On the Boards and Riding the Rails

Playwright and Connecticut native Eugene O’Neill probably arrived in Provincetown, Massachusetts on the tip of Cape Cod by train when he first met up with the Provincetown Players. He wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiographical note that as the son of a stage actor:

First seven years of my life spent mostly in hotels and railroad trains, my mother accompanying my father on his tours of the United States….

In celebration of National Train Day this Saturday, we might observe that for much of the 20th Century, theatre was brought to most small towns and large cities by train. When Gertrude Lawrence played the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, or when Dion Boucicault played at the Boston Museum, they arrived by train. When Joseph Cotten played at the summer theater in Surrey, Maine, a young apprentice named Henry Fonda picked up his trunk at the railroad depot.

Much later on theaters which had been habitually been built close to train stations developed into large entertainment complexes built by interstate highways, but our formative years of theatre in this country have a lot to do with train travel.

Ruth Gordon, in her My Side - The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon (Harper & Row, NY 1976) recalls the amazement on first taking the ultra swank Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, a step up from the days of rattling train coaches and butcher boys hawking sandwiches in the aisle,

“Memories of damp linen handerkerchiefs on our faces to keep the cinders off were a thing of the past.”

We have another more whimsical episode on the train called the Twentieth Century Limited when John Barrymore rode the rails to his next gig (referred to last year in this Another Old Movie Blog post). Biographer John Kobler writes in his biography of John Barrymore, Damned in Paradise - The Life of John Barrymore (Athenaeum, NY 1977):

“Ensconced in his stateroom aboard the eastbound Twentieth Century, John sent for two Pullman porters, old friends from previous trips. Handing one of them a book, he explained, ‘Now, this is really the skull of Yorick and you are the grave digger.’ And to the other, ‘You are Polonius.’ Fed his cues in this fashion, he rehearsed himself all the way across the continent.”

This Saturday marks National Train Day, sponsored by Amtrak. For more on National Train Day, have a look at this website.

Meltdown in Boston: Jane Cowl vs. James Stewart

Jane Cowl, one of the most famous stage actresses of the early 20th century, was a Boston native who, while appearing in Boston, may have inadvertently aided the future film career of her bumbling stage manager.

The play was “Camille”, and the bumbling stage manager was James Stewart. The year was 1933, that awful financial and emotional trench we’ve come to recognize as the depths of the Great Depression.

James Stewart had begun his fledging acting career with the University Players on the Cape the year before in 1932 upon his college graduation. After the University Players had a seven-week run with “Carrie Nation” in New York, and then broke up, Stewart managed to catch favorable reviews for minor roles in a few other similarly frustratingly short-lived plays. Needing to feed himself between roles, a common problem for actors it seems, Mr. Stewart accepted a job in Boston as the stage manager of “Camille.”

It might have been a slight detour in his quest to be an actor, but any job in a company with Jane Cowl in it was valuable. Miss Cowl, with only a handful of film credits spread out over many years, made her real home the stage where she not only acted, but wrote plays and also directed.

She was perhaps most famous for playing Juliet. In 1933, between her Broadway stints of engagements of doing the romance “A Thousand Summers” ending in 1932 and the comedy “Rain From Heaven” which went up in 1934, Jane Cowl found herself in the city of her birth to sink her scenery-chewing teeth into one of the most famous diva roles ever written.

During her final, famous, frenzied death scene where she coughs her farewell to her sobbing lover, Miss Cowl’s young stage manager became distracted, and left off following the script.

Stewart, fumbling with his cue book, had heard noises out in the alley. He went to investigate and found a drunk amusing himself by lobbing rocks at the theater building, either at the wall or trying to land them on the roof. Stewart went outside to get rid of him.

Then, realizing in a panic that he had left his post at a crucial moment, ran back to his place in the wings, only to mess up the final curtain. We have at least two versions to consider: in “Jimmy Stewart” by Marc Elliot (Harmony, 2006), Stewart is said to have missed the cue to drop the final curtain just as Jane Cowl dies of tuberculosis, leaving her there hanging. Dead. So to speak.

In “James Stewart: Behind the Scenes of a Wonderful Life” by Lawrence J. Quirk (Applause Books, NY 1997), we are given the further picture of Stewart panicking, rushing back to his post, and ringing down curtain before her death scene was completely over. Jane Cowl, being Jane Cowl, might have taken a rather long time to die.

Cowl was furious, screamed at him, that he had ruined her scene, and had him fired.

