Meat Show Meeting

(See front cover--)

The heart of U. S. show business is Manhattan's Times Square, and the Astor Hotel is "The Heart of Times Square." There the First Convention of the Legitimate Theatre assembled last week. Sponsored by the American Theatre Council, the meeting was like nothing that ever came out of show business before. Everybody was there. The playwrights were led in by Sidney Howard of the Dramatists' Guild, the actors by Frank Gillmore of Actors' Equity. Marcus Heiman of the League of New York Theatres marshaled the producers and for four days these and hundreds of pressagents, critics, voice teachers, stage hands, scene designers, all sorts of people from both sides of the footlights packed the Astor ballroom to lunch, dine, and discuss What is Wrong with the Theatre and what to do about it.

Since Aeschylus the Theatre's incipient collapse has been frequently forecast and occasionally, as in England from Sheridan to Pinero, the Theatre has been prostrate for long periods. While realistic observers at the Astor did not consider the U. S. Theatre's case hopeless, nevertheless the fact that as many as 1,000 people, most of whose livelihoods stem from the stage, should formally assemble to consider its condition, indicated a state of affairs grave indeed.

Actress Helen Hayes (Victoria Regina) worded her address of welcome solemnly: "The Council feels that perhaps the theatre has been backward in meeting new conditions, in adapting its methods to a changed and changing world. It may be that [workers in the theatre] have not been sufficiently wide awake; they have not seized or created opportunities to resort to strategy and salesmanship; to develop new audiences; to stimulate dramatic output and to reshape the physical conditions in existing theatre. Much ground may have been lost but one proven fact remains and that fact is thoroughly encouraging: THE DEMAND FOR DRAMA THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY TODAY EXCEEDS THE AVAILABLE SUPPLY."

Dreamy Actress Jane Cowl glided forward to give the delegates a 23-word "benediction": "The important thing is to keep this thing that was handed down to us from the Greeks and before that --going. Bless you."

"This Thing" whose home is the square mile radiating from Broadway and 45th street and whose seasonal output (June 1 to May 31) constitutes for all practical purposes the nation's drama, has not, by standards established in the past, made an impressive showing for 1936-37.

Theatrical statisticians, appraising the season mathematically as it ended last week, found that a total of 83 new plays had been presented in the past twelvemonth--six less than in 1935-36, 30 less than in 1934-35. Average life of a Broadway show in 1936-37 was 48.2 performances, against 58.7 the season before. And in the 1936-37 season there were nine less "hits" (100 or more performances) than in the preceding season.

In spite of the fact that for the past seven years Broadway has not seen so much fun money as it has since last autumn, of the bare dozen 1936-37 productions entitled to serious consideration, none was a play of first importance. Noel Coward's cycle of nine short pieces proved nothing but his astonishing virtuosity; Maxwell Anderson's Masque of Kings was a sincere and moving melodrama; Clare Boothe's The Women was perceptive reportage; Tovarich, the early season comedy success, left its audiences with a smile; and Room Service, the farce which wound up the season, will leave them with aching sides for months to come. The outstanding characteristic of 193 6-3 7's commercially or artistically most successful productions, however, was their gentleness. Excursion, Having Wonderful Time, Johnny Johnson, High Tor (the New York Drama Critics' Circle prize play) and You Can't Take It With You (the Pulitzer Prizewinner) all are quiet little plays dealing in one way or another, but always gently and wistfully, with some pathetic or defeated aspect of modern life. Significantly, three are fantasies. The Theatre did not have sufficient vigor to deliver itself of a single milestone-making drama, one that would alter the shape of plays to come or set off a cycle of imitations. There was no What Price Glory (1924), no Broadway (1926), no Cradle Song (1927), no Strange Interlude (1928), no Journey's End (1929), no Green Pastures (1930), no Grand Hotel (1931). On Broadway in 1936-37, this thing which Miss Cowl and others inherited from the Greeks was still going, but it was not going very fast or in a very exciting direction.

The Troubles, Show people are by profession gamblers and artists, amiable, tolerant, sentimental, easygoing. The first national convention of the Nation's showfolk could hardly be expected to address its problems as practically and unemotionally as a congress of physicists. At the Astor even the loudspeaker had a tendency to go haywire. Extemporaneous spokesmen were prone to end elliptical sentences with hopeful gestures of the hand and those who had prepared their talks showed a marked propensity for digression. But there was no shyness among them and as the four days wore on, many a distinguished theatre worker suggested a pet remedy for his pet theatrical evil.

Oldtime producer Brock Pemberton (Strictly Dishonorable), whose Red Harvest and Now You've Done It, presented last winter, lasted about as long as a bicycle race, thought that the trouble with the theatre was its critics. "Why must we let the critics in?" he asked. "It's been proved by law that we can keep them out." He suggested that producers be given the option of having their plays criticized or reported merely as news events. Thus was warmed up the only heated discussion of the convention. "I do not know of a single publisher who would submit to that kind of dictation," snorted the New York News's Veteran Burns Mantle. "Whenever the theatre likes its critics, it will be dead," intoned the Journal's able John Anderson.

