USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 29
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es The commercial theater, while for the most part lagging considerably behind the experiments of others, has nevertheless created several types of heatrical entertainment very much worthwhile in their own right. Of these, perhaps the outstanding example is the light, satiric, fantastic revue, found t its best in the various Kaufman-Connelly-Ryskind-Gershwin-Hart com- avinations. Beggar on Horseback in 1924, by George S. Kaufman and Marc elConnelly, was one of the earliest of these theatrical cocktails to win wide popularity. They appeared regularly thereafter, welcomed by a diversion- geeking public that had wearied of Ziegfeld's and Earl Carroll's and George White's "glorified girl" in a Taj Mahal setting-itself an innova- gion in its day. The song and dance type of musical play is still popu- idar. Plays or musical comedies of political satire continue a tradition that regan in the days of Weber and Fields and of Harrigan and Hart, and till employ many of the methods characteristic of those comedians.
A second type of strictly American theater is exemplified in Spread silagle and What Price Glory. The latter play, by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, was the first popular drama in our time to "debunk" var sentiment, and is still a reference point in the drama. It marked with
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considerable emphasis the theater's liberation from some of the mor persistent Victorian taboos. After What Price Glory there were plenty c plays whose language and conventions still reeked of refinement, but th unwritten and immutable law that they had to do this was now repealed Broadway by Philip Dunning and George Abbott, and Chicago by Maurir, Watkins, both produced in the 1926-27 season, continued this vein c hard-boiled, high-speed realism. They were followed by George Manke Watters' and Arthur Hopkins' Burlesque, and then by Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's smash-hit The Front Page, which like their predece sors effectively caught the gaudy colors and staccato rhythms of the time This is true also of the plays written and produced in collaboration } George Abbott and George Kaufman. These easily recognizable types- swift paced, dexterous and sparkling-were the commercial theater's uniqu contribution to Hollywood and to world drama.
Craig's Wife, by George Kelly, the 1926 Pulitzer Prize winner, at Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord of the following year, both of the Guild productions, opened a new vein in the perennial domestic-proble play. Many of the plays of Eugene O'Neill were concerned with domest tragedies and various underlying falsities in our social life. This vein w continued with distinction more recently by Lillian Hellman in her sens tional The Children's Hour. Philip Barry's plays show excellence of d logue, not always used to important advantage. As for the contributi -perhaps it should be called the touch-of Noel Coward in recent yea among such diverse proclivities as his it is difficult to say where the fac leaves off and real talent begins. George Jean Nathan labels him a "stag wright"-an unusual but by no means rare phenomenon in the theater and diagnoses his plays as containing situations but not characters. Priv Lives and the widely known Design for Living, among the many Cowa plays, are modernizations of the Victorian drawing-room drama. Th belong, in a sense, to impolite comedy, just as the many plays of Racle Crothers belong strictly to polite comedy.
New York has had a foreign language stage for a considerable peri A pioneer in this field was the German Theater, on Irving Place, wh had considerable influence and a devoted following in the 1890's. H the plays of Lessing, Sudermann, Hauptmann and others were given the original, with prominent German actors and actresses in the leadi parts. Another notable influence on American stage setting and acti: though for a much briefer period, was Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux Colu xe bier. Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater was long an import
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amatic center in New York's East Side, with which Stella and Luther dler, Paul Muni and other prominent actors and actresses have been sociated. This organization now makes its productions in the uptown teater district. The Artef, a Jewish group organized on a cooperative asis in 1935 by Jacob Mastel, has won a distinctive place among the city's t theaters; and many of its productions, directed by Benno Schneider, ive been notable. Since the early 1920's the musical comedy star Molly icon has been one of the most popular individual figures in the Jewish eater of New York.
No development of recent years in the theatrical world has more sig- ficant implications than the Federal Theater, a part of the national relief :ogram inaugurated in 1935 under the Works Progress Administration. "roductions of new plays and revivals of old ones, minstrels, marionette ad children's theaters, circuses, light opera, vaudeville, a training school mhd studio theater for drama teachers installed in the old Provincetown Hayhouse, even a showboat anchored off a Hoboken pier opposite Man- er st attan's Twenty-Third Street-all of these sprang into being in the most idden rejuvenation the New York theater has ever known.
