Aftershock: The Serious Reckoning

Post-war theater in Philadelphia reflected all the many serious issues the country was facing: Carmen Jones, A Streetcar Named Desire, Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Member of the Wedding  and Death of a Salesman all had tryout premieres in Philadelphia - among many others.

For a blog post on our website with additional information and images, go HERE

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

COPYRIGHT 2024 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome once again to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz. Our original theme music is composed by Christopher Mark Colucci.

So on this episode, as I promised, I’m going to cover the consequential tryout shows that came through Philadelphia in the years 1943 to 1950, and I’ll try to connect their story to that of the city itself, as it entered into the mid-20th Century. The city, as well as the American theater industry as a whole, was about to experience a serious aftershock in the wake of the seismic events of the past quarter century, including the First World War, Prohibition, the Great Depression and the Second World War. 

Even though this historical period began with a victory, of course America’s emergence as the great industrial and military power in the world was not without its consequences, as the generation of men and women who had literally been on the front lines of the fighting, returned to country with a political system that was still not living up to its own ideals of equality, justice and democracy. And, to their eyes, many of the buildings and artworks and music and (for our purposes) the theater that had once been fashionable and admired, now seemed horribly dated, especially in Philadelphia. 

Jois me once again as we set off, in the continuing story of our Season Three: The Tryout Town

[TRYOUT TOWN THEME MUSIC ]

We’ve mentioned in a previous episode how during the war years American commercial theater was booming, and especially how the team of Rodgers & Hammerstein were transforming American musicals. But Oscar Hammerstein II, the librettist and writer whose work on Oklahoma! had forever changed American musical theater, now lived in Doylestown Pennsylvania to the north of Philadelphia, and was simultaneously engaged in a particular passion project, along with Broadway arranger Robert Russell Bennett and director Hassard Short. He was transforming a classic French opera, George Bizet’s Carmen, into Carmen Jones. In his version, the action was moved to an army camp in North Carolina, and all the major characters were now African American.

Carmen Jones had its world premiere at the Erlanger Theater in Philadelphia on October 19th 1943, produced by the Broadway showman Billy Rose. Philadelphia critics and audiences alike all loved the show. On its triumphant opening night, reported Variety, the cast were not allowed to take encores or more than one curtain call, because the evening was running very late. Which was too bad, the critic thought, because the audience wanted to give them six or seven.

Few of the cast of Carmen Jones had never been on stage before, let alone in a major Broadway production. In the title role was soprano Muriel Smith, who four years previously had become the first Black student admitted to Philadelpia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Getting cast in the part of Carmen had allowed her to give up her day job working as a clerk in a Philadelphia factory. She would go on to share the role in the 14-month long Broadway run, and tour with it for several years more. She did finish up her degree at Curtis, however, graduating in the same class with Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern.

Muriel Smith eventually eventually had quite a career, including working with the American Negro Theatre in New York and in the cast of South Pacific in London. She eventually played Carmen in the original opera there, too.  Though she is perhaps not as well known as she should be, nowadays. Part of that was due to the fact that she was known to turn down roles that she felt were not beneficial to her people. (She didn’t care for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, for example.) And she was aware that all over America, just because African Americans were serving their country in the armed forces or in war production, they weren’t necessarily getting more respect or rights. Not without a fight anyway.  

In Philadelphia, as a case in point, there was the famous Transit Strike of 1944, when the entire public transportation system was shut down when unionized white workers refused to let Black workers be hired as trolley motormen. And though there was no real violence, industrial production was severely impacted when nobody could get to work. Eventually the federal government had to send in troops to ride the trolleys and eventually the white-led unions had to back down. By August of 1945 Philadelphians of all colors were thronging the streets together, in celebration of the end of the war.

Other situations elsewhere were more troubling, in 1946 a black serviceman in uniform named Isaac Woodward was attacked while riding a bus in South Carolina, and was thrown into prison where he had his eyes gouged out. It was an incident that galvanized the early Civil Rights Movement. But as millions and millions of soldiers came home, all over the country, there were already plays being produced which directly addressed serious social issues like this. If comedies and musicals had tended to dominate American theater during the war years, as soon as many troops returned home, dramas started to address what the nation had to deal with, now that it was the leader of the “Free World.” Even some musical revues, like Harold Rome’s Call Me Mister, took up the issue of the adjustments that servicemen, and the entire country would have to face.

