbird Revues, the Ed Wynn Revues, the Passing Shows (another Shubert entry), and on and on. George M . Cohan created revues in 1916

26Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 243.

27Toll, On With the Show, 276.

28Erenberg, 187.

29John E. Dimeglio, Vaudeville, U.S.A. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), 2.

30Robert Baral, Revue (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962), 14.

20 MATES

and 1918 with much satire and with no book, and these had a strong effect on what went into revues of the twenties.

When the big, elaborate shows began to go out of style, a smaller, intimate revue began to take its place. Where vaudeville was a series of individual acts, the musical revue was "planned, designed, scored and directed with an eye for a unified final product."31 The 49ers (1922) introduced the American experimental intimate revue while the English contributed Charlot's Revue (1924). Audiences quickly accepted the new form (note especially The Little 5hows).32 Both the large and intimate revues have continued their careers on the American musical stage, though perhaps with not so lush a quality as in the twenties.

Among the positive developments resulting from the twenties experiments with the revue form, one must include the opportunity for young composers to try their wings on the musical stage-Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, for example-without having to compose a complete score for a full-length musical. Established composers, too, found a place in the revue; the Ziegfeld Follies of 7921 featured music by jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml and Victor Herbert.33 One of the more interesting experiments took place in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 with the ballet of Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. These ballet ballads became a regular part of the series.34 Years later, when Agnes DeMille and jerome Robbins and others worked on popular Broadway musicals, their audiences had been thoroughly prepared. The "personality revue," a vehicle for a single star (though surrounded with singers and dancers in minor roles), was launched in the twenties with Elsie janis leading the way followed soon after by Ed Wynn's Carnival .

John Murray Anderson points out that many technical innovations were introduced during the twenties, including drapes and draw curtains

31Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), 574-575.

32Thomas S. Hischak, Stage It With Music (Westport, CN : Greenwood Press, 1993), 212.

33Baral, 268.

34Gerald Bordman, American Musical Revue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 59.

The American Musical Stage 21

of exquisite materials and design, the moving platform, and, especially, projected scenery, allowing for faster pacing.35

The Carrick Gaieties spoofed operetta; the Grand Street Follies twitted Broadway. The fact is, revues of all kinds flourished in the twenties and all sorts of experiments were attempted. Especially noteworthy was George Gershwin's jazz opera, Blue Monday Blues, inserted into the 1922 edition of George White's Scandals. The real attraction of this series was the jazz-age tone established by the dancing and the music. The Music Box Revues proved that audiences of the revue were no less interested in spectacle than in song. The revue of the twenties " emerged as the superstructure of Broadway musicals," and it is to the musical we must look for still more experiments and innovations.36

Gerald Bordman found that "an almost incredible array of brilliant, adventuresome young composers" plus "a few brilliant, adventuresome young lyricists" accounted for much of the era's-and the twen-ties'-greatness.37 Even though operetta's days were numbered (to a large extent the form died in the thirties), some of the best American operettas were written in the twenties (for example, The Vagabond King, The Desert Song, The Student Prince, The New Moon) and their experiments affected the musicals to come. Rudolf Friml's Rose-Marie (1924) tried the Canadian Rockies as a setting, experimented with murder as an important part of the story, and made a serious attempt to integrate music and plot. In fact, the program refused to identify individual songs.38

The musical comedy, however, was where most experiments took place. Almost everyone who writes about the American musical has a candidate for exciting experimentation in the twenties. john Lahr, for example, is partial to George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good! (1924). "Gershwin shortened the musical line, added blue notes, and brought the musical up to speed with the Metropolis." He quotes Gershwin as saying " we are living in an age of staccato, not legato." 39 Experiments and innovations included a thematic danced opening, songs that helped to

35Cited in Bordman, American Musical Revue, 60-61.

36Baral, 10.

37Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 128.

38Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 36.

39john Lahr, " City Slickers," The New Yorker (22 and 29 August 1994), 110-112.

