by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s PBS Fall Arts Festival presentation was Act
One, a new play by James Lapine based on
Moss Hart’s 1957 memoir — though as the title suggests, Hart’s book covers only
the start of his theatrical
career, growing up in a Jewish-American family in the Bronx (though his dad affected a half-British,
half-Irish accent and tried to pass them off as goyim) and relating far more to his aunt Kate (Andrea
Martin) than either of his parents. Aunt Kate is a theatre buff who’s always
scraping together as much money as she can so she can see Broadway plays —
indeed, at the very beginning of the show she’s taken young Moss (Matthew
Schechter) to a production of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and Moss, age 11, is bitten by the theatre bug
forever. He’s determined to become an actor, and he manages to bluff his way
into a job as office boy for a cheap producer who puts together road companies
of plays for places as obscure as Green Bay, Wisconsin (which is far less
obscure now than it was then but only because of the pro football team headquartered there). Eventually he
writes a play, The Beloved Bandit,
in its spare time and persuades his boss to produce it — though he signed it
with a pseudonym and there are some anxious moments when his boss and the
boss’s partner (a widow who lost her husband on the Titanic) want to meet the mysterious playwright and sign a
contract with him, and Moss has to “out” himself as the author. Alas, The
Beloved Bandit closes after one week in
Rochester, beset with a set that’s falling apart, roof leaks in the theatre
that lead to the stage becoming wet in a rainstorm (I remember rainstorms!) and
the leading actor falling on his ass during the technical rehearsal, and the
clunky dialogue concocted by its first-time playwright.
Moss ends up losing his
job as an office boy and he and his three friends from the same gig (including
Edward Chodorov and Dore Schary, who also became major writers; Schary became a
film producer and studio head of MGM, and in 1963 he wrote, produced and directed the first film version of Act One, starring George Hamilton as Moss Hart and Jason
Robards, Jr. as George S. Kaufman) land a job writing and staging variety shows
at a resort in the Catskills, where Jewish New Yorkers who could afford it went
to spend their summers. Among the performers they have to deal with is an
excruciatingly out-of-tune singer attempting Fanny Brice’s hit “Second-Hand
Rose.” Moss Hart lands a part as Smithers in a production of The
Emperor Jones starring the Black actor
Charles Gilpin (for whom Eugene O’Neill wrote it and his other play with a
Black male lead, All God’s Chillun Got Wings) — though the actor playing Gilpin here is short,
stocky and hardly looks like Paul Robeson (who made the 1933 film of The
Emperor Jones with Dudley Digges superb as
Smithers, the part young Moss blunders his way through), who took over
O’Neill’s two Black roles after O’Neill had thought he’d have to mothball the
plays forever once Gilpin retired. (In Act One Gilpin is described as an alcoholic whose fondness
for the bottle stems from his inability to find parts for a serious “Negro”
actor.) For the most part, Moss has to rely for his income on the Catskills job
and one teaching Jewish actors in a workshop in Newark, though he keeps writing
— five O’Neill-esque dramas and then, once he realizes his true muse is comedy,
a rambunctious farce on the early days of sound in Hollywood called Once
in a Lifetime. He briefly catches the interest
of producer Jed Harris (Will LeBow) — a man with a reputation so foul that
Laurence Olivier, who worked with him in an early-1930’s production called The
Green Bay Tree (in which Olivier had to
play a man who leaves his wife for a male lover), later admitted that he’d
based his famous portrayal of Richard III on Jed Harris — who made his name as
producer of Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s mega-hit The Front
Page but also made a name as someone who’d
string young playwrights along for years with vague promises to produce their
scripts and solemn warnings not to shop their plays anywhere else. (In the 1963
film Harris is renamed “Warren Simon” because back then the real Jed Harris was
still alive and, though retired, still notoriously litigious.)