September 10, 1945: The play Deep Are The Roots had its world premiere at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. The drama starred Barbara Bel Geddes and Gordon Heath, and was led by the rising young director Elia Kazan.

Inquirer critic Linton Martin hailed the play. "Right at the outset of the season,” he wrote, “an adult drama of impact, power, and importance has come to town." 

Deep Are the Roots was by the team of Arnaud d'Usseau and James Gow. It told the story of an African-American war hero who had returned to the Southern town where he grew up, in order to aid his community - and he becomes principal of the local Negro school. In the action he is unjustly accused of theft, but in the course of the investigation, his romance with the daughter of an aristocratic white family is revealed.

Linton Martin admitted to his readers that the show would be "strong meat" for many in the Philadelphia audience. But his positive review helped convince the producers to bring it immediately to Broadway, where it ran for 477 performances.

So, on the whole, the number of plays and musicals being produced for the commercial Broadway stage began to fall again in the post-war years. But there was a new seriousness of purpose and depth in a lot of work that was being produced. Here in Philly because of the Shubert Organizations’s iron grip on local theaters, that meant the Walnut or the Locust would usually see the serious (straight) productions on their way to New York, while the Erlanger or the Shubert would be chosen to host tryout musicals. No If any of those shows became hits, usually Philadelphia would see them again when they came around on national tours - but now they would play the Shubert’s premiere house, the Forrest Theatre on Walnut Street because of its larger audience capacity. This was the case, for example with the Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsay’s serious comedy about presidential politics, entitled State of the Union, which came through town at the Walnut starring Ralph Bellamy, in the fall of 1945, and then returned in a post-Broadway tour at the Forrest Theatre, but now with Conrad Nagel heading the bill in the fall of 1946.

Now you may not be familiar with the play State of the Union, but I bet you’ve heard of this next one, a landmark of American drama was also coming through Philadelphia, going through the typical series of Shubert-controlled theaters during its tryout tour. This play was set in New Orleans and featured a character named Stanley Kowalski, who was also a war veteran - although that fact was not a crucial feature of the play. Here’s how theater historian Andrew Davis described the production’s stay in Philly, in his invaluable 2010 book, America’s Longest Run: The History of the Walnut Street Theatre.
_______________

On November 17, 1947. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire opened for previews at the Walnut prior to its Broadway opening. Irene Mayer Selznick produced and Elia Kazan directed. The play arrived at the Walnut after tryouts in New Haven and Boston. Jessica Tandy starred as Blanche DuBois. The action was set in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where Blanche has come to stay with her sister, Stella, played by Kim Hunter, and her low-life husband, Stanley Kowalski, played by a relative newcomer, Marlon Brando.

 . . The Philadelphia critics immediately recognized the play as a landmark.  . . Reviewers focused mostly on Tandy.  . . It was Brando, however, who came to dominate the play, creating an iconic image in blue jeans and a white t-shirt. Costume designer Lucinda Ballard created that image by tailoring a t-shirt so that it was form-fitting and removing the pockets of his jeans. Of Brando, the Evening Bulletin observed "his transitions from animal brutality to a sort of crude affections are flowing, convincing, never jerked.”
________________
January 27, 1948: After an initial week at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, the new play Mister Roberts, starring Henry Fonda, opened in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theatre. Fonda had turned down several film roles to appear in the show, he cared about it so much.

The drama about a US Navy officer who longed for “real combat,” but all the time trapped in unimportant duty on an undistinguished ship during World War II, was written by Thomas Heggen, based on his own novel. Joshua Logan directed.

Also among the cast were David Wayne, who had left the show Finian’s Rainbow to do the role of the energetically amorous Ensign Pulver. William Harrigan played the overly controlling Captain who gets Mister Roberts’ goat.