22 MATES

tell the story, and two pianos in the orchestra. The city's feverish pace is first dramatized here, says Lahr, and the myth of modern urban life begins to take shape. Bordman says the date when jazz became an established and even welcome musical idiom was 1 December 1924-the date when Lady, Be Good! opened.40 Another book finds "one of the first and most potent symbols of the Jazz Age-the Charleston-came in the 1923-24 season in the Black musical Runnin' Wi/d"-it bridged the gap between exhibition and public dancing- "and announced that jazz was indis-pensable for truly chic and up-to-date Broadway entertainments." 41

With Morrie Ryskind and George S. Kaufman writing the book, and the Gershwins writing music and lyrics, Strike Up the Band (1927) experimented with politics as theme with a cynical point of view, satirizing militarism and big business. The experiment proved successful enough that others in the genre followed, notably Irving Berlin's Face the Music and As Thousands Cheer. And of course, Of Thee I Sing, a direct outgrowth of experiments in the twenties, was the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Cinderella theme, claims Bordman, so dominated Broadway that for three seasons, from 1921-1924, of the one hundred and twenty musicals that showed up on Broadway, fully half the operettas and revues and twenty-one of the fifty-eight musicals centered on a Cinderella figure.42 Musically, these shows gave their audiences songs, with dancing an important, though mostly irrelevant, element (precision dancing in particular was tried and accepted). What Cinderella shows did was provide a venue for American composers and lyricists to come to the fore. Stanley Green said, "If ever a period of musical comedy belonged to its composers and lyricists it was the decade between 1920 and 1930." 43

Vincent Youmans was one of the most popular composers of the period with some of the biggest hits on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to a large assortment of touring companies. If his shows had few innovations, they served to combine many of the experiments of others, including the quickening of pace and the new stress on urban back-

40Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 121.

41Armond Fields and l. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 439.

42Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 107.

43Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 101.

The American Musical Stage 23

ground {witness No, No, Nanette) . In Rainbow (1928), Youmans experimented with realistic situations {a novelty) and three-dimensional characters. Music was somewhat relevant to the plot. Here, at least, Youmans's experiments advanced the cause of musical comedy.

Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend kept the spirit of the Princess Theatre's shows alive, and their Peggy Ann (1926) used a dream as the entire story.44 They had three shows on Broadway in 1928, though only Chee-Chee attempted to experiment, with all songs sticking close to the story line and pushing the plot forward.

Buddy De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson took up-to-date topics with current language phrases and made hits of them in such shows as Good News! (1927) and three others before the end of the decade. The topical musical comedy "became one of the standard types of the late 1920s, and as time went on it tended to become the ruling type.''4s

Some strange productions probably should be mentioned, though whether they were spectacles or pageants or extravaganzas is hard to say. Such shows as Aphrodite {1919-1920), with Henri Fevrier and Anself Goetzl's music, Michel Fokine's choreography, and Leon Bakst's costumes, seem to represent some strange musical stage experi-ments-Aphrodite's climax, for example, was set to the music of Moussorgsky and the bacchanalian ballet was danced on a floor of rose leaves.46 Mecca (1920) had music by Percy Fletcher, with Fokine and Bakst again designing the choreography and costumes, respectively. Several other musical shows experimented with staging and lighting, and though the shows have disappeared, the technology {drapery, lighting, elevators) was passed on and remains an important part of today's musicals.

Probably the most important experiments came near the end of the twenties when jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927) set new standards for the American musical.47 The plot was unusually serious for the musical stage of the twenties, involving among other things desertion and miscegena-tion. The opening with Black wharf hands instead of chorus girls was

44/bid., 117.

45Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950), 151 .

46/bid., 136.

47Robert C. Toll, The Entertainment Machine, American Show Business in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 134.

24 MATES

another risky experiment. The songs expressed the feelings of the characters and were not dropped into the show willy-nilly. Part of the experimentation involved a "blending of the most antagonistic elements of musicals comedy and operetta." 48 Even the use of a serious novel (by Edna Ferber) was startling in the twenties, as was a story that stretched far over time and place. Where interpolations were standard fare in musicals, here they helped to set time and place-in short, they were relevant. The use of the leitmotiv throughout was innovative in a musical. Arthur Jackson claims that Show Boat was a new departure in the world of musicals, "a blend of music, lyrics and libretto that would serve as a guidepost for the future and an object lesson for all aspiring show writers."49 And Miles Kreuger, in an entire book on Show Boat, says that for Kern and Hammerstein "this was to be a tightly written musical play with devotion to character development, with songs that grew meaningfully out of the plot, with spectacle and dance only when spectacle and dance seemed appropriate to the story." 50

Ethan Mordden writes about the forcing of the issue of social integration through the musical. 51 And Robert Toll notes:

[L]ike America itself, musical comedy was a blend. From extravaganzas it got lavish costumes and production numbers; from burlesque it took satire and chorus girls; . . . from operettas it drew beautiful melodies and glamor; and from vaudeville it borrowed popular dance, music, comedy, and stars, along with a breakneck performance speed. But the full integration of these diverse elements . . . took decades of experimentation on the nation's stages.52

There is no question that as a result of the experiments of the twenties, America's musical stage changed-not necessarily because it

48Ethan Mordden, " Show Boat Crosses Over," The New Yorker (3 july 1989), 79.

