Theater Porn

Lawrence Langner

IF YOU DIDN’T MEET metaphysical optimism in Voltaire’s Candide, you may have come across its watered-down simulacrum in Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump, which put its ever-hopeful hero in an unlikely succession of recent-historical events, some of them influenced by his presence.

Imagine a story like that about American theater. You’d need to place your protagonist in New York in the nineteen-teens, when restless Greenwich Village-ites founded such stragglebum groups as The Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, the latter introducing the work of Eugene O’Neill.

This central character would need another source of income, of course. How about something that would take him across the country and around the world? We’ll make him a patent attorney. He’s at the forefront of the young century’s technological innovations, but his love for theater and his dream of an American theatrical identity keep him restlessly exploring production ideas.

Within the first hundred pages of his story, he’s hanging out with John Reed and Louise Bryant, Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He would go on to become a confidant and champion of both O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw. And every time you turn the page of Lawrence Langner’s 1951 memoir The Magic Curtain, a fresh and seemingly unbelievable surprise awaits.

For a fan of theater history, this is practically pornography – except that you’ll be using your free hand to smack your forehead in surprise. Take this passage (which is corroborated by the company in question) that describes the intermission dinner option for patrons of O’Neill’s lengthy, experimental “Strange Interlude” in 1928:

. . . when the touring company played Quincy (Wollaston) Massachusetts, just outside Boston, a restaurant near the theatre was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; the play brought the owner so many customers that with the cash he accumulated he started a chain of restaurants all over the country known by his name of Howard Johnson!

Born in Swansea in 1890, Langner went to work at age 13 in the London office of theatrical impresario J. Bannister Howard, who shared offices with Ellen Terry’s manager, thus enabling young Lawrence to see his first Shakespeare productions in Terry’s legendary versions. But the boy became too much of a favorite among the young actress who petitioned him daily for auditions with his boss: Langner’s mother happened by one day and caught her son sitting high on a prop dynamite box, surrounded by a bevy of beauties. She quickly found him other work in a friend’s patent office.

But this was enough to allow Langner to bring an immigrant’s eye to America’s theatrical potential. By 1914, he was living and working in New York and traveling the country to oversee regional patent offices. While in Ohio, he took a fellow-worker to see Nijinsky dance, prompting the friend to angrily threaten “to take a sock at that guy! Why doesn’t he work for a living?”

I mention this to show what we who pioneered in the theatre had to meet and overcome in the philistine attitude of the American public toward the arts, an attitude which was generally prevalent except for a small handful of people in the larger cities who were looked upon as cranks, eccentrics, or “sissies” by their fellow rugged individualists.

Langner believed that a subscription-based repertory company would be necessary so that an audience could be developed to weather the vicissitudes of a season’s offering. His first step in that direction was to help found and run the Washington Square Players in 1915, which lasted only until America’s entry into the First World War.

Views of G.B.S.

Summers at an artist’s colony in Woodstock, NY, put him contact with more like-minded individuals, and in 1918 Langner made a fresh theatrical start by creating the Theatre Guild, a now-legendary organization that began as an alternative to Broadway’s commercial theater scene, presenting works by the likes of Strindberg, Molnar, Werfel, Ibsen, and Capek. With the production of “Heartbreak House” in the Guild’s third season, Langner began a life-long friendship with Shaw that led to the American premieres of the massive “Back to Methuselah,” “Saint Joan,” “Caesar and Cleopatra,” and many more.

During the Guild’s seventh season, housed at the Garrick Theatre, a group of younger actors associated with the theater put together an after-hours revue titled “The Garrick Gaieties” which gave the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart its first success. Eighteen years later, the Guild paired Richard Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein for their first hit, “Oklahoma!”

1928 began the Guild’s association with O’Neill, and Langner presents fascinating examples of his friendship and correspondence with the playwright as works like “Mourning Becomes Electra,” “Ah! Wilderness,” and “The Iceman Cometh” are premiered. Both O’Neill and Shaw reveal themselves as working humans rather than the godlike figures often hagiographed by other writers.

As “Iceman” gestated, Langner complained to O’Neill in 1941 about an intestinal ailment, and the playwright replied:

Next time we meet you can tell me about your intestines, and I’ll tell you about my gall bladder, and liver, and low blood pressure and pyloric spasms, and we’ll both be too interested to listen to each other, and hour after pleasant hour will pass unheeded, and we’ll forget income taxes, and if anyone asks us about the war we’ll say, “What war?” There’s nothing like having a real good ailment.

. . . . Followed by a hilarious fantasy O’Neill spins out of how many conflicts throughout history could have been averted had the rulers only had the opportunity to discourse on their diseases.

Langner goes on to create the Westport Country Playhouse, which he used as a launching-pad for new plays (Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” was one such), and as the story ends in 1951, he’s on the brink of starting the American Shakespeare Festival Theater, which would open in 1955 in Stratford, Connecticut, and present Shakespeare’s plays into the 1980s. Langner lived until 1962; in 1958, he won a Tony Award for producing Dore Schary’s play “Sunrise at Campobello.”

Alongside Langner’s fascinating theater history is the story of American invention through the beginning of the 20th century. Langner co-founded the National Inventors Council in 1940 to inspire wartime innovation, recognizing the importance of cultivating talent that might be found outside the usual industry settings.

Langner’s narrative voice is charming and self-effacing, and he knows how to put across a good story. I picked The Magic Curtain off of the shelf of a used-book store to take a chance on it; it’s one of the most enjoyable chances I’ve recently taken.