Mare Island and Back

Arthur Miller (1915–2005)
From Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004, with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s & 40s

Interesting Links

“Arthur Miller: The Art of Theater” (Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron, The Paris Review)

“Dr. Henry Kessler's Excellent Aventure” (PDF, Garden State Legacy)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“Audience Tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea,” Elia Kazan

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Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004, with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s & 40s
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Henry Kessler (right) adjusting what appears to be a full leg stabilizing brace at Mare Island Naval Hospital, c. 1945. Photograph: Cornell University Libraries via gardenstatelegacy.com.

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In 1942, the year he turned twenty-seven, Arthur Miller was still a struggling author, and he began working the night shift at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The next year, however, he quit his job when he was hired to write The Story of G.I. Joe, a film adaptation of Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War. For the film he interviewed soldiers at army training camps but was fired before the script was completed. Miller would use the material for a book of reportage, Situation Normal . . . , published in 1944 to mixed reviews and tepid sales. His first Broadway production, The Man Who Had All the Luck, premiered that same year to scathing notices and closed after four performances.

To help pay the bills during the war years, Miller also wrote radio plays. His main gig was writing for Cavalcade of America, a series of patriotic dramas depicting events and people in American history. Later, from June 1944 to July 1945, he wrote plays for the CBS program The Doctor Fights, which dramatized stories of real-life physicians serving in the military. Although Miller later regarded most of these scripts as mere contract work, his biographer, Christopher Bigsby, argues that some of them “remain impressive” and that the requirements of radio drama taught him “something about plot, language, and character.” As Miller explained in a 1966 Paris Review interview:

We had twenty-eight and a half minutes to tell a whole story in a radio play, and you had to concentrate on the words because you couldn't see anything. You were playing in a dark closet, in fact. So the economy of words in a good radio play was everything. It drove you more and more to realize what the power of a good sentence was, and the right phrase could save you a page you would otherwise be wasting.

While working on each program Miller ran up against various constraints; the scripts were expected to be uncontroversial and patriotic, and advertisers were nervous about overt political messaging or gloomy representations. But, as Bigsby notes, when Miller worked on the The Doctor Fights episodes, he “was determined that the true story of wartime injuries and their treatment be told.” He spent several days at Valley Forge General Hospital to understand better the realities facing doctors and patients. Miller told Bigsby:

[The producers] didn’t want it that way. It was dangerous. It would put people off the military. But I felt it was better to tell people the truth. . . . It was very moving for me. They were all very young, younger than I was, and marred for life. You couldn’t turn your back on them and I just felt I owed it to them. I was moved terribly by the whole experience, as remote as I was from it. I wasn’t flying over Europe getting shot at.

One of Miller’s last scripts written for The Doctor Fights relates the story of three soldiers who have lost limbs in combat and are recovering at Mare Island Naval Hospital, northeast of San Francisco. The episode’s doctor is Captain Henry H. Kessler, director of the hospital’s rehabilitation division, who was played in the original production by Robert Montgomery. (Kessler himself was interviewed at the end of the program.) “Mare Island and Back” is one of six radio plays selected by Tony Kushner and published for the first time in the new Library of America collection, Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004, with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s & 40s, and it is presented here in full for Story of the Week readers.

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KESSLER: Hear this! You blessed ones, you lucky ones sitting in your bedrooms with ten pink toenails to clip, and you in your kitchens opening a beer bottle with two living hands, hear this. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Drunken Sisters

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
From Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater

Interesting Links
“Notes on The Alcestiad” by Thornton Wilder (ThorntonWilder.com)

The Alcestiad Opera (ThorntonWilder.com)

Previous Story of the Week selections from Thornton Wilder
• “Chefoo, China”
• “Spiritus Valet”

Buy the book
Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater
Our Town | The Skin of Our Teeth | The Matchmaker | The Alcestiad | Shadow of a Doubt (screenplay) | other plays | essays | 888 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $26.00

Detail from The Fates Gathering in the Stars, 1887, oil on canvas by American painter Elihu Vedder (1836–1923). (Click on image to see the full painting.) Wikimedia Commons.

In an introduction to the 1977 edition of Thornton Wilder’s The Alcestiad and The Drunken Sisters, Isabel Wilder recalled what first attracted her brother to Greek mythology in general and the myth of Alcestis in particular:

Thornton’s tapestry was minute when at the age of seven or eight in Madison, Wisconsin, he first heard the name Alcestis while reading or being read to from Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable. The story of the daughter of King Pelias, princess of princesses in the myth and the song of pre-Christian Greece, captured his imagination—and his heart.