In the week before the opening of Mister Roberts, a publicity photo was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer showing the actress Eva Marie Saint with Henry Fonda, in costume as the attractive nurse Lieutenant Girard. This was a mistake, however, as Eva Maire Saint had already been replaced by Jocelyn Brando in the role during rehearsals. Jocelyn was Marlon Brando’s older sister. Their mother, Dodie Brando, had in fact been the person who first persuaded a young Henry Fonda to take up acting in the first place, back in their hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Likely that’s how she’d gotten the job.

It was hard luck for one actress, but good news for another, who would soon be joining her brother on Broadway while Streetcar Named Desire was having its triumphant run. Because it was already clear to all that Mister Roberts would be a success as well. In his enthusiastic review - a piece that should have included a big Spoiler Alert Warning in it - critic Edwin H. Schloss praised the entire large cast of the show, writing:

“Henry Fonda is well cast as the quiet-spoken but dynamic Mister Roberts, the idealist with a sense of humor who finally manages to get his transfer to a combat vessel and (we are told in a sobering coda) meets the hero’s death he has courted.”

“David Wayne, who started his climb up the ladder as the leprechaun in ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ is practically perfect as the incorrigible Ensign Pulver. . . Jocelyn Brando, the sole feminine member of the company, as an army nurse, is slim and blonde enough to represent a sex-starved sailor’s dream.”

“But ‘Mister Roberts’ adds up to something bigger, better and funnier than its components. It offers a rarely exhilarating evening. Don’t miss it.”

After one more week of tryouts in Baltimore, Mister Roberts opened in New York at the Alvin Theatre in February of 1948. And although A Streetcar Named Desire ran for two years on Broadway, Mister Roberts ran for three years and over a thousand performances.

August 29th, 1948:  A letter from the author and director Eric Bentley, who was then a Professor at the University of Minnesota, was printed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, detailing his recent travels and work on translating and staging the plays of Bertolt Brecht. "Speaking of Brecht," he wrote,"I left Ohio for Pennsylvania where I directed Brecht's play The Caucasian Chalk Circle. What Minnesota thinks today, Pennsylvania does tomorrow."

Not only had Bentley translated and directed the first production of Brecht's play ever, but he had already staged it in a student production at Carleton College. Significant among the Carleton cast was Alvis Tinnin, who was rather older than most of his classmates, and was also the only Black member of the cast. Tinnin was not only a World War II US Army veteran, but also a veteran of the Broadway stage, having been in the company of the 1946 Harold Rome revue Call Me Mister about soldiers coming home from the war. Tinnin was now, in civilian life, a French major at Carleton.

Jasper Deeter and everyone else at the Hedgerow had been impressed with Eric Bentley's recent book, entitled The Playwright as Thinker, and Deeter had invited Bentley to stage his new translation as part of the Hedgerow company's 25th Anniversary season. Deeter acceded to Bentley's request that he be allowed to bring Alvis Tinnin along to play Azdak, as well as a young actress named Minnie Ball to play Grusha. But, because Deeter also wanted to maintain the integrity of his longtime acting company, he insisted that the two actors from Minnesotat share the roles with members of the company from Pennsylvania, and they would play the parts on alternating nights.

Furthermore, Deeter and Bentley decided not to include the Brecht's original prologue of the play, the one which shows the members of a Soviet cooperative farm deciding to tell the story of Grusha and how she ended up taking care of the Governor's baby during a revolution in medieval Georgia (or "Grusinia"). This framing device would have perhaps been seen as a little too politically provocative in an era when tensions were definitely rising between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle opened at the Hedgerow in repertory with other productions celebrating the company's quarter century of work. Because of the notoriety surrounding Brecht at the time, including the recent Broadway production of his Galileo, starring Charles Laughton, many major American publications sent critics down to the Hedgerow to see it. Harold Clurman even came down to write a review for the New Republic magazine, although he spent most of his review discussing Brecht, and not the Hedgerow production. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, for its part, was more interested in the events surrounding the collaboration between Bentley and the theater. In its review, it praised Tinnin and Brill, but said the play's "second act suffers in comparison with the first."