49 Arthur Jackson, The Best Musicals from Show Boat to A Chorus Line (New York : Crown Publishers, Inc., 1977), 32 .

50Miles Kreuger, Show Boat, The Story of a Classic American Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 26.

5 1 Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies, the People Who Made the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33.

52Toll , The Entertainment M achine, 132.

The American Musical Stage 25

evolved from earlier forms but because these forms coexisted on the New York stage "and productions that were conveniently labeled musical comedies actually covered a spect~um that included comic opera, operetta, burlesque, musical farce, satire, and extravaganza."53 Add the different kinds of revue and grand opera, and the musical stage offered something for everyone. The credit for drawing a heterogeneous audience and for passing on new traditions to the American musical stage largely goes to the wonderful range of experiments of the 1920s.

53Knapp, 115.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)

Buddhism on the Contemporary American Stage: Jean-Claude van ltallie's The Tibetan Book of the Dead

GENE A. PLUNKA

When Open Theater members toured Europe in summer 1968 performing The Serpent, Jean-Claude van ltallie left the group to go to Scotland to visit his friend, Tania Leontov, who had become a Buddhist. Van ltallie had been interested in Buddhism after having read D.T. Suzuki's The Supreme Doctrine years earlier. During his visit with Leontov, van ltallie met her teacher and master, the Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa, a graduate of Oxford University who had established a Tibetan monastery in Scotland. A few years later, Chogyam Trungpa moved to the United States and founded a Buddhist center in Vermont. After becoming a student of Chogyam Trungpa in Vermont, van ltallie embarked on a trip to India in 1971, carrying with him a letter for the Dalai Lama from Chogyam Trungpa. Van ltallie left India before he could meet with the Dalai Lama, who had deferred the appointment for one week; the most noteworthy relic of the trip was To India, a journal that van ltallie kept about the two-month excursion. After returning to the United States, van ltallie became a practicing Buddhist under the guidance of Chogyam Trungpa. From 17 to 23 February 1973, van ltallie directed the Mudra Theatre Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, which allowed directors and actors from experimental theatre groups, as well as playwrights and dancers, to study with Chogyam Trungpa and forty of his students. Van ltallie organized the conference, the first working exchange of Western experimental theatre techniques and Buddhist psychology. A year later, the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college, was founded at Boulder. Van ltallie has frequently taught there since 1974. Since the early 1970s, van ltallie has incorporated Buddhist philosophy into several of his plays. Certainly, van ltallie's The Tibetan Book of the Dead best exemplifies the influence of Buddhist concepts and beliefs on many Western artists' work.

Van ltallie has frequently included Buddhist thought in his plays. Several of his dramas that examine the effects of materialism and conspicuous consumption derive from the Buddhist concept of spiritu-

The Tibetan Book of the Dead 27

ally cleansing the soul. However, The Tibetan Book of the Dead clearly goes beyond a nominal understanding of the tenets of Buddhism and instead delves into a more rigorous foregrounding of Buddhist ideology. In an interview that I conducted with him in December 1992, van ltallie emphasized that he avoids using Sanskrit or Tibetan language in his plays but instead tries to include vocabulary accessible to the audience. In that interview, van ltallie discussed the role of Buddhism in his theatre: "I hope that I never preach, Buddhism or anything else, in my plays. The theatre doesn't work as a pulpit."1

By the time van ltallie had completed The King of the United States in spring 1972, the Tibetan Buddhism of Chogyam Trungpa was slowly inculcating him with a sense of spirituality. For example, part of Chogyam Trungpa's conversation with van ltallie in summer 1968 inspired the Call Girl's speech about a spiritual leader she seeks in India that van ltallie inserted into The King of the United States.2 Van ltallie converted to Buddhism shortly after his trip to India in 1971, so The King of the United States reflects the first vestiges of his linking national politics with the spiritual vitality, or lack thereof, in individual conscious-ness. Van ltallie's thesis in the play is that we elect the political leaders we deserve-inevitably, those politicians who reflect the dearth of spirituality in the individuals who voted them into office.