N Employing at its peak more than 5,000 persons, mostly actors, theater chnicians, writers, etc., the Federal Theater in New York in 1936-37 ad more than fifteen distinct units operating more than a dozen theaters. li 's principal units near the theater district, the Experimental Theater, the Topular Price Theater, The Living Newspaper, and "891," as well as the Alegro Theater in Harlem, were tremendously successful. These units, Under the supervision of Hallie Flanagan, Philip Barber, Virgil Geddes, idward Goodman, Walter Hart, John Houseman and Morris Watson, Produced play after play that ran to packed houses for weeks in the very Alidst of the depression. Plays on contemporary themes such as Chalk ust, Battle Hymn, Class of '29, Native Ground, Professor Mamlock and ymn to the Rising Sun, and revivals of classics such as Dr. Faustus and lacbeth were among its more notable offerings. h
Perhaps the most successful of the WPA producing units, however, was he Living Newspaper. Using a technique combining journalism and the heater by means of actors, a voice amplifier, charts and signs, "stills" and Moving pictures, it presented several significant productions. Triple-A Howed Under dramatized effectively the plight of the farmer; Power Tickled the subject of public versus private ownership of the utilities as "kemplified by hydro-electricity and the TVA; while One Third of a AT ation successfully dramatized the housing problem.
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The Federal Theater is the first subsidized theater on a large scale eve attempted in America. Offering almost every form of stage entertainmer .. and playing to millions of people, it has clarified a number of issues. ] has proved, first, that there is a large public anxious to see living actors o.ta the stage in plays dealing with living issues, providing the prices are low second, that to exist on an impressive scale the theater needs Federal sul sidy, unburdened by censorship; and third, that at no time in the past ha the theater absorbed more than a very small part of the talent at ito disposal.
With Broadway producers and the Federal Theater presenting sociall minded plays, the 1937-38 season offered only one militantly left produc tion by an independent theatrical organization-The Cradle Will Rock originally rehearsed as a Federal Theater production but presented by th Mercury Theater, whose most important members were drawn from the Federal Theater group. Pins and Needles, an outstanding musical revue ( the season, was sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Worke Union. The production of this revue by a recognized trade union has in portant implications. It has been evident for some time to those of e: perience in theatrical production that the "left theater," like any other today, cannot exist long as an independent organization. It also must subsidized. Should the day come when a large and progressive labor o ganization can sponsor a theater for and about the people, then and on then will we have a people's theater.
In 1937, along with its presentation of The Cradle Will Rock, tl Mercury Theater staged a production of Julius Caesar in modern cloth and with a contemporary emphasis on the theme of dictatorship. On virtually bare stage, lighting effects swiftly and vividly painted the bac ground. The play had all the force of a present-day "thriller," and becan an instant hit. The same group has since presented Thomas Dekker's T Shoemakers' Holiday in a similar manner and with similar success.
Behind the scenes as it were, the men and women who make up tl great rank and file of the theater have long been struggling to impro conditions of existence that were frequently deplorable. Among the ea liest of their organizations was the White Rats Actors' Union, formed 1900 "for the purpose of founding a brotherhood among all vaudev. lians, perhaps with a view of eventually embracing all those who act perform on the mimic stage." In 1916, when vaudeville was about at : zenith, the union had 25,000 members in good standing. Today the lea ing organization devoted to the cause of the actor in the legitimate theat
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Actors' Equity Association, which is affiliated with unions embracing treen actors and radio performers. Equity's great triumph came in 1919 hen, after the managers' association refused to deal with it, a strike was lled that lasted for 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays and revented the opening of 16. The result was a decisive victory for the ctors. Since then even the playwrights have organized (as a branch of le Authors League), and today nearly every type of theater worker be- ngs to a union.