Alcestis, whose story is most famously depicted in a tragedy by Euripides, offers her own life so that her husband, King Admetus, might be spared. Wilder first began working on a modern adaptation as early as 1938, but events intervened. (“The Alcestiad was not a play for a war-torn world,” noted his sister, who was Wilder’s agent for most of his career.) He took the manuscript with him when he was commissioned as an Air Force captain, but his papers were lost when he returned to the States towards the end of the war. He made an attempt to reconstruct the work, but eventually put it aside for nearly a decade.

At long last the play premiered at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival as A Life in the Sun, but generally unfavorable reviews led Wilder to withdraw the rights for the production. (The director admitted to the playwright, “I did not serve your play well.”) Wilder revised the play and decided to make a significant addition. A journal entry from December 1956 reveals, “How long I have aspired to write one of the lost plays of antiquity or to furnish . . . a satyr-play to a real or assumed trilogy.” Satyr plays are brief one-acts designed to lighten the mood after a three-part tragedy; Wilder emulated the Greek dramatic tradition by adding his own satyr play, The Drunken Sisters,  to the end of The Alcestiad. The irony, as Wilder noted in his journal, is that Euripides’s Alcestis was itself originally a satyr play.

The Alcestiad, with The Drunken Sisters, was translated into German and successfully produced in Zurich in 1957—nearly twenty years after Wilder began writing it and half a century after his boyhood encounter with the myth. An operatic version of The Alcestiad, with music by Louise Talma, had its world premiere in Frankfurt in 1962 and ended with a twenty-minute standing ovation and several dozen curtain calls, although a number of German opera critics dismissed the performance, in no small part out of antagonism towards the very idea of a female American composer born in France. The first professional American production of the two plays was not staged until 1977—two years after Wilder’s death.

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The three FATES are seated on a bench largely hidden by their voluminous draperies. They wear the masks of old women, touched by the grotesque but with vestiges of nobility. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Long Voyage Home

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)
From Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920

Interesting Links

“Eugene O’Neill and George Jean Nathan: transforming American theater together” (Reader’s Almanac)

The Long Voyage Home: analysis and background (Jeff Kennedy, Provincetown Playhouse)

Other Story of the Week selections by Eugene O’Neill
• “In the Zone”
• “Tomorrow”

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Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920
Beyond the Horizon | "Anna Christie" | The Emperor Jones | The Glencairn cycle | 22 other plays | 1,104 pages
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Photograph of the Provincetown Players production of The Long Voyage Home, November 1917. Image from the blog For the Actor.

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After struggling for nearly four years to be a writer, Eugene O’Neill’s fledgling career, as well as his financial situation, took a notable turn for the better in 1917. His short story, “Tomorrow,” appeared in the June issue of a new magazine called The Seven Arts, and O’Neill received fifty dollars—the first substantial sum ever paid for his writing. (Although the year marked a turning point for O’Neill, the magazine didn’t fare as well; it folded after the October issue.)

Around the same time that the story was accepted, the poet Louis Untermeyer stopped by the offices of The Smart Set, dropped off some of O’Neill’s writing, and “suggested trying to recruit him,” recalled the magazine’s coeditor H. L. Mencken, who sent off a friendly letter to the playwright. O’Neill responded:

I am taking advantage of your kind letter asking to see more of my stuff to enclose two one-act plays. They are units in a series the first of which was Bound East For Cardiff, produced in New York last season by the Provincetown Players. They deal with merchant-sailor life on a tramp steamer as it really is—its sordidness inexplicably touched with romance by the glamor of far horizons. . . .

I have never seen anything of this kind in The Smart Set and I have small hope of it being the type of material you desire. But I do hope, and hope it strongly, that you will read them. I want these plays, which to me are real, to pass through your acid test because I know your acid is “good medicine.”

The “series” mentioned by O’Neill in his letter includes, in addition to Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone and the two plays he sent to Mencken, The Long Voyage Home and The Moon of the Caribbees. Contrary to O’Neill’s expectations, Mencken was impressed by both plays and handed them to his coeditor George Jean Nathan, who accepted them along with Ile, a third play O’Neill had sent separately. The first to appear in print was The Long Voyage Home in the October 1917 issue of The Smart Set; it’s the only one of the four plays in the series to take place on land, in “the bar of a low dive on the London water front.” It premiered on November 2 at The Playwrights’ Theatre in New York.

For the publication rights, the magazine paid O’Neill the then-unimaginable sum of $75—for each of the three plays. He later acknowledged to an interviewer that the publication of his plays in The Smart Set represented his “first ray of recognition.”

* Reprinted in The Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (Yale University Press, 1988).