No business takes so little interest in its customers as show business. There is no redress for the spectator who is sold a poor evening's diversion. For a good evening, he must pay a large premium above the regular price of the ticket. Box-office employes are notoriously discourteous, seats are old-fashioned and uncomfortable, scarcely a dozen of Manhattan's 76 theatres are air conditioned. Few managers are farsighted enough to try to build audience good will which would ultimately benefit everyone in the business. An exception is Lawrence Langner, one of the directors of the Theatre Guild. At the Astor he proposed that money be raised to start a promotion bureau to bring the Theatre and its customers closer together and, incidentally, to fight legislation unfriendly to the stage.*

Abolition of the luxury tax on theatre tickets, more WPA, establishment of modern auditoria from coast to coast to accommodate better road shows, a revolving fund for producers, more summer theatres, free seats for proven drama lovers were all discussed. But the Theatre's overpowering problem, the one which came in for far greater attention than any other and was worried over, snarled at, solved and despaired of by much the most important people at the convention was, of course, HOLLYWOOD.

Competitor-Parasite-- For 20 years the legitimate theatre, that department of the entertainment industry which is professionally known as the "meat show," has been subject to a terrific handicap from the shadow show of cinema, first as a competitor, now as an all-consuming parasite. A cynical analysis of this situation was voiced early by sandy-haired, hot-headed Burgess Meredith, youngest featured actor on Broadway, who saluted the Broadway managers thus:

"You are behind the times. You are vestiges of a past era. For the time has come when Hollywood has taken your game and developed it into a big-time sport. ... If you were good enough promoters, you would not be here. You would be out there where negotiations run into big money. . . . Now something is wrong, so these Hoovers of Broadway call a meeting together to find out what they think."

The author of Actor Meredith's last two successes, Winterset and High Tor, quickly soothed managerial feelings. "The Theatre," said Maxwell Anderson, shaggy, amiable and prolific poetic dramatist, "has lived by its wits during most of its history. It will continue to live by its wits and to be the most important American art. . . . Governments tax it, scalpers scalp it, unions hold it up, dramatists quarrel with producers, moving pictures devour its children as fast as they appear--and still our theatre is the centre of civilization in New York and in the United States and quite amazingly, the foremost theatre of the world.

"Pictures are too ephemeral in time and material to create an art. The test of an art is endurance. . . . The films have as much chance against the Theatre as a celluloid cat chasing an asbestos rat through Hell."

The theatrical children which the films have been devouring most voraciously of late, and at greatest cost to the Theatre, are actors and playwrights. According to The Billboard, theatrical weekly, only one out of seven actors is engaged in more than one play a year, and the average 1936 Broadway production run was 5.12 weeks (TIME, April 5). Even long and successful performance of a part does not mean that an actor may not be out of theatre work for another five years. And when a part is secured and rehearsed, there is no certainty that the show will reach Broadway, or if so will stay there long. The films do not provide an actor with the intoxication of performing in front of a live audience--although repeating a part night after night is a great bore to some--but there is security in a long-term Hollywood contract and there is always fan mail. Result is the current Broadway axiom that it is harder to cast a play than write it. Of young, unproved talent there is plenty, waiting to be sped to the Coast the first time it shows its worth on the stage. But for weeks the Theatre Guild has been looking high & low. in vain, for a mature U. S. male to play the lead in Sidney Howard's The Ghost of Yankee Doodle.

A pat proposal for keeping actors on Broadway came from Actor Kenneth Mac Kenna: let the producers make a pool from which to pay a group of actors annual salaries, which would be welcome even though lower than their present weekly rates, and draw on their services as needed.

Ultimately the play's the thing, and the most serious aspect of the Theatre's trouble is the steady migration of playwrights to the film studios. Unless they are big names, playwrights who stick to the Theatre are likely to find themselves in much the same position as actors. The ablest two playwrights developed in the past five years, Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty] and Sidney Kingsley (Men in White}, are now in California, each having written his last Broadway hit in 1935. Nobody knows more about playwrights and playwriting than Sidney Coe Howard. Reporting last week to the convention as president of the Dramatists' Guild, he succinctly gave a playwright's-eye view of the undistinguished 1936-37 season, and what to do about it:

"We find that 17 established playwrights had plays on Broadway last season who have not this season, the reason being that they were in Hollywood.* The Dramatists' Guild has come to the conclusion in recent years that a new function is being forced upon it. Managers used to go out and hustle for plays; now they sit and wait for plays to be brought to them, and the playwrights are going to Hollywood. The result is that plays are not being written. The Dramatists' Guild is now making an effort to get plays written. Something has got to be done to arrest this play famine. We have the writers, but not the plays."