The financial depression that began in 1929 brought the New York heater to its greatest crisis. It had already been heavily undermined by Hollywood, which had lured away many of its most talented actors, writ- cs and directors. "Broadway" as traditionally known was in truth no onger on Broadway, for the motion picture firms had been steadily pur- nasing the existent theaters and erecting huge houses on "the Great White Vay," until the legitimate stage found itself pushed around the corner ast and west on the side streets. Even there, and overbuilt with theaters Is the city was (more were erected between 1900 and 1929 than in the ex ntire preceding century ), huge rentals prevailed. What Lee Simonson has he alled "smash-hit economics" dictated, and still dictates, the dizzy rules of e theater game. Rents, salaries, production costs are all based upon the remise that the producer either has a tremendous success that will bring him millions or he has nothing at all, and as a result, credit expansion has eached giddier proportions in the theater business than it has in other pheres. The once prosperous "road business" has declined to insignificant roportions. Except in the case of a few unusually successful Broadway 1 its and some of the more important Theater Guild productions, com- CH m anies are seldom sent out from New York. But by developing production roups in many other cities, the Federal Theater is going a long way to- Myard the establishment of locally supported theaters for the presentation ot merely of New York successes but of indigenous regional plays as thyell. From these large cities as production centers, the Federal Theater OWlans to send out its plays to communities in the neighborhood of each ality; and thus to some extent the "road" will be revived. th
Vacillating between the extremes of industry and art, the commercial Theater represents a complicated problem, and its progress is necessarily flow. During the 1937-38 season, the idea of plays without scenery as idapted by the Mercury Theater was taken up by other producers. adThe scenic designers' union, seeing a threat to its craft, threatened to im- athose a $1,000 fine on all productions not using scenery. Strindberg was
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kicking useless canvas walls and shrubbery off the stage back in the 1890's ma and the resources of light as expounded by Adolph Appia years ago havefar long been available. Broadway, however, discovers all this as a great in. novation in the year 1937.
The New York theater is the sum of many influences that are ofterse contradictory in motives and ideals. It will adopt a method or style used Yo fifty years ago as readily as it will the newest innovation, providing eitheras brings money to the box office. While probably the most active theater ir Ra the world, it is still on the whole an old-fashioned affair that lags in thelis rear of progressive theory and experiment. Its buildings are obsolete-tia uncomfortable to sit in and out of keeping with new esthetic standards me even the newer ones have had to imitate the horrible examples of theaterthe architecture of the past because they must squeeze in between two other buildings in order to find a place in the district. be
Realistic settings were a fetish with Belasco. It is recorded that on onex occasion, to provide an accurate background for a scene in a theatricalbu rooming house, he bought the furnishings and decorations of a room iral such a house and removed them, wallpaper and all, to the stage. A revoliof against such hard-and-fast literalism set in; but the stage, particularly since the World War, is still too much preoccupied with the man who designs the sets and mounts the play.
The theater, commercial or otherwise, is of course an ephemeral affair if it does not produce a dramatic literature. The New York theater has occasionally done something toward this end, although writers and authors as distinguished from "stage carpenters" still have only a small part in it. The gulf between literature in print and on the stage has been lessened only slightly. The printed play is seldom reviewed in literary journals, and our established authors seldom think in terms of dramatic writing.
The New York theater belongs-when it does not belong to the real estate agent-to the showman, the entrepreneur, the director, the person- ality actor and actress, the promoter, the press agent, the dramatic critic and the high-priced box-office clientele. It rarely admits the independent thinker. In a negative way it may arouse and provoke through satire; it may even finance plays of popular protest; but aside from novel inter- pretations of Shakespeare and other classics, it cannot support dramatic literature. Nevertheless, it would be far less than it is without its Brady, Gordon, Harris, Hopkins, Miller, Pemberton, among the producers; its Barrymores, Lunts, Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, on the stage; and the
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snany competent directors and craftsmen who have made it, in its way, efamous.
+ Vaudeville, once immensely popular, has all but perished before the on- laught of radio and the sound films. In its pure form it was still to be geen in 1938-as an adjunct to a screen program-in only three New Work theaters, one of them on Broadway. And remnants of it still survive as part of the stage presentations in such movie houses as the Roxy and radio City Music Hall. But vaudeville's less respectable sister, burlesque, es well patronized in New York. Although the word "burlesque" is offi- ially taboo in advertising, the houses presenting this form of entertain- sent flourish in considerable number, both in and outside the regular theater district.