Eric Bentley himself, apparently, did not really care for the eventual result of the production at the Hedgerow, and he never mentioned it in his published memoirs. Bentley had also clashed with many members of the Hedgerow's company, whose long-honed 'naturalistic' acting methods clashed with what he regarded as the proper Brechtian acting style. Furthermore, Bentley had discarded most of the set designs of sculptor Wharton Esherick because they were too abstract, in his view. And the penny-pinching ways of the Hedgerow company, long used to working on a minimal budget, did not please Bentley either.

Nonetheless, as he left Philadelphia, Bentley told the Evening Bulletin that the Hedgerow company had something special in American theater of the day. "It has impressed me that there is something that ought to exist in the theater but doesn't - a group that works together as a team." The author then went off to Europe to meet with Bertolt Brecht himself. Brecht's own German-language production of his original text would be staged a few years later.

After Bentley had left, the Hedgerow company did not long maintain the play Caucasian Chalk Circle in its ongoing repertoire. A photograph of the final scene of the 1948 production, destined thereafter to be reproduced in many theater history textbooks, was mostly what remained. Alvis Tinnin's presence at the back - an African-American actor in the midst of an otherwise White cast - is rarely noticed.

Speaking of returning veterans . . . April 1949: The comedy Stalag XVII-B is produced by the Plays and Players Theatre in Philadelphia.

It was a very small event in the Philadelphia cultural calendar that week, true, hardly drawing any press attention. And at that time the Little Theater group did very little advertising. But a small item was printed in the Inquirer:

"The Plays and Players are particularly thrilled with the production they'll give starting tomorrow night at the Delancey St. playhouse and continuing through Saturday. For it's an original play. 'Stalag XVII-B' written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski around their experience in a German concentration camp."

It wasn't the very first production of the play, however. The two authors had actually written and staged the show in Stalag Seibsehn-B itself, as a way to relieve the doldrums of life as POWs. According to their account, the humorless German guards of the prison camp did not get any of the jokes, so they didn’t get into any trouble. When the camp was liberated, the pair had gone to Paris where they read the play to Broadway director, whom they ran into - Joshua Logan, as it happens. Logan encouraged the pair to keep working on it, saying that there was going to be plenty of demand for wartime dramas now.

It's not clear to me yet how the project ended up in Philadelphia in 1949.  But two years later, as just plain Stalag 17, it would be staged at the Lamb's Club in New York City, where it caught the interest of actor and director Jose Ferrer.  In May 1951 Stalag 17 became a surprise hit Broadway play. And in 1953 it became a movie starring William Holden. (And later, of course, it became the inspiration for the popular TV show Hogan's Heroes.)

Bevan and Trzcinski never wrote any other hit plays, but Bevan became one of the chief cartoonists for Sardi's Restaurant, doing caricatures of Broadway notables. Trzcinski had a cameo in the movie Stalag 17  - in which one of the prisoners reads a letter from his wife to a buddy, who’s sitting smoking a pipe on the bunk next to him:

“I believe it, I believe it!

“You believe what”

“My wife. She says: ‘Darling, you won’t believe it, but I found the most adorable baby on our doorstep, and I’ve decided to keep it for our very own. Now you won’t believe it, but it’s got exactly my eyes and nose.’ Why does she keep saying ‘I don’t believe it’? I believe it!  . . . . I believe it . .  [unconvincingly] I believe it.”

December 22, 1949: The Member of the Wedding, a play by Carson McCullers adapted from her own novel, opened at the Walnut Street Theatre. The director was Harold Clurman.

Issues of sexuality, gender identity, race, and mental illness were all explored in McCullers' drama, which would go on from its Philadelphia tryout run to have a year-long success at the Empire Theatre on Broadway.

The production starred the 24 year-old Julie Harris as the 12 year-old Frankie, a troubled adolescent growing up in a small Southern town. Frankie is clearly uneasy with her own changing body, and at the start of the play has recently chopped off most of her hair. Still, she is obsessed with gaining acceptance from other local teenagers, and she wants to be a leading figure in the upcoming wedding ceremony of her older brother.