James Stewart headed dejectedly back to his shared digs with pal Henry Fonda in New York City, still stinging from his blunder and his return to joblessness. But the darker days of the Depression were coming to a close for Mr. Stewart. He went back to acting, which unlike stage managing does not require one to pay attention every single second, and the following year, to Broadway in “Yellow Jack”, a performance which earned him a screen test with MGM.

Jane Cowl also eventually left Boston and went back to Broadway, where among other roles (as a bit of trivia) she originated the role of Dolly Levi on Broadway in 1938, when Dolly was a minor character in Thornton Wilder's "The Merchant of Yonkers."

Summer Theatre Summary - 1940

The first summer theater is believed to have begun in the 1890s in Denver, Colorado. But like most new inventions, the public was not exposed to this new entertainment, at least not in very large numbers, for a long while, not until the late 1920s and early 1930s. This is when more people could afford to leave the sweltering cities in the summer. This is when they began to vacation in the country, and this is when the automobile first made that journey a bit easier. This is when those lush and lovely locales in the mountains or by the sea provided theater entrepreneurs the opportunity to push their own unique product to the vacationers.

In June 1940, Theatre Arts magazine celebrated the first decade of summer theatre with an article by author and theater manager, Warren P. Munsell, Jr., who noted, “It is no longer a quaint idea to pop out to the country in July and take in a straw hat show.” He rejoiced that now it was a commonplace thing to do. He noted that “actors, like everybody else, like to get out of the city in the hot weather. Unlike everybody else, in their spare time actors like to act.”

Interestingly, Munsell observed that even at this time, slowly over the preceding decade of the Great Depression, the old-style repertory theater was being altered by the presence of big-name stars from Hollywood. If the audience was asked to pay the enormous sum of $2.75 a ticket to see Henry Fonda live on stage, then by golly, they would expect to see an entire season of big stars rounding out the casts. Munsell notes that such demands by the audience, no longer content with the backwoods repertory, put a huge strain on the theater’s coffers, so much that summer theaters are “generally close to bankruptcy.”

He notes that audiences prefer familiar titles of recent Broadway hits (at the time of this article, it was “You Can’t Take it With You” and “Susan and God”). Giving the public what it wants also extends to what he calls his hesitancy “to offer Oscar Wilde to an audience comprised mainly of farmers.”

He notes comedy is a bigger draw than drama, and notes the risks of trying out new plays as opposed to presenting familiar chestnuts. Except for the price of the tickets, he could be talking about today. Munsell closes his article with a warm summation at which we might smile, “But if, in its maturity, the straw hat circuit seems to have less spontaneity, and to be of less value as an incubator for Broadway plays and Hollywood protégés than before, it has evolved its own special, significant function. It is another outlet for theatre. For summer theatres are supported on the whole by communities a varying percentage of which have no contact with the stage.”

That, too, may still be true, although the big cities are not so far away anymore, just a few exits down the superhighway for most people. But with so many competing sources of entertainment, is live theater likely to be any more popular today for an evening or afternoon’s entertainment than it was in the Great Depression when money was scarce, but many more small communities had a tradition of theatre?

Review of "Sleuth" - Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts is the oldest continuing summer theater in the U.S. Knowing that, and knowing that Henry Fonda and Robert Montgomery began their careers here in the summer of 1928, along with another first-timer who also ushered, Bette Davis, is part of the experience of attending a play at the Cape Playhouse on a warm summer night.

(c. 1940s photo.)It goes along with the rough broad-beam rafters in the peaked barn-like ceiling above, and the wooden floors, the wooden benches reminiscent of when founder Raymond Moore dragged (not by himself, surely) a former Unitarian meeting house to this sand-and-scrub pine lot along scenic Route 6A. This is no Cineplex, no grand beaux arts palace. It’s what summer theater used to be in an age when the greatest actors and actress of the day spent their summers playing in barns, and boathouses, tents, and old meeting houses.

A peculiar delight to sit on your bench, glance at the heavy rough oak rafters above, at the plush red curtain ahead, and imagine a young Bette Davis showing a perhaps much less-awed audience where to sit. A little of the shine is diminished today when you see a bored-looking young usher jerking his head and telling two elderly ladies with cardigans around their shoulders, “You guys are over here.”

Note to young people ushering, waiting tables, or running checkout stands in stores: ladies are always “Ma’am” and men are always, “Sir”, and should never be referred to as anything else except “ladies” or “gentlemen.”

I feel pretty sure even a tough gal like Bette Davis would have known that.

Another thing while we’re on the subject, the witless and lazy expression, “Have a good one” can be retired at any time.

Now, back to work. The Cape Playhouse just wrapped up its production of “Sleuth” by Anthony Shaffer. Directed by Russell Treyz, the show starred Peter Frechette and Malcolm Gets.


Yoshinori Tanokura designed the multi-level set, which featured a high narrow staircase to an upper level landing, large arched windows, and dark wood paneling, illustrating an ornate English country house. The fire place, the large elk’s head mounted above it, the crossed swords on the wall, all give us the illusion of English aristocracy, wealth, power, arrogance, and this goes a long way to establishing the character of the master of the house, played by Frechette.

The plastic-domed turntable stereo with the LPs tucked beside it remind us it is the 1970s.

Mr. Frechette plays Andrew Wyke, the writer of mystery novels whose wife is leaving him for Milo Tindle, played by Malcolm Gets. He invites Gets to his home to discuss the situation man-to-man, and soon sets him up in a most creative, and most cruel, game to exact his revenge. Frechette is brilliant as the playful, funny, arrogant, and somewhat manic writer who uses his expertise at writing mystery stories to manipulate and bully Gets into humiliating, and occasionally terrifying, scenarios. Frechette is teasing, bubbly, childlike, scornful, and at times appearing a bit unhinged. That’s a lot of oranges to juggle.

Gets, a more sensitive but no less clever man, is at first overwhelmed by the forceful life-of-the party personality of Frechette, who makes him jump through emotional hoops, but in the second act Gets proceeds to ploddingly turn the tables. The final scene is shocking, and we see that the relentless drive to be the winner in this peculiar game of one-upmanship comes at great risk for both men.

It is a literate play, and frequently the dialogue erupts into long and complicated soliloquies, but this is managed very well by both actors. Both employ credible, and several, British accents in the course of the action as they role play. They are well matched, and deserve much credit for instilling a great deal of energy into what is essentially a very wordy play.

Good company on a warm summer night on Cape Cod.

For more on the rest of the season at The Cape Playhouse, have a look at this website.

The University Players of Cape Cod

A couple of months ago back in February of this year, Cape Cod, and New England summer theater, lost a bit of history when a house in Woods Hole, Mass. was destroyed in a fire. It was once a rehearsal space for the University Players.

The house, once part of the Whitecrest estate owned by Frances Crane, was used as rehearsal space in the mid 1920s, when Henry Fonda was part of that group.

Other members included future Hollywood actor Kent Smith, stage and screen star Margaret Sullavan, future Life photographer John Swope, and the future Broadway director Joshua Logan. The fledgling professional troupe was named “University Players” because these founding members were all then students at Harvard, Radcliffe, and Princeton.

Other members who in future years ended up on Broadway or in Hollywood were Myron McCormick, Barbara O’Neill, Bartlett Quigley (whose daughter, Jane Alexander accomplished much in films and on stage), character actress Mildred Natwick, Arlene Francis, and Martin Gabel. In the group’s final year, James Stewart joined them, and the gangly Midwesterner who had recently taken an interest in dramatics in college, learned how to be a leading man.

The young actresses were quartered, and chaperoned, in rented house in Quissett. The young actors slept on Charles Leatherbee's grandfather's yacht or on the Charles Crane estate in Woods Hole.

They later moved to an old movie theater near Old Silver Beach and most of the actors were later housed in West Falmouth.

The University Players lasted less then five years, disbanding in the depths of the Depression, though most of its members were more fortunate, going on to varying degrees of fame and fortune. According to Henry Fonda’s autobiography, “Fonda - My Life” (New American Library, NY, 1981), Fonda once remarked of his early exposure to theater in University Players, “The only people who’ve seen me are visitors to Cape Cod.”

In his autobiography, “My Up and Down, In and Out Life” (Delacorte, 1976), future Broadway director Joshua Logan wrote of these summers in West Falmouth, “…inside each member burned hot love not only for the theatre but for their company - yes, and for each other. We actually believed we were better than anyone. We would have challenged any company in the country. It was only this blind, idiot confidence that could make us accept minor parts, odd jobs with the crew, our meager salary of five dollars a week less laundry, our frayed clothing and our repetitious skimpy diet.”

If it was a cloistered existence, it was also ultimately a career-building experience.