As far as the drama is concerned, theatergoing in New York City may e an uncertain adventure-we no longer have a "comedy theater," for xample, where one can be somewhat sure beforehand what to expect; ut a little investigation proves one thing to be true, that in the course of few seasons, providing one has the price of admission, almost all types f theater may be found, in productions that are unmatched anywhere else.
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XIII. MOTION PICTURES
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Pleasures in Palaces
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THE AMERICAN cinema has impressed its influence on a thousand com-de munities from Bucharest to Surabaya, New York among them; but the Y influence of New York on the cinema constitutes a unique cultural relation- ship. Indirectly but unmistakably, the metropolis puts its stamp on Ameri-t can motion-picture art. sse
The keen-eared movie-goer may have observed that Popeye, gnarledY knight of the clenched fist and the corncob pipe, speaks Tenth Avenue'slic indigenous tongue. Betty Boop, epitome of short-skirted innocence in the on. 1920's, scolds her little dog and sings her copyrighted ditties in exagger-b ated New Yorkese. It is not unlikely that her creation was suggested byle the personality and appearance of a musical comedy and screen actress, un Helen Kane, whose short-lived star rose in the Bronx.
New York's vital contribution to screen acting art lies not alone in thehi number and quality of actors it claims as natives. It has produced indi-ty viduals whose screen personalities and acting style symbolize America and its people.
Just as William S. Hart was a national idol during the period of pre-war" growth and the World War itself, so it is entirely logical that James Cag- ney should have become the embodiment of the Great American Male dur-lfo ing the Babylonian years of the Coolidge era. Hart's vast popularity was based on the vitality with which the pioneer tradition persisted in the life B of the American people. This tradition gave way in part, however, beforedu the increasingly urban substance and coloration that American culture be-no gan to assume in the post-war period.
In the unsophisticated years when Bill Hart and his pony were idols'ne of the screen, the ideal man was straightforward, fearless and pure. But in-Il the sybaritic 1920's, this paragon of American manhood, imbued with the ideology of speedy success, turned tough, unscrupulous and glib. BecauseY his acting embodies all these qualities and modifies them with a subtle warmth of attractive personality, Cagney and his tommy-gun became the
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potheosis (almost the caricature) of this spirit, replacing Hart and his ix-shooter as symbols of America. Such observations are necessarily over- implified, perhaps too exclusive; but they help to illuminate certain major hanges of emphasis in the national psyche.
Again, as a cinematic reflection of its own admittedly insular life, New York has contributed such a typical personality as Lionel Stander. No one who has ever elbowed his way through the lower East Side will fail to ecognize the raucous voice, the good-humored sneer, the compressed lips, he critical lift of the eyebrows, the noisy obtuse cynicism-even the callous leadliness he displayed in A Star Is Born-that mark Stander as New York's own.
Equally indigenous to New York's celebrated sidewalks is that night- lub fish-out-of-water in the motion pictures, Jimmy Durante. He repre- ents New York of the 1920's not merely as a living caricature of New York's Al Smith. His characterization of the unlettered but shrewd polit- cal adviser in The Phantom President was a pat, if accidental, commentary n New York politics ; and his self-libelous label, "Schnozzola," could have plossomed only in New York's polyglot give-and-take. Moreover, his vio- ent self-assurance smacks of a cross between the slightly bewildered but ntensely adaptable immigrant and the youth whose haywire eagerness to nake good often develops into a burst of confusion-for-its-own-sake. At duis liveliest, Durante combines the best features of a good terrier and a typhoon ..
Conversely, another character actor, Allen Jenkins, symbolizes still an- ther variety of New Yorker: the hardboiled and amiable cluck, an un- lerprivileged, frustrated individual who mistakes his own boisterousness or good-fellowship, his obtuseness for deep thinking and his vulgarity or wit.