In the role of Frankie's six year-old cousin John Henry was the child actor Brandon deWilde. (Brandon was also playing a character younger than himself - because deWilde was seven at the time.) John Henry is a loquacious little boy, inquisitive and artistic, and he too does not seem to adhere to gender norms - he happily plays with dolls and wears women's shoes on occasion.

Billed above the title of the play, and quite well-known to Philadelphia audiences already, was the singer and actress Ethel Waters. I’m so glad to get back to Waters, whom we first met in our episode about Philadelphia vaudevillians. Waters had started to perform in dramatic roles starting with Mamba’s Daughters, which had performed at the Forrest theater in January of 1940. In The Member of the Wedding, Waters was playing the role of Berenice, the household servant who acts as a sympathetic parental figure to the two odd children at the center of the play. She sees clearly how all three of them share a marginal position in the small Southern town.

Carson McCullers' play about social misfits seemed like an unlikely Christmas-season presentation of the Shuberts, who now owned the Walnut, but supposedly the Shuberts saw what a hot property they had. After its eventual prolonged run on Broadway, the play would be made into a Hollywood film which thankfully starred most of the original cast, including Harris, deWilde and Waters.  If you’ve seen this movie version, you may remember the scene where she embraces the two children and sadly sings to them - and eventually with them.

Inquirer critic Harry Murdock hailed the play in his review of December 23rd, 1949, saying it was “the one play that suddenly lights up the theater with a dramatic impact that makes the previous offerings, no matter how well written and acted, seem on the frail side." Murdock did carp a little about the play's length, however, which almost made him miss his deadline that evening, and his review did seem a little hastily written. Nevertheless, it had been a great night at the theater in Philadelphia.

That’s our show for today . .

But wait, wait . . .  hey, I hear you say, didn’t you skip something . . what about the most famous play to ever have its world premiere in Philadelphia: Arthur MIller’s Death of a Salesman??? Are you not going to cover that? Well yes, yes I am - let me just read briefly from Miller’s own memoir, entitled Timebends - in a passage in which he recalls going across the street from the Locust Street Theatre, where Salesman was about to have its first public performance, along with lead actor Lee J. Cobb and director Elia Kazan:

[NOTE: "TIMEBENDS" EXCERPT NOT TRANSCRIBED]

However, I have to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, this famous account of Death of a Salesman’s premiere in Philadelphia, the one I just read - is, in several important aspects, wrong - just not correct. There is more to know, and these are things you will not find in any theater history book, not anywhere. I, however, have written about the play’s Philly premiere for my upcoming book, but my publisher would have a fit - and justly so - if I just read it to you, and spilled the beans here on the public podcast.

BUT - if you’re dying to know what secret I’m holding back from you, I have recorded a bonus episode of my chapter about Death of a Salesman and put it on our Patreon Page - our patrons there can hear that story right now - and so can you! If you Become a supporter of the podcast. I know this is the part of the episode - right at the end - where everybody tunes out, or reaches for the fast-forward button on their podcast apps . . .but please .  would you consider it? You will really like this story - and all the extra stuff you can find there, as well as this preview about Death of a Salesman. I would be very grateful for your financial support, and I’m very excited about eventually sharing the results of my research about Death of a Salesman in public, as well as all the other stories that will be in the book. And, of course, you can wait and buy the book - and I’m sure that’s the solution my publishers would prefer, certainly. But consider becoming a Patreon patron of the show, and hear about it, right now.

I’m so grateful for all the feedback we’ve been getting from listeners lately! I’ve had so many lovely messages. But I can always use more - send me some! If you’ve been enjoying this season of the podcast, or have any thoughts or suggestions or compliments, drop us an email at AITHpodcast@gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you! I would love to hear from you. To support this show and to get access to bonus material and special insider information about Philly theater history, go to our Patreon page: Patreon dot com/AITHpodcast.  You can also leave reviews about the show on Apple Podcasts, you can follow us on Facebook and on Instagram and on Mastodon, where we post new material about Philadelphia theater history every single day.

This is Peter Schmitz, and the sound editing and engineering for this episode were all done by My Humble Self, right here at our studios in our World Headquarters high atop the Tower of Theater History. 

Thank you for listening to the show, and thank you for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]