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 Reviving the Late Sidney Howard THE LATE CHRISTOPHER BEAN On October 1923, the playwright Sidney Howard (who at that time was a respected, socially conscious journalist and occasional playwright but not yet a major theatrical force) was sailing home to New York from Europe when his ship, the Scythia, collided with another in a dense fog. In the ensuing chaos, the passengers were told to prepare to abandon ship. Howard returned to his state room and collected the two most important things he owned, items he would rather follow to a watery grave than leave behind. They were a small statue of Shakespeare and the manuscript of his new play, They Knew What They Wanted. Luckily, the ship was able to safely return to port. This was fortunate, seeing that a year later They Knew What They Wanted would win the Pulitzer Prize. What would have happened if the manuscript had been lost? Perhaps it was a question such as this that propelled Howard, ten years later in 1932, to adapt a play by French playwright Rene Fauchois. For the resulting work, The Late Christopher Bean, is about the value of art. Christopher Bean, an impoverished and tubercular painter has been dead for ten years at the start of the play - his last years spent living in the barn of a kindly New England country doctor, Dr. Haggett, and his family. To the Haggetts, Bean’s paintings are worthless – strange, oddly colored, and frightfully ugly. The old canvases used to patch a leak in the attic and shore up a wall in the chicken coop. When savvy art-appreciating New Yorkers discover Bean’s work and begin inquiring as to the whereabouts of his other paintings, things take a madcap turn. Howard was writing in the dark economic uncertainties of the depression. Audiences responded to his buoyant and energetic brand of comic farce, making the Broadway production a massive success with 224 performances. Underlying the humor, though, is a serious message about the nature of greed and the corruption of otherwise upstanding citizens. Dr. Haggett is a good man, but he changes once money rears its ugly head. In the original New York Times review, Brooks Atkinson praised Walter Connolly’s portrayal as the "quintessence of the comic spirit," metamorphosing from the village doctor into "a hoss-swapper and a huckster in one beautiful Autumn day." Howard does not aim his targets solely at greed, however. He shows us what is lost, namely love and art. At the play’s heart is Abby, the Haggett’s servant and the only one who recognized Bean’s talent and believed in him. Originally played by Pauline Lord, Howard creates in Abby a heroine that elevates the play from socially conscious satire to a genuine emotional work rooted in character. When learning playwriting at Harvard, Howard was told that truth was the vital component in art. While largely forgotten today, Howard was a major force in the theater of the 20’s and 30’s, spoken about in the same breath as Eugene O’Neill. He fought theater censorship when objections were raised to the adultery in the plot of They Knew What They Wanted. He championed young playwrights and served as president of the Dramatist’s Guild, negotiating on behalf of writers for better contracts. Mere months before a shocking accidental death caused by a farm tractor, he helped form the Playwrights’ Producing Co. with Robert Sherwood, Elmer Rice, and Maxwell Anderson, an organization designed to place production decisions into the hands of writers and away from unscrupulous producers. Never quite at home in Hollywood, he nevertheless found success with the screenplay for Gone With The Wind, which won him a posthumous Academy Award in 1939. Yet through it all, he was committed to writing engaging and dramatic material to serve the actor, for him the axis around which every other aspect of theater revolved around. Interestingly, Howard was the antithesis of Christopher Bean. Bean was unloved while alive but recognized as a genius upon death. Howard, on the other hand, won awards and found success during his lifetime. It is a shame that his carefully crafted and profoundly enjoyable works have not re-surfaced since his death. Aside from a short Broadway revival of They Knew What They Wanted in 1976, none of Howard’s twenty-seven plays has received a major New York production in over fifty years. It was luck that Howard’s career didn’t end up at the bottom of the sea that October night in 1923, and TACT doesn’t want to see it rotting on shelves either. Howard once wrote, explaining the differences between prose and playwriting, that "the dramatist prefers acting to anything. The drama does not spring from a literary impulse but from a love of the brave, ephemeral, beautiful art of acting." Christopher Bean’s paintings belong on public display in museums, and Howard’s writing belongs on the stage, alive and breathing. TACT is proud to present The Late Christopher Bean as the inaugural main stage production of our 17th season. |
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