Van ltallie's Bag Lady (1979), a study of the effects of consumerism on modern society as well as an engaging psychological portrait of individ-ual exile, has roots in Buddhist philosophy. Not only has Clara's supposed insanity created a self-imposed exile for her, but also her madness seems to distinguish the bag lady as one who has tremendous wisdom about how people interact in modern society. Individuals who are deemed insane may frequently have a unique understanding of humanity beyond what one might expect. Clara's name suggests "clarity" or clear vision. Van ltallie views her as a seer or prophetess. Less than a year after the play's run in New York, van ltallie admitted, " . .. I saw her partially" as a kind of Zen monk. Her message was, 'Travel

1Gene A. Plunka, "Interview With Jean-Claude van ltallie," in The Playwright's Art: Conversations With Contemporary American Dramatists, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 253-54.

2Van ltallie made this comment in an extensive autobiographical report published in 1985. See "Jean-Claude van ltallie," in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 2, ed. Adele Sarkissian (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985), 416.

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light, you're not going to be around for very long. Travel light. ' " 3 In an earlier interview with the Daily Princetonian, van ltallie stated, " The bag lady is an observer, she's in a kind of Zen position there on the curb, and she watches all the people pass by, and she sees the end of the city." 4 At t imes, Clara epitomizes the Buddhist sense of calm and stil lness amidst a society gone amok. Clara's solitary existence and concomitant sense of alienation and exile provide her with a Zen-like serenity that offers her the ability to see clearly. Clara seems able to predict intuitively who will succumb to cancer or heart attacks. As a seer, she also envisions the destruction of modern society, which she predicts will soon be reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland.

Van ltallie's 1988 play, Struck Dumb, is essentially a Zen experience, much like Bag Lady, in wh ich the protagonist, an aphasic, is an observer of I ife around him and therefore stands outside society, like Clara, an omniscient seer, watching with a different perspective as the world passes by. Struck Dumb invites us into the mind of Adnan, a singer by profession, nearly fifty years old, who lives in Venice, Californ ia. We spend a day with Adnan as he wakes up in his small apartment, discusses his Lebanese heritage, takes us through his morning routine, explains his interest in music, walks on the beach, practices words, reads a letter from an aphasic friend, strolls the Santa Monica mall, and finally muses about the sunset. Adnan, the seer, views himself as " a ph ilosopher" ; he even claims to have befriended jean-Paul Sartre, another ph ilosopher. Van ltallie implies that Struck Dumb is similar to the Zen experience of Bag Lady: "It is the perceptions of someone who lives on the margins of society-who is, by society's terms, in some ways a little bit off. But that 'off' leaves a gap for some very clear perceptions which reflect on society itself."5

As a type of Zen philosopher, Adnan perceives life differently from most of us. He admits, "I am a philosopher, but I have no answers./You must I ive without answers./! want to know things clearly/The questions

3Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, interview with MG (fu ll name unknown), 28 August 1980, Department of Special Collections & Archives, Kent State U nivers ity Librar ies, 20.

4 Craig Mellow, " Van ltallie: Broadening the Frontiers of Theater," Daily Princetonian, 7 April 1980, 7.

5 Barry Daniels, " Listening for the W ord, " America n Theatre 5, nos. 4-5 Uuly/August 1988), 47-48.

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must be clear./ But I must live without answers."6 His vision is often epistemological: "Every every/day, waking:/1 wonder, what is this room?/What is this day?!VVhat planet?/Light?/Lights?/Sky?/Only one sun?" (11) Like Clara, the bag lady, Ad nan predicts an apocalypse that he views from his own inner turmoil: " Cataclysm . . . /It's crisis in universe, stars, planets ... /Crisis causing changing, of course./So what is changing?/ Changing, it's 'evolving' " (12). Adnan, the seer, concludes, "Earth ending-it's going to happen when?" (18)

Van ltallie's first full-length examination of Buddhist thought on stage was Naropa, completed in draft form during summer 1977. His source material for the play consisted of Tibetan texts translated by Herbert V. Guenther. 7 The Buddhist KagyU lineage examined in these texts is referred to as an oral-instruction heritage. The lore of this I ineage has been passed on since the time of Tilopa, a guru who lived in India at the end of the ninth century A.D. and the beginning of the tenth century (A.D. 988-1 069). Taught by four gurus in India, Tilopa passed this knowledge along in eleven yoga manuals and then through his teachings to Naropa.

