Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Chapter 3. Young Lion of Broadway

29 Chapter 3 Young Lion of Broadway The Armory Show of 1913 had an incalculable effect on all the arts in the United States, but nowhere more than in New York City. The first significant American exhibition of postimpressionist painters such as Picasso, Duchamp, and Matisse stimulated the imagination of intellectuals and artists who were fascinated by the emergence of modernism in Europe. They were excited by the prospect of spreading the new art in America, a provincial backwater to those who defined culture exclusively in the terms of fine arts. “Little magazines” sprang up to promote modern aesthetics in poetry and prose and “little theaters” mounted work by George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen. Inspired by reports of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Washington Square Players began to coalesce in New York the year after the Armory Show. They were the toast of Greenwich Village for staging challenging, socially critical plays in contrast to the conventional melodrama and comedy of Broadway. In 1919 the Washington Square Players reorganized as the Theatre Guild and became one of the most important producers of contemporary theater in the world. The remarkable growth of the Theatre Guild, from its debut in the six-hundred-seat Garrick Theatre on West Thirty-fifth Street through the time Mamoulian left for Hollywood, was proof that a large American audience was hungry for Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By, Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., and Ernest Vadja’s Fata Morgana. Many of its actors would become famous on Broadway or in Hollywood, especially Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Fredric March, Edward G. Robinson, and Claude Rains. By 1929 the Guild had designed its own hall on West MAMOULIAN 30 Fifty-second Street with a unique fifty-foot-deep stage and leased two additional theaters to accommodate thirty thousand season subscribers in New York. The Guild also ran subscription series in six other American cities and mounted tours to the Pacific coast and London. The antithesis of theater as escapism and entertainment, the company produced plays with a sharp intellectual appeal. Like the Pre-Raphaelites and the Bauhaus, it looked to the craft guilds of medieval Europe as an antecedent . Paradoxically, the Theatre Guild strove to sustain itself through ticket sales while remaining noncommercial, and it sought American themes while sticking in the early years to a European repertoire. The six men and women of the Guild’s original board of managers compared themselves to a faculty debating society. Five had graduated from prestigious East Coast schools where America’s first theater programs had coalesced in the early years of the twentieth century. Although the board took pride in being a collective, complete with “managers’ rehearsals” that could assume virtual codirectorship over a play, the sixth member, Lawrence Langner, a British patent attorney and financier in New York, gained special prominence. It was Langner who engineered the transformation of the semi-amateur Washington Square Players into the prestigious Theatre Guild. Dapper in bow tie and spats, he would be instrumental in the next step of Mamoulian’s career.1 In 1926, when the Guild brought the American Opera Company to New York for a short run, Langner met Mamoulian, whom he recognized as a “gifted individual.” Eager to play on a bigger stage, Mamoulian “begged us to visit him” in Rochester. Langner was impressed by his abilities as a teacher as well as his “striking personality and enthusiasm for the theater.” According to Langner, Mamoulian “walked my legs off pacing the streets of Rochester, telling me all he planned to do in theatre if I would only bring him to New York.” Mamoulian pressed for directing a play, but instead was given an instructorship at the newly formed Guild School with the promise the position could be a rung on the way to directing the Guild’s subscriber productions.2 Mamoulian mounted three student productions at the Theatre Guild School in Scarsborough, New York, after returning from a short European trip in September of 1926.3 His first plays for the Guild School included Clarence by popular American novelist Booth Tarkington, Gilda Varesi Archibald and Dorothea Donn Byrnes’s Broadway comedy Enter Madame, and Leonid Andreyev’s experimental “realistic fantasy” Young Lion of Broadway 31 He Who Gets Slapped...