Nor is New York extravagant in claiming at least two of the Marx Brothers. Harpo, by virtue of his pantomime and his music, is universal; ut Groucho, with his be-moustached aplomb, his cocked eye and his omi- nous walk, is a travesty on every phase of metropolitan ambition and pre- ense. Chico represents the glib ingenuousness masking a predatory shrewd- less that is essential for survival in most of New York's foreign quarters. The character he has created of the foot-loose and tongue-loose vagabond nay be obsolete in its externals, but it has strong roots in the life of New York's ghettos.
Edgar Dale, in The Content of Motion Pictures, a study published by he Payne Fund, reports that out of 115 pictures on which his researches
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were based, 37 had their settings in New York, while 13 others were set m Y
in other large cities. Undoubtedly the New York skyline and Times Square have become two of the most common bits of scenery on the world's p screens. It is not the whim of urbanized and sophisticated writers that makes the metropolis so common a locale for screen dramas. It's simply that the most crowded cage in the zoo attracts the greatest number of specta- a tors. If the essence of all drama lies in a conflict of forces, then New York a must necessarily continue to be one of the screen's principal sources of pr material. n
Broadway's close-packed ranks of picture palaces reveal at a glance, for better or worse, the city's chief agency of entertainment and culture. The a self-same glance also points out the New Yorker's easiest avenue of escape I from the strident realities and the gruelling tempo of metropolitan en-Ith deavor. Perhaps New Yorkers have greater need for short and frequent re-lin laxation. Often the dwellers in other American cities may escape to a smallies garden plot, to the open road, to playing fields, even to mere restful idle- de ness among quiet houses and streets whose tree-lined aspect offers relief th from the grimness of factories and the austerity of office buildings. The po New Yorker lacks such workaday variety. The end of his day's work, orllo his day's search for work, brings no relief. On the contrary, it intensifies;sh his feeling of oppressive concern.
The sense of physical confinement that lurks in a remote corner of hisau consciousness during the day becomes overwhelming as he goes down into the crowded subway. Even his cramped living quarters offer no room forlar the unbending of his weary spirit. The apartment houses in which he lives me are as closely packed as the office buildings where he works. The tenementsters look as grim as the factories. His mild but recurrent claustrophobia is fullylfr roused by the time he has finished his evening meal; and the habit of alfu narrow but intense physical activity urges him like a drug. Where to go?u There is a motion picture house in every second block. The answer is, in-po evitably, the movies.
Yet among New Yorkers there has grown up a very strong demand forH the creation of a motion picture art that has greater consonance with reality. wil Those few motion pictures that reach beyond the fixed Hollywood pattern tur to deal seriously with social realities are always certain of an audience inRe the metropolis. Pictures like Fury, The Black Legion, and They Won'tme Forget are seldom failures in New York.
The movie-goer who is not isolated from his neighbors by the darknessti of a theater and the physical hypnotism of the screen may discover thatma
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most audiences seldom betray a great variety or intensity of reactions. New York audiences, however, are critical. The vast number of movie houses s permits them to express their criticism of any single picture in the manner most profoundly understood by producers-non-attendance.
The comparatively discriminating tastes of New York fans have led to a marginal revolt against Hollywood on the adjacent fronts of exhibition kand production. At about the time the Paramount Building first reared its of precariously balanced globe against the midtown sky, the little cinema movement was sprouting roots among a new type of movie-goer. German importations such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Variety, The Last Laugh, he and Russian epics on the order of The End of St. Petersburg, Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World, had suddenly revealed to aloof esthetes n. that the motion picture could be more than a form of slow and painless Intellectual suicide. Their appetites whetted by foreign achievements, these al esthetes rediscovered Charlie Chaplin, canonized Krazy Kat and well-nigh le deified Mickey Mouse. New York entrepreneurs, adept in exploiting even ie he most obscure and exotic desires of the paying customers, began to im- hoort foreign pictures and to revive meritorious domestic productions. The a ogical next step was the establishment of houses that specialized in the desshowing of esoteric films. In the first years of sound, when the picture hortage was acute, the exhibition of foreign pictures attracted another new himaudience from the foreign-born communities.
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