Another member
of the office boys’ chorus warns Moss of Harris’s reputation and leaks the play
to another producer, Sam
Harris, George M. Cohan’s former partner
and quite the opposite from Jed Harris in temperament and integrity (he’s
mentioned in Joe Adamson’s biography of the Marx Brothers as a man so
terminally nice that the nastiest thing anyone could recall Sam Harris saying
about anyone was, when the change
of government in Germany occurred in 1933, he said, “Hitler is not a nice
fellow”). Sam Harris says he’ll take the play and produce it if Moss can get the legendary playwright George M.
Kaufman (Tony Shalhoub) to rewrite it and direct it, and the result is nearly a
year of intensive work and collaboration between the wide-eyed innocent Hart
and the weird and reclusive Kaufman. Their relationship starts off on a bad
note when Jed Harris gives Hart Kaufman’s home phone number, and Hart calls
him. When Kaufman naturally asks Hart where he got his number, and Hart tells
him, Kaufman says, “Tell Jed Harris that I’m having it put in my will that when
I die I am to be cremated so my ashes can be thrown in his face.” (I’ve heard
that line elsewhere, attributed to screenwriter Norman Krasna, who was under
contract to Columbia, got a better offer from MGM, and decided the best way to
get out from under his Columbia contract was to insult Columbia studio head
Harry Cohn and get Cohn to fire him — so he had a Hollywood Reporter columnist put an item in saying that Norman Krasna
had made a new will; when he died he was to be cremated and his ashes thrown in
Harry Cohn’s face.) What was most remarkable about Act One the book was that it made the process of crafting
and honing a new play seem as suspenseful as any action plot, and that’s
largely preserved in this production — though at times the play drags and I
couldn’t help but wish James Lapine had been able to hook up with his former
writing partner, Stephen Sondheim, to turn Act One into a musical. (Their joint masterpiece, Sunday
in the Park with George, is also a work
about creating art.)
It’s a quite engaging work, though I could have done
without Lapine’s device of having the actors playing Moss Hart — Santino
Fontana in the bulk of the play and Tony Shalhoub as the middle-aged Hart
reminiscing about his career while writing Act One — break character and narrate the story. It’s an
interesting counterpoint to Schary’s take on the story in the 1963 film, which
is more sentimental (a recurring weakness of both Hart and Schary as artists) and gives much more
screen time to the chorus of office boys (one of whom, in the movie, is an
aspiring actor named Archie Leach who later became internationally famous as
Cary Grant); this version is much more interested in the dynamics of Hart’s
family and the way the success of Once in a Lifetime got them out of the Bronx and allowed Hart to
support them in relative comfort for the rest of their lives — the scene in
which they leave their old apartment and take almost none of their possessions
with them because they want to start their new life “clean,” with no traces of
the ghetto in their wake, is heartbreaking, and the fact that early on in
Hart’s progress he gets invited to a party thrown by Kaufman’s wife Beatrice
(Andrea Martin, who also plays Aunt Kate and Frieda Fischbein, the office
assistant to Sam Harris who first alerts him to Hart’s play — there are so many
actors double- and triple-cast that 40 parts are played by 22 actors) and
legendary figures like Alexander Woolcott, Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx appear
(and indulge themselves in what Adamson called “that cold-soup negativity that
passes for wit on Broadway” — the moment I saw the actress playing Dorothy
Parker insulting everyone for no better reason than that they expected her to,
I couldn’t help but remember Nora Ephron’s comment that as a young woman she
hung out around a group of aspiring writers, actors and whatevers around
Broadway and they decided to play at being the Algonquin Round Table — Ephron
got drafted to be Parker because she was the only woman in the group — and when
she met Parker and told her this story, Ephron said that after a while it just
got boring and Parker said, “The real one was boring, too”). Act One could have been better — Moss Hart’s material seems
to have more potential as drama than either Lapine or Schary found in it — but
it’s still quite likable the way it is, and kudos to the producers of Live
from Lincoln Center for letting us know at
the end of the credits just when
the performance filmed for the play took place: June 16, 2014.