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SCENE—The bar of a low dive on the London water front—a squalid, dingy room dimly lighted by kerosene lamps placed in brackets on the walls. On the left, the bar. In front of it, a door leading to a side room. On the right, tables with chairs around them. In the rear, a door leading to the street. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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In the Zone

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)
Reprinted in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920

Interesting Linka

““O’Neill’s S.S. Glencairn Cycle: Page vs. Stage” (Richard Compson Sater, eOneill.com

Buy the book
Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920
Beyond the Horizon | "Anna Christie" | The Emperor Jones | The Glencairn cycle | 22 other plays | 1,104 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $32.00

Left to right: Eugene Lincoln, Robert Strange, Frederick Roland, Jay Strong, Arthur Hohl, and Rienzi De Cordova in The Washington Square Players production of In the Zone, 1917. Photograph by the White Studio. Museum of the City of New York.

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Between 1914 and 1917 Eugene O’Neill wrote four one-act plays featuring several of the same characters, all sailors on a tramp steamer. The plays—Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees—were not originally conceived as a “cycle.” In 1917 two of the plays premiered within two days of each other, performed by different troupes at different New York theaters: In the Zone opened October 31 by The Washington Square Players at The Comedy Theatre; The Long Voyage Home, on November 2 by The Provincetown Players at The Playwrights’ Theatre. Not until 1924, when O’Neill had two Pulitzers under his belt, were the plays staged together as a series (with the author’s approval) under the title S.S. Glencairn. Although In the Zone was the second play to be written and staged, it is chronologically last in the cycle.

Based on O’Neill‘s own experiences aboard the British ship S.S. Ikala, all four plays feature the character of Driscoll, whom literary critic Jeffrey H. Richards describes as “a hard-living, hard-drinking, dominating but good-hearted, superstitious, and ignorant man.” The spotlight of In the Zone is shared by the quiet and sensitive Smitty, whose furtive activities are regarded warily by the rest of the crew. The only one of the Glencairn plays set in wartime, In the Zone debuted just months after the American entry into World War I, when war fervor was at its height. The play proved to be O’Neill’s first real financial success, and a vaudeville company took it on tour the following year. “Paid me good royalties—on which I got married!” he recalled a decade later.

Critics ever since have singled out In the Zone as a tense, even melodramatic, psychological drama with an emphasis on plot that is unique among O’Neill’s early seafaring plays. In fact, those very aspects caused O’Neill (often the severest critic of his own work) to later disparage it. In 1919 he wrote in rebuttal to a reviewer who published an appreciation of the play: “It is too facile in its conventional technique, too full of clever theatrical tricks. . . . Smitty in the stuffy, grease-paint atmosphere of In the Zone is magnified into a hero who attracts our sentimental sympathy.” He especially felt that “the spirit of the sea” is missing: “In the Zone might have happened just as well, if less picturesquely, in a boarding house of munitions workers.” Other letters suggest that he was also embarrassed by the play’s success on the vaudeville circuit. Nevertheless, this one-act play continued to be popular during O’Neill’s lifetime and, today, it is still frequently staged by community theater companies. In the Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, Robert M. Dowling calls it one of O’Neill’s “stronger early works” and notes, “Scholars generally do not share O’Neill’s grim estimation of In the Zone’s artistic merit. . . . Even his most unforgiving critics have been drawn to the play’s ‘smooth and effective’ tempo and technical strengths.”

One bizarre biographical irony is that O’Neill and his friend Harold DePolo were arrested as German spies in Provincetown in spring 1917, when the two little-known newcomers were seen by local residents taking long walks along the beach, occasionally toting a black box (which was almost certainly O’Neill’s typewriter). Yet O’Neill and his friends insisted that he had finished the play, with its eerie parallels, before this real-life incident occurred—further proof that life does imitate art.

SCENE—The seamen's forecastle. On the right above the bunks three or four portholes covered with black cloth can be seen. On the floor near the doorway is a pail with a tin dipper. A lantern in the middle of the floor, turned down very low, throws a dim light around the place. Five men, Scotty, Ivan, Swanson, Smitty and Paul, are in their bunks apparently asleep. It is about ten minutes of twelve on a night in the fall of the year 1915. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Man Who Came to Dinner With George Kaufman Directing

Morton Eustis (1905–1944)
From The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Interesting Links

Laurence Maslon on Kaufman & Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner (Reader’s Almanac)

What George S. Kaufman learned from the Marx Brothers (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “Audience Tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea,” Elia Kazan
• “Stage Struck,” Channing Pollock

Buy the book
The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner
Over 850 pages of history, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and parody
List price: $40.00
Sale price: $14.00

Pullman Company advertisement featuring Alexander Woollcott, 1940.

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Seventy-three years ago this week, on October 16, 1939, one of Broadway’s most successful comedies made its debut. The Man Who Came to Dinner was supposed to have premiered at the Music Box a week earlier, on October 10, but the opening was delayed while George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart hurriedly rewrote the third act, adding a new scene. Although the play—as well as its subsequent film and radio adaptations—continues to delight audiences, modern-day theatergoers may not be aware that various characters in the play are satirical portraits of real-life celebrities, including such household names as Harpo Marx and Noël Coward. As Laurence Maslon explains:

Its main character, Sheridan Whiteside, was transparently based on one of the most dramatic, infuriating, and improbable celebrities of the era between the wars: Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was a drama critic, raconteur, radio host, essayist, and charter member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, but that barely suggests his influence then on middlebrow culture. He was a tastemaker of popular fiction on a scale that would have made Oprah Winfrey’s encomiums seem like fortune cookie messages. His barbed wit would have sliced Simon Cowell for breakfast. . . .

