Vine of the Souls

Marowitz continuedfrom previous page Broadway success transformed his status but never for a moment shifted the deeply submerged iceberg of his low self-esteem. That is, perhaps, the most fascinating aspect of the man; that, in his own eyes, his work was a failed attempt to escape the person he persisted in believing he was—even in the face of dazzling, tangible proofs to the contrary. Brown doesn't delve too deeply into the cause of Hart's depressions and, in general, is more concerned with marshalling facts than providing analyses—which is a shame, as the paradoxes and contradictions of Hart's life cry out for explication. One is given a very thorough agenda ofHart's professional life, which seems to skirt theprivate agendas that pulsate beneath. In his preface, Brown appears to have a high estimation ofthe American theatre between 1920 and 1960. He salutes the outstanding playwrights—Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman, Robert E. Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Marc Connelley, Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and, of course, Moss Hart— without acknowledging that, with the exception of O'Neill, Miller, Williams, and possibly Wilder, it is a very down-market Hall of Fame indeed; and that a distinction needs to be drawn between great dramatists such as Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Synge, O'Casey, Genet, and Beckett, and effective craftsmen and playmakers like virtually everyone else on Brown's roster. A well-made piece of commercial theatre such as the three or four successful plays of George S. Kaufman and Hart are not to be sneezed at. It takes a very special kind ofgenius to produce a Broadway success—and for a short while, during an exceptional decade, Kaufman and Hart had it in spades—but there is a considerable difference in latitude and longitude between commercially successful ephemeral art and those durable works whose resonance does not fade with the end of the season. It would be difficult to reanimate the work of most of the names in Brown's Pantheon. Behrman, Sherwood, Hellman, Connelley, Anderson, Rice, and even a number of O'Neill's plays, retain only a kind of archival significance , of interest to the historian and the drama student but not to the public, and for the very good reason that most of them are mummified in their period. To be fair to Hart, his most durable work as a playwright belongs to the mid-thirties, when he was in tandem with Kaufman, but even here, we must strike offMerrily WeRollAlong (1934), George Washington Slept Here (1940), and The Fabulous Invalid(1938), as well as the failures acknowledged by Brown himself, such as ChristopherBlake (1947), The Climate ofEden (1953), and TheAmerican Way (1939). Light Up the Sky (1949), it seems to me, is a marginal case, as is Lady in the Dark (1941), both of which, in the hands of imaginative directors, are capable of reincarnation. What is never in dispute is Hart's directorial achievements, and, in many ways, these are more impressive than anything he ever wrote. The pinnacles were obviously My Fair Lady (1956), Lady in the Dark, and, in a roundabout way, the re-treaded and patched-up mise-en-scène for Camelot (1961). But what is clear is that, as a young man, having begun as an entertainment director at summer camps and then being mentored by the brilliant veteran Kaufman, Hart instinctively assimilated the chemistry of stage direction, and his temperament, working methods, and professional dedication were so attuned to the heeds of his material that he truly became a master of the craft. Collaboration with Kaufman was both a boon and a burden. Everyone believed the senior writer was responsible for the best of what was shown, and the fumbled moments were inevitably attributed to his junior sidekick. The most magnanimous thing Kaufman may have ever done is his lifetime was when he stepped forward on the glittering first night of Once in a Lifetime (1930) and, in a one-line curtain speech, told the audience of critics and first-nighters : "I would like this audience to know that eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart." One suspects that...