George S. Kaufman (1889–1961)

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I got this collection of 1930s plays five years ago, in the early stages of my Oscar-watching project, because the middle one of the three was the basis of a very successful film starring Lionel Barrymore. In fact all three of these plays were successfully adapted for the screen.

The scripts are prefaced by a short piece from each of the two authors, gently poking fun at each other and giving a sense of the relationship between two Broadway creators. They certainly seem to have got on with each other better than Gilbert and Sullivan.

The first play, Once in a Lifetime, is about a vaudeville trio, down on their luck because of the invention of talking movies which sucks the audience out of theatre, who go to Hollywood and try to make it big there. The dumb guy of the three ascends to huge cinematic power, and the punchline of the play is that the bad decisions he makes turn out to be very successful.

I thought it was really funny. I don’t always find it easy to read scripts, but here I had no difficulty differentiating the characters with their different voices. I noted that George Kaufman, one of the authors, also played the frustrated playwright Laurence Vail in the first Broadway cast.

The key character is Mary Daniels, the woman in the vaudeville trio, who gets the best lines and serves as the audience viewpoint character on what is happening in Hollywood. In the original Broadway production she was played by Jean Dixon.

The drunk actress Gay Wellington (and another comic turn, the Grand Duchess Olga) were among the cuts made by Riskin as he adapted You Can't Take It With You for the screen. Kirby’s background is much less developed in the play – the whole subplot involving property transactions, and the character of Mr Poppins, are inserted by Riskin into the film. The Vanderhofs have pet snakes rather than a raven. (Though I’m glad to say that the kitten is original.)

The guts of it are all the same, and one can see why the play won a Pulitzer as an uplifting tonic in depressing times. It’s a bit more misogynistic (as I said, two extra female characters who are only there as figures of fun, and Mrs Kirby gets a harder time) and more racist (Donald gets treated worse). There is a hilarious sequence during the Kirbys’ disastrous visit to the Vanderhof household, where Penny gets the Kirbys to play a word association game.

The third play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, is even more overtly a character study than the other two. A famous New York theatre critic slips on an icy patch while visiting Ohio and is immobilised in the home of his reluctant hosts for several weeks. There’s a bit of a comedy of middle-class manners here, but mainly it’s about the monstrous protagonist who is unaware of his own monstrosity.

I Imagine that this is simple to stage, in that the entire play takes place in the Ohio front room. It’s more of a one-joke story than the other two. The play was written for actor and critic Alexander Woolcott, who had behaved with abominable rudeness while visiting Hart’s family home; for some strange reason he bowed out of actually performing as the character based on himself, and it fell to Monty Woolley to do it on both stage and screen, giving his career an immense boost. The film stars him and Bette Davis.… (altro)

Lesser comedy-drama by the team of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, who would have much greater successes with STAGE DOOR, THE ROYAL FAMILY, and DINNER AT EIGHT. The plot, based on Ferber's short story "Old Man Minick," is about an older fellow who comes to live with his son and daughter-in-law and proves to be a terrible disruption in their lives. There are funny scenes and poignant ones, but the play waffles between making the old guy the protagonist or the antagonist, and no one comes off as terribly pleasant. It is amusing at best.… (altro)

The title is very informative. New York's Broadway from the nineteen thirties to the forties had at least one of these plays drawing crowds at any given moment. they are:1934 Merrily We Roll Along (Kaufman and Hart)
1936 You Can't Take It with You (Kaufman and Hart; Pulitzer Prize winner)
1937 I'd Rather Be Right (Kaufman and Hart)
1938 The Fabulous Invalid (Kaufman and Hart)
1939 The American Way (Kaufman and Hart)
1939 The Man Who Came to Dinner (Kaufman and Hart)

This was a Modern Library Anthology, and is a very buy should you find a copy. The only missing play from their collaborations is 1940's George Washington Slept Here.… (altro)