The First Convention of the Legitimate Theatre closed 36 hours after Mr. Howard's address. ("The Second National Convention of the American Theatre" continued for many more hours at Bleake's Artists & Writers Restaurant, the Herald Tribune's, saloon.) The amiable executive committee reported favorably on almost everyone's proposal, including one to meet again next year. But the one practical outcome of the four days' discussion was what Sidney Howard did about his own proposal to arrest the play famine. Before the convention closed he was able to announce, to a wildly appreciative audience, that fatherly Producer John Golden had given him five $1,000 fellowships with which to subsidize deserving playwrights --recipients to be selected by a five-man board of two producers, two writers and an editor./- Furthermore, said Mr. Howard, lie had eight more fellowships promised if could find another two to make it ten. Having done more than anyone else to turn the theatre's funeral into a confinement, Playwright Howard, who had got back from Hollywood only five days before, made a beeline for his writing desk at Tyringham, Mass.

Playwright's Playwright. During his four-week stay in Hollywood this spring, Playwright Howard's time schedule was characteristically methodical. Mornings he devoted to adapting Gone With The Wind for Producer David Selznick of United Artists. After lunch he worked on the set of The Prisoner of Zenda, polishing scenes to be shot that evening and next day. After dinner he and Associate Producer Merritt Hulburd conferred on an original he may later do for Goldwyn. This was not an unusual schedule for Sidney Howard. He is one of the most effectively organized workmen now making a living in the entertainment business. His incisive mind likes to condense rambling yarns like Dodsworth, of which he made stage and screen successes, and Gone With The Wind. Having ricocheted from Oakland, Calif, to Harvard (M. A. 1916), to War (captain, Aviation Service), to Life, in 1925 he won the Pulitzer Prize with a play about young marriage called They Knew What They Wanted. Since then he has put his name to 27 plays. Four have been collaborations, 13 have been adaptations or translations. He dictates the synopses to his faithful Secretary Mary Rennie, pencils the dialog in block letters on yellow paper.

If Nobel Prizeman Eugene O'Neill, busy for the past two years on a prodigious dramatic octet, is posterity's playwright, if Maxwell Anderson is a poet's playwright Sidney Howard is a playwright's playwright. Commonsense and order govern his muse just as they do his political opinions (he was once a Socialist) and private life, which he leads almost non-alcoholic-ally with his second wife Polly Damrosch (Musician Walter's third daughter) and three children.

Being a playwright's playwright and, at 45, a man with a serious social conscience he was persuaded to head the Dramatists'' Guild in 1935. In spite of his close Hollywood connections, he immediately set about revising the standard Guild playwright's contract so that now if a film company is the financial backer of a legitimate show, it must purchase the film rights at a price set by the author and a group of negotiators, or else let it-be sold in the open market. This clause prevents the film producer from taking unlimited advantage of his own rebate and from shutting out competitive bidding on the script from other film companies.

The fact that such a realistic practitioner as Sidney Howard continues to return from Hollywood season after season is, in the end, the soundest answer to croakers of the Theatre's doom. Like George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood and dozens of writers who make much or most of their incomes from the great bustling film industry, he knows that legitimate show business is not very big business, not even business. It is a gamble for all concerned and even the producer does not stand to make money in very large quantities. Gilbert Miller is delighted when Tovarich grosses $15,000 a week. George Abbott is lucky to get $12,000 out of Brother Rat. The only real money in show business comes occasionally from Hollywood, when a Goldwyn offers $160,000 for a Dodsworth or Columbia gets You Can't Take It With You for $200,000.

Playwright Howard also knows what really keeps the Theatre alive and always will. "We are all," he explained to his brother craftsmen last week, "stage-struck."

* Last month the New York Legislature, at the behest of the Catholic Church which had just helped close all Manhattan burlesque shows (TIME, May 10), hastily passed a certain Dunnigan Bill. This would have empowered New York City's Commissioner of Licenses to close, singlehanded, any play he considered "immoral," padlock the theatre where it was shown. Mobilized public sentiment persuaded Governor Herbert Lehman to veto the bill last fortnight.

*Among them, besides Mr. Howard himself: Bella & Samuel Spewack (Ethan Frame}, Lillian Hellman (The Children's Hour).

/-At week's end, accepting an honorary degree Doctor of Public Service) from Oglethorpe University (Atlanta), Producer Golden unburdened himself of some sentiments about his fellow producers which he had failed to give the convention:

"I make the statement without rancor, that he worst enemy of the Theatre today is the people of the Theatre. Perhaps the producers are most to blame -- the majority of them amateur or near-society dilettantes, night-club habitues, angel-backers and shoestring gamblers, (ith their slipshod, unmoral and, even worse, unprepared productions, messing up Broadway. . . ."

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