Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

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Sharpen Your by Gavin Witt, Production Dramaturg Though his aunts, and more so his future father-in-law, disapprove of his current calling—come to think of it, he’s hardly thrilled himself— he’s managed to land himself a position with some authority and considerable social cachet. He’s Mortimer Brewster, Drama Critic. In the Big Apple of 1941, writers of every stripe and attitude populate the bountiful pages of a veritable cornucopia of media outlets: multiple daily papers, not to mention magazines and journals and other periodicals, litter the landscape (see below). When not actually at the seemingly scads of openings each season, the critics—a pretty staid bunch, all told—can be found holding forth (or a fifth, more likely) around town. As lately as 1940, wit and critic Alexander Woollcott, a stalwart of the theater pages and a mainstay of the acerbic circle of the Algonquin Round Table, even appeared, essentially as himself, in the acclaimed Kaufman and Hart farrago The Man Who Came to Dinner. Figures like Woollcott and Brooks Atkinson and Burns Mantle are nearly legendary by 1941, and their carefully honed utterances can make or break careers. Legions of colleagues, rivals, and cheap imitators are many. No neutral objectivity for these arbiters of taste; they tell it how they feel it, sometimes without even having to see the performance, and woe betide the actor, writer, director, or play that earns their ire. Of course, Mortimer was apparently far happier back writing about real estate—and there is that book about Thoreau he’s been working on…. His family seems confident that theater as a whole is teetering on its last legs; maybe 1945 will see the last of Broadway. And good riddance too, they’re ready to say. Meantime, though, the Fabulous Invalid clings to life. A Rogues Gallery In 1939, Time pulled back the curtain on the New York Critics Circle, profiling some of its charter members: Slight, bespectacled Brooks Atkinson (Times), a reserved, dryly humorous Yankee who writes books on travel and Thoreau. As the Times’s critic, he has by far the greatest single influence on box office. Cultivated, impishly able to carve a “turkey” with the best of them, he is now and then a sucker for high-toned emptiness, sometimes recoils from the sweaty and disagreeable. Moonfaced, blue-shirted Richard Watts, Jr. (Herald Tribune), was formerly the H. T.’s cinema critic. Boyish (Broadway’s loudest heigh-hoer of good-looking actresses), he is also thoughtful (Broadway’s briskest champion of social-minded plays). Often acute, Watts chiefly errs in being too rhapsodic about what he likes. Tall, dashing John Anderson (Journal & American) is Broadway’s supreme critic of bad plays, with a great gift for wisecracking down on them. (“[Jeremiah] may be entered…as prophet and loss.”). Though murderous with fanciness and Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace |
In the weeks following the 1941 New York premiere of Arsenic and Old Lace, a series of mysteries and thrillers debuted on Broadway to considerably less enthusiasm—earning them some choice and characteristic responses from the critical choir. X The Lady Who Came To Stay Brooks Atkinson. New York Times, January 3, 1941. Eight O’Clock Tuesday John Mason Brown. New York Post, January 7, 1941. McKay Morris was never more dead in his life than when the curtain went up at Henry Miller’s Theatre last night. There he was stretched out on the floor of his shadowy suburban library with a paper knife thrust far into him, a man who had breathed his last, the mortal remains of Ivan Godden, a wretch who can be more accurately identified as Ivan the Terrible. But did Mr. Morris stay put? He did not. Most assuredly he did not. Things like that don’t happen in the theatre, at least to such actors as Mr. Morris. Brooks Atkinson. New York Times, January 7, 1941. When the curtain rises on the detective drama…the corpse is already on the floor. He is soon decently covered with a blanket, although you can see the blanket rise and fall, rise and fall with the regularity of breathing—always a nerve-wracking blemish in the acting of corpses. John Anderson. New York Journal and American, January 7, 1941. Inspector Wait grills [everyone] modestly and gets them slowly but surely to tell on one another and on themselves. At the end, we know who killed poor Ivan, even if we no longer care, and the one bright promise of the evening is the inspector’s assurance, at the very end, that, hereafter, he’s going back to the old methods of clues and fingerprints and who was that alibi I saw you with at four minutes past whatyoumaycallit. First Stop to Heaven Richard Lockridge. New York Sun, January 6, 1941. A number of intolerably quaint people performed strange antics last evening at the Windsor Theater. Mail carriers quoted poetry, policemen distractedly wished themselves back in Central Park, and a building inspector, frenzied at finding himself in so odd a gathering, twice fell down a flight of stairs. This department shared the inspector’s emotions, but was denied his release. Mr. and Mrs. North Louis Kronenberger. New York Newspaper “PM,” January 13, 1941. After the drenching and lunatic laughter of “Arsenic and Old Lace”, with its two dozen variegated murders, “Mr. and Mrs. North” cannot help seeming a touch prosaic. Its mere brace of homicides seem, by comparison, just routine incidents in any nice young couple’s daily existence. Sidney B. Whipple. New York World- Telegram, January 13, 1941. Mr. Davis’ play suffers, I think, from the circumstances of its being the third of a cycle of murder plays to arrive in hurried sequence on Broadway, and particularly from having followed the cheerfully gruesome “Arsenic and Old Lace” with its homicides in wholesale lots. But if it lacks the comic impact of that murder epidemic, it gains a great deal in the understanding and charming portraits of [its chief characters], the Norths. In other words, I find the North family more interesting and real…than I do the strange situation into which the authors have thrown them. They are doing the best they can to scare the innocent theatergoer at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre. Using an old ghost story…as his sourcebook, Kenneth White has written a nightmare and Guthrie McClintic has directed and produced it as if he believed in it. [….] But if he thinks that “The Lady Who Came To Stay” is worth all the hard work and skill that a good theatre production requires, this column will have to beg to be excused. It is a silly, maudlin piece of willful adolescence that seems especially malapropos in the modern world. John Anderson. New York Journal and American, January 3, 1941. “The Lady Who Came To Stay”…is a pretty depressing and somewhat sadistic exercise in spook-a-boo drama by Kenneth White designed to induce shudders and chills. Instead, it merely left me cold, so cold in fact that the sleety street seemed a welcome relief. John Mason Brown. New York Post, January 3, 1941. “The owly-hoots are out tonight” says Mrs. Tuddlewinks in the nursery rhyme. And so they were—in droves—at the Maxine Elliott last night. For there…was…a ghostridden melodrama by Kenneth White…in which the three weirdest sisters known to the drama since “Macbeth” died off one by one and, by refusing to stay put, kept more than their graves yawning for the major portion of a silly evening. fake, he is sometimes too clever and cynical at the expense of a serious play. Tall, curly-haired John Mason Brown (Post) is the youngest of the newspaper critics. Probably the ablest all-round of the lot, he combines journalistic dash with analytical skill. With Anderson, he has the highest critical boiling point. Kindly, near-sighted Burns Mantle (News) is, at 65, the oldest of the newspaper critics. Nationally known for his annual The Best Plays of 19—, he is often sound, almost always dull. His best advertisement is his trick of rating plays by stars. Slight, professorial Richard Lockridge (Sun) is intelligent, fluent, sometimes astute, curiously colorless. Small, thin Sidney B. Whipple (World- Telegram), Broadway’s newest critic, wrote a life of Charles M. Schwab which will remain locked in a safe until Schwab dies. A polysyllabic Pollyanna, Whipple likes good clean fun, loves good clean seriousness, is Broadway’s defender of the family, the fireside, the flag. Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace |
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