Famous coast-to-coast by 1938 as the host of a radio show called The Town Crier, Woollcott regaled his audience with an idiosyncratic mix of stories, reviews, and personal predilections. Although he could be quite vicious, Woollcott had a wide sentimental streak and often devoted broadcasts to wrongly convicted murderers, war veterans, seeing-eye dogs—and, of course, Christmas. Eventually, Woollcott fancied himself an actor and demanded that his pals Kaufman and Hart concoct a play for him. It wasn’t difficult to put the melodramatic Woollcott on stage—what to do with his character once he got there was another matter.

Although the idea for a play based on Woollcott’s “character” came from Woollcott himself, he eventually removed himself from the production. Hart and Kaufman were wondering how to pursue the project when Woollcott visited Hart’s home for an overnight stay, treating the members of the household abhorrently and complaining the entire time. Aghast, Hart described the nightmarish guest to Kaufman and wondered aloud how horrible it would have been if the Woollcott had been injured and had to stay there the whole summer.

Thus was born the central premise of what became the final play. The show would prove to be a huge hit, featuring Monty Wooley in the lead role and running on Broadway for 739 performances—“an exceptionally long run in 1939–40,” notes Jared Brown in his biography of Hart.

And what did Woollcott think of Kaufman and Hart’s biting portrait of him as an unbearably cantankerous misanthrope? In short, he loved it. When the play went on its West Coast tour, he even stepped into the lead role, treating audiences to the sight of a celebrity acting as a satirical version of a character based on his own public persona. At the end of one performance, cheered on by repeated curtain calls, Woollcott riffed off one of his character’s signature lines from the play and announced to the audience that he planned to sue the authors for $150,000.

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‘All right, Mr. Kaufman?’ the stage manager asks. . . . ‘Yes, any time you’re ready.’ . . . George S. Kaufman has a whispered colloquy with Monty Woolley. He stands centre stage surveying the green living-room-hall in Mesalia, Ohio, which Donald Oenslager has designed for The Man Who Came to Dinner. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Stage Struck

Channing Pollock (1880–1946)
From The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Also of Interest
“Channing Pollock: The American Theatre’s Forgotten Polemicist,” William Grange, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (PDF via UNL’s digital commons)

Interview with Laurence Senelick, the editor of The American Stage (PDF, The Library of America)

Buy the book
The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner
Over 850 pages of history, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and parody

Detail from “The malignant disease,” illustration by Warren Rockwell for Channing Pollock’s “Stage Struck.” The whole illustration, along with three others by Rockwell, is included in the PDF for the selection.

The theater bug. If you haven’t been afflicted personally, you almost certainly know somebody who has. Channing Pollock, in his various capacities as playwright, critic, press agent, and lecturer, had met hundreds of “plumbers, waitresses, floor-walkers and cloak-models” suffering from stage fever and struggling to make the lucky break that would lead to fame, accolades, and fortune.

Pollock knew well the ups and downs of Broadway. He was sixteen when he became assistant drama critic at The Washington Post, and twenty-three when he was hired as press agent for the Shubert organization, “even though the Shuberts knew little more of drama and literature than cows know of the albuminous content of milk.” As a playwright, he enjoyed his greatest successes during the 1920s, chief among them The Fool (1922). But, his modern-day champion William Grange notes in a 1987 appreciation (see “Interesting Links”), Pollock was a believer in plays that speak to members of “church groups, P.T.A. luncheons, women’s clubs, and garden parties”—those who lived outside Manhattan—and he waged war against the “sophisticates” of the Algonquin Round Table and The New Yorker. It was inevitably an uneven match, his critics—led particularly by Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Brooks Atkinson—destroyed his career as a playwright with their persistently withering attacks.

Pollock’s “diagnosis” of stage fever, written early in his career and reproduced here with the original illustrations by Warren Rockwell, describes the stories of some of the wannabe actors and actresses he and his colleagues met outside the theater or on the road. He takes a scornful, mocking view of the talentless, stage-struck members of community theater groups and acting programs, from telephone operators to society women, from naval officers to silk importers—many of whom probably made up the very audience for his later plays.

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“From the stern life of an officer in Uncle Sam’s Navy to a merry job carrying a spear in the chorus of a musical comedy may be a far cry”, but that is the step which a metropolitan newspaper recently recorded as having been taken by a young man named in the story whose beginning is quoted above. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.