As a Buddhist abbot of Nalanda University, which van ltallie describes as "the Harvard-Oxford of its time," Naropa was known as a prominent spiritual teacher. He had written several texts on Buddhism and was presumably proud of that accomplishment and of his fame. Naropa was somewhat disenchanted with his life as a scholar and therefore turned to a study of the occult sciences. One day, when he was studying the Vajarayena teachings, an old witch-like crone asked him whether he grasped the deeper significance of the texts he was reading. When Naropa acknowledged that he understood what he was studying, the old woman wept. She explained that her brother, Tilopa, a pandit and great teacher, had such knowledge. Naropa, convinced of the woman's sincerity, abandoned his position at the university and received permis-sion from the monks to pursue his prospective master, Tilopa.

Naropa, written in epic style structured as a series of isolated episodes or stationen, depicts Naropa's picaresque journey to find Tilopa,

6Jean-Ciaude van ltallie and Joseph Chaikin, Struck Dumb, in Kaleidoscope 19 (Summer/Fall 1989), 14. Subsequent references to thi s work will be cited in the text.

7For information about the biographical histories of Naropa and Tilopa, see Helmut Hoffman, The Religions of Tibet, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (london: George All en & Unwin, 1961 ); S.K. Ramachandra Rao, Tibetan Tantrik Tradition (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1978); Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1973); and Giuseppe Tucci, The Religions of Tibet, trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

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his teacher. Van ltallie understood that the spirituality of Zen koans is intrinsically linked with a deeply manifested sense of humor. The opposite of this spirituality is rigidity of thought derived from conditioned behavior. Naropa, the serious pandit, lacks the ability to see clearly, displaying virtually no sense of humor. Unlike Clara, the bag lady, who views humanity with wry sarcasm despite the impending apocalypse,

Naropa, the university scholar, is so solemn that he fails to realize his own spiritual identity and the beauty of the world surrounding him. In a comment about the potential synthesis between politics and spirituality, van ltallie once said, "You need to begin by centering yourself, slowing down, seeing things clearly, and then allowing whatever action is necessary to arise spontaneously." 6 Naropa has difficulty responding spontaneously because, according to Tilopa, he is "poisoned" by his own restrictive mode of thought. As an insolent abbot, Naropa did not "center" himself and therefore could not see clearly, most notably demonstrated by his inability to find Tilopa. The quest for Tilopa thus becomes a search for the key to unlock the secrets of one's own soul. As was true in van ltallie's earlier play, A Fable, the Beast lies within ourselves.

Unfortunately, Naropa has not premiered on the New York stage because van I tall ie has never been comfortable with how the play worked in rehearsals. In a 7 June 1993 letter that he wrote to me, van ltallie noted, "It [Naropa] was directed at a workshop at Yale School of Drama by Lee Breuer in a manner I loathed." Naropa was next scheduled to premiere with Bag Lady in 1979 at the Theater for the New City during its prospective run from 21 November to 23 December in New York City; however, at the last moment, Naropa was withdrawn because van I tall ie thought the production was flawed. In 1982, Naropa was in rehearsals at the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club; Steve Gorn had already composed the music. Unfortunately, van ltallie agreed with Ellen Stewart in finding the production "woefully inadequate" and canceled it.9 One must understand that the LaMama performances were staged without puppets, which are an integral part of the play. Obviously the continuity was altered, thus causing difficulties. The fact that van ltallie withdrew Naropa twice before it was to be given public_ performances invites intriguing queries about the efficacy of the play's form. In Naropa, the episodes often degenerate into brief images that are at times loosely structured as in a dream. Whereas a random juxtaposition of images

8" Theater as Practice: An Interview With Jean-Claude van ltall ie, " New Visions,

Spring 1993, 10.

9Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, letter to author, 7 June 1993 .

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works in surrealist theatre, such a form was less effective in Naropa, in which the audience must make sense out of the collective episodes in order to unravel the parable, i.e., Naropa's quest for identity. In short, several of the images in Naropa need to be fleshed out a bit more to solidify its epic structure and deter any notion that the play is loosely fashioned like surrealist theatre. Naropa's inappropriate form thus precludes it from being a multicultural vehicle for effectively representing Buddhist thought on the contemporary American stage.

