Men in White

Abstract

TODAY’S TELEVISION VIEWERS ARE RELENTLESSLY EXposed to endless dramas, documentaries, and “reality” shows centered on the operating room. But the dramatization of the surgeon’s workshop, replete with urgent calls for scalpels and sponges, represents a rather recent wrinkle in the long history of American popular culture. To be more precise, on September 26, 1933, the operating room made its Broadway debut in Sidney Kingsley’s medical melodrama, Men in White. Its opening curtain essentially lifted a sluice gate, releasing a torrent of medical shows for public consumption. The now famous but then barely surviving Group Theatre produced what turned out to be a smashing success. Gushing over the production’s realistic portrayal of life in an urban general hospital, critic Brooks Atkinson described the play in the New York Times as forceful and “warm with life and high in aspiration . . . it has a contagious respect for the theme it discusses.” Equally effusive, the crusty Joseph Wