Last Act

Ruth Gordon in her autobiography remarks on the poignant cry of the stage manager when places for the final act of a closing show is announced to the players. Instead of calling “Act Three”, he calls, “Last Act”.

This is the last act for “Tragedy and Comedy in New England”, though not entirely a farewell. Though I will not be continuing this blog due to a work load that requires more of my attention elsewhere, I will continue to post on the history of theatre in New England on my other blog, “New England Travels”. I hope you can join me there. In the meantime, I will leave this blog up as it is for the near future, but will disable further comments.

Let’s not ring the curtain down; let’s just move the show to a different stage.

Heat Wave on Stage in Ogunquit

Reminiscent of our recent heat wave, Ruth Gordon remarks on a week’s engagement in Ogunquit, Maine where she appeared in “Saturday’s Children” in July 1936.

From her autobiography, “My Side” (Harper & Row, NY, 1976):

Hottest July day on record, read the headline in the Portland paper. The matinee had been a boiler, ladies sweated, fanned, sweated. On stage, we sweated.

Ah, those simpler, more rugged days, or How Air Conditioning Has Changed Theatre.

Photographs of the signboard outside the playhouse taking in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s plainly stating the theater is AIR CONDITIONED, under Elaine Cancilla starring in “Can Can”, and Michael Constantine ahd Lawrence Pressman staring in “A Walk in the Woods” and “Yes, There Were Giants” with Kitty Carlisle, John Raitt and Jo Sullivan. You can find these, and a marvelous historical retrospective, in the excellent book “The Ogunquit Playhouse: 75 Years” by Carole Lee Carroll, Bunny Hart, and Susan Day Meffert (Back Channel Press, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2007).

Ruth Gordon also appeared in this play at the Cape Playhouse in August 1935, see this previous blog post.

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.

Christmas Night Performance in Boston 1941

Christmas, for actors and actresses, is sometimes a celebration fit in between performances. In December 1941, when Pearl Harbor earlier in the month had already established that this would be the first wartime Christmas, Ruth Gordon played the Majestic Theatre in Boston.

From her “My Side - The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon” (Harper & Row, NY, 1976), Ruth Gordon captures a moment.

“Two days of dress rehearsals and open Christmas night…I hurried out onto Avery Street, deep in slush. No empty taxi, a cold rain beating down, dress rehearsal at two-thirty. I rushed along Tremont Street. No need to dodge the puddles; my feet and legs were soaked. I could feel the cold water squish. Only a few blocks, cross Boylston, then up the alley to the Majestic stage door. Just beyond it and across the alley is the stage door to the Colonial. Had Hazel Dawn ever had to run through rain and slush? I was perspiring from having hurried so. What if I took cold? What if tomorrow my voice was ragged? Or gone altogether? All those lines, all those words, all those changes and cuts and additions!”

Opening Christmas night, peace on earth, and anxiety backstage. Always, for the actor, putting one’s career on the line with every show.

“Backstage was taut with excitement, nerves, good wishes. Actors are great. None of us thought the show would make it, but the good wishes didn’t sound like that. One last sip of water, one last trip to the ladies, one last pat of the powder puff, last prayer to God, then wait in the wings. Deep breath. Cue, open the door On! A burst of applause, the first line.”

The play, which she does not name, got bad notices. As Miss Gordon wrote to Orson Welles afterward, “The Mayor of Boston gave me the key to the city, the pubic gave me the gate.”

The second week of performances was cancelled. They took the show on to Philadelphia. In five months, it was back to Broadway for Ruth Gorden in May 1942 with “The Strings, My Lord, Are False.” Directed by Elia Kazan, it ran 15 performances. The same play? Or another opening, another flop? One hopes her shoes dried out from the icy slush of Tremont Street by then.

Ruth Gordon at the Cape Playhouse

Above is from a Cape Playhouse playbill of the week of August 12, 1935.

“Were you ever in Dennis? There’s not a whole lot of it,” so writes actress, playwright, and author Ruth Gordon in her autobiography, “My Side” (Harper & Row, NY, 1976). She describes coming to Dennis to perform the above play, “Saturday’s Children” by Maxwell Anderson in the summer of 1935.


The Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass. was founded by Raymond Moore in 1927. Photos here of Mr. Moore and the Cape Playhouse are from a booklet on “The Cape Playhouse and the Cape Cinema” from the late 1930s.

Transformed from a former Unitarian meeting house, The Cape Playhouse opened with Basil Rathbone in the theater’s first production, “The Guardsmen” on July 4, 1927. Many stars have performed there since, to be discussed on this blog in future.

Ruth Gordon’s wistful observations of her appearance that year at the Cape Playhouse for “A Church Mouse” have a somber edge to them, as she recounts that while she stayed at Mrs. Wittemore’s boarding house during her run, another member of the company stayed in a small cottage on the nearby salt marsh. Miss Gordon wondered why Margaret Bellinger stayed there instead.

“Were there no more rooms or was it because Margaret was black? In 1935, what would you think?”

After Miss Gordon appeared in “A Church Mouse”, the management asked her to stay another week to perform in the play “The Bride the Sun Shines On” because the star they hired did not arrive. Such was the scramble of summer theater in its early days.

Other actors stayed at Mrs. Whittemore’s as Ruth Gordon did, but not all the borders were actors. There was a grocery store across the road where telegrams could be sent. She wired her friend playwright Thornton Wilder to come down to see the play, and he did. They ate lunch at the Motor Car Inn, which Miss Gordon describes as expensive. This was probably The Sign of the Motor Car at the Bass River Golf Club in South Yarmouth. According to an ad in this same program for “Saturday’s Children”, luncheons and dinners went from $1 to $2.75.

Expensive, yes, for 1935. Tickets for the Cape Playhouse at that time ran from 50 cents to $2 for a matinee, and 50 cents to $2.50 for an evening performance. The highest priced dinner at the Motor Car cost more than the best seat at the Playhouse.