Yoshi Oida, one of director Peter Brook's actors, asked van ltallie to assist him in creating a dramatization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In Paris, van ltallie saw Oida's adaptation of the Tibetan text and decided to write his own version. After van ltallie revised the play for nearly a year, going through eight rewrites and translating the text into French (his native language) and back into English, The Tibetan Book of the Dead or How Not to Do It Again was completed in draft form in December 1982. The play is an adaptation of the Bardo Thodol, a sacred text of the Mahayana School of Buddhism, first translated by Oxford University scholar W.F. Evans-Wentz as The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead premiered at the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club Annex on 14 January 1983. The play was produced by El len Stewart and directed by Assurbanipal Babilla. The lively Tibetan music was composed by Steve Gorn, who played some of it himself, ably assisted by Geoff Gordon, Yokio Tsuji, and Dan Erkkila. Together they created sounds from Oriental musical instruments, including the Sona (a Tibetan oboe), the Sheng (a Chinese mouth organ), a fan drum, and assorted bells, pipes, and reeds. Jun Maeda, a Japanese set designer who had worked at LaMama for ten years, created a huge set that featured a two-story-high skull made of white sheets stretched over saplings. Passages that appeared to be orifices of the skull functioned as entrances and exits for the performers to move about on various stage levels; moreover, the saplings enabled the actors to climb around the set acrobatically. The skillful lighting design was effectively coordinated by Blu (sic) who devised five auras (red, blue, green, grey, and yellow) to correspond with the energy levels surrounding the dead person. The play's international ensemble consisted of eight performers from different countries, providing the performance with a multicultural distinction that suggested universality and recalled the Open Theater's collaborative efforts on The Serpent.

As is true of most off-off Broadway productions that do not aim for commercial success, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was not heavily reviewed by the New York press. However, the notices the play did receive were favorable. In a 1993 interview that I conducted with him, van ltallie fondly recalled: "That play was a wonderful success with the

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audiences. People who came to see it often came back several times to see it because they were so moved. That play is a success story in every sense except the commercial. It moved even some reviewers to great paens." 10 Mel Gussow's review in the New York Times praised van ltallie's "ecumenical spiritual fervor," the "physically adept'' cast, Gabriel Berry's "vivid costuming," and the music, "scored for a potpourri of exotic instruments that are plucked, thumbed, stroked, shaken and tooted ." 11 Comparing The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the ensemble pieces created by the Open Theater, most notably Terminal, Michael Feingold of the Village Voice described the play as "simple and cogent, dignified without pretension," framed within a fluid production high-1 ighted by masterly set design and sty I ish dance and acrobatics.12 Rosette Lamont's review, which summed up much of the critical sentiment about the play, referred to van ltallie's drama as "a beautiful and deeply moving spectacle. . . . The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a magnificent text, and van ltallie has created a powerful dramatic version of this classic work. LaMama invites us to a solemn and ecstatic celebration of death and life." 13 The only dissenting opinion was written by Lionel Mitchell of the New York Amsterdam News, who enjoyed the performance but, as a student who once received instruction from an old Mongolian lama, was adamant that "one cannot reduce these teachings to a Western drama concept without the audience being initiate into the culture behind it."14

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an examination of the choices one has when death occurs, a subject that obviously fascinated van ltallie. During a 27 December 1992 interview, I asked van ltallie what terrifies him. He responded, "Oh, Lord. At different moments, different things. Death . Old age."15 In 1980, shortly before The Tibetan Book of the Dead was conceived, van ltallie and Wendy Gimbel visited the

10Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, interview with author, tape recording, 26 june 1993, Rowe, Massachusetts.

11 Mel Gus sow, "Theater: Tibetan Book of the Dead," New York Times, 1 9 january 1983, C24.

12Michael Feingold, "And So Tibet," Village Voice, 25 January 1983.

13 Rosette Lamont, "The Book of the Dead: A Meditation on Mortality," Other Stages 5, no. 9 (13-26 January 1983), 5.

14Lionel Mitchell, "Lightweights Do 'Heavy' Tibetan Book of Dead," New York Amsterdam News, 22 January 1983.

