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6. The Greater Depression
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6 The Greater Depression As the SW11l11er of1932 approached, Eva was ready to taclde the reopening ofthe Civic. During her sabbatical year, she had kept a nucleus of her staff and acting company on a small retainer's fee and assumed they were prepared to resume their work. She discovered otherwise. Her strongest performers-Jacob Ben-Ami, Egon Brecher, and Alma Kruger-had chosen not to return. Their absence not only damaged the company morale but meant Eva needed to find solid replacements. She began by contacting her former Liliom costar, Joseph Schildkraut . For the past few years, Schildkraut had been acting in films for Cecil B. deMille. When offered the opportunity to join the Civic, he accepted, primarily because ofhis great friendship and admiration for Eva, but also because his own career was floundering in Hollywood. To complete her replacements, Eva elevated former apprentices Howard da Silva, Burgess Meredith, and Richard Waring into lead performers in the acting company. Over the months, a new insecurity had been mounting. Eva now worried about her appearance, especially her hands. Dreading that audiences would stare at her crippled fingers, she developed an elaborate makeup for them, which she used for the next fifty years. Using tempera paint, she shadowed and highlighted her fingers to give them a realistic appearance. She studied the angles in which they looked best and developed special techniques to achieve these positions. She had never believed in consciously planning movements and gestures, but that was before the fire. As the opening of the season drew near, Eva reaffirmed her ideals and once again attacked Broadway: "The theatre has fallen into the hands of real estate men and syndicates and those who have no love or interest in the stage or its life, but who have considered it principally as a means to make money."l Although she still appeared arrogant and confident, she was actually very frightened about the future. The economic picture had 99 100 / The Lives ofEva Le Gallienne altered considerably since the time she had founded the Civic in 1926. Dming her first five years, donations had averaged a little over $100,000 per year, making it possible for her to have a deficit ofonly $5000 at the start of her sabbatical a year earlier. But dming the season that the theatre was dark, gifts dropped dramatically. Because of the maintenance expenses ofthat year, she was left to begin her new season with a deficit three times that amount.2 Desperate for both a popular and an artistically strong comeback, Eva opened the Civic's sixth season on October 26 with a revival ofone of her former triumphs, Litwm. The overall production was rated as one of the Civic's finest. A critic for Theatre Arts Monthly maintained that Eva's portrayal ofJulie had "gained in depth and poignancy. Her voice is full and dear, her movement quiet and eloquent. Her Julie possesses a heartbreaking tenderness."3 One emotion Eva had definitely achieved was the ability to convey a sincerity in her acting, especially in the scene after the death of Liliom, when Julie sits quietly in her misery, reciting the Beatitudes. Actor Paul Ballantyne remembers that Eva "was always overwhelming in this scene; she would start to read from the Bible, and very soon one realized she wasn't reading at all-she had long known, and had lived every word by heart."4 Immediately following the opening ofLiliom, she revived Camille, with Schildkraut as Armand Duval. Since Lillian Gish was to open a few nights later at the Morasco Theatre in Robert Edmond Jones's production ofthe same play, Eva thought she couldcapitalize on all the advance publicity and advertised hers as the first performance in New York that year. The two interpretations were quite different. Eva continued her attempt to make Marguerite Gauthier a believable woman who could exist in 1932. As she explained, "The problem which existed socially then [when the play was written in 1852] exists fundamentally now. The play is based on love and gallantry and bravery, and you know there's nothing more true than these." Gisb, bowever, viewed the character as a person of"great delicacy and charm, ... a Ming porcelain ."5 The critics rushed to compare. One reviewer thought Gish "was a cough all dressed up in the costumes of1875," whereas Eva was a live person. A critic for The Stage complained that Gish made Marguerite "a rare girl, too tender and yielding to survive in...