15Piunka, "Interview With Jean-Claude van ltallie," 252.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead 33

Vileabamba Valley in the Andes Mountains of Equador to discover the secrets of longevity in a region of the world where the elderly continue to be active when they are well over one hundred years old. 16 Moreover, in her article on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was printed as pub I icity material for the drama and was part of various theatre programmes advertising the play's run at LaMama, Rosette Lamont included this statement by van ltallie: "The most tragic experience of my life was the death of my mother. She died very young, before she was fifty. We were very close." Lamont tied van ltallie's play to the death of his mother by stating, " Van ltallie's enactment is an exorcism of a profound sorrow, a meditation on mortality, and the soul's progress." 17 However, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not a lugubrious event; instead, it is a rejuvenation of the soul to its divinity lost at birth. As such, the focus is on spiritual rebirth rather than on death. Van ltallie summa-rized the tone of the play: "The production was full of light and joy, a celebration really, not at all what the name of the play might imply."18

Buddhists believe that life and death are continuous processes. Indeed, many Buddhist lamas insist that they have experienced frequent deaths and rebirths. Some Buddhists admit that every person alive has returned from death, although seldom will those individuals who are not spiritually oriented recall previous deaths. Death is a time of reflection in wh ich the meaning of life is accentuated. The Bardo Thodol, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a guide for the Bardo existence, which is the intermediate period of forty-nine days from one's death to rebirth. 19 Bardo is a Tibetan word that means "gap," the transition between death and spiritual rebirth. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is read by a spiritual master to a dying person or even to one who has recently passed away

16See Jean-Claude van ltallie and Wendy Gimbel, "Discovering the Real Fountain of Youth ... in South America," Vogue, February 1981, 196, 201-204.

17Lamont, 4.

181'Jean-Ciaude van ltallie," in Contemporary Authors, 421 .

19For a more thorough appreciation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, see W .Y. Evans-Wentz, ed. and trans., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 3rd ed. (london: Oxford University Press, 1957); Francesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa, ed. and trans., The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1975); and Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, ed. Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Also pertinent is C.J. Jung's " Psychological Commentary," Lama Anagarika Govinda's " Introductory Foreword," and Sir John Woodroffe's "Forward" to the Evans-Wentz translation, as well as Chogyam Trungpa's "Commentary" included in the Fremantle-Trungpa edition .

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and is now in the Bardo state. The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus stresses to the dead person the vital significance of the soul. However, the original purpose of this sacred text was as a guide for the living who are seeking spiritual enlightenment and a concomitant understanding of the full meaning of their existence as human beings. Sogyal Rinpoche explains, "The word 'bardo' is commonly used to denote the intermedi~ ate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring continuously throughout both life and death, and are junctures when the possibility of liberation, or enlightenment, is heightened." 20

This sense of liberation or enlightenment for the living is part of van ltallie's purpose in staging The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Van ltallie views the play as a celebration of life. During spring 1993, van ltallie stated, "Theater at its best is a spiritual practice. And also when it's very funny, it's a spiritual practice."21 In yet another interview that he gave in 1993, van ltallie acknowledged, "In the blessed sixties Ram Dass summed up the goal of spiritual practice as being here now .... Is the landscape, whenever we glimpse it, of being here now piercingly, poignantly, beyond words funny? Seems to be. No?"22 In that article, van ltallie also discussed the concept of the koan as a joke, "its purpose to blow mind."23 The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manifestation of theatre as spiritual practice. The text teaches us the importance of "being here now" as it celebrates the beauty of life. In short, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a humorous, yet revelatory, guide to leading a more rewarding existence. Van ltallie explained why The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the personification of spiritual theatre: "The book is trying to bring consciousness, light, into the process of our projecting our illusions onto the world. It speaks with the voice of a friend, often with humor, and its intent is compassionate."24

The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains no acts or scenes, and van ltallie does not designate an intermission. Obviously, van ltallie realized that it would be pedantic to dramatize each of the forty~nine days of the Bardo. Instead, van ltallie devised a unique structure of seventeen

20Rinpoche, 11.

211'Theatre as Practice: An Interview With Jean~Ciaude van ltallie," 10.

22Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, "On Laughter," American Drama 3, no.l (1993): 89.

23/bid., 88.

24Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, "Additional Notes," in The Tibetan Book of the Dead or How Not to Do it Again (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983), 51. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text.

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interludes, each with its own title, to represent the most salient stages of the Bardo. The structure is fluid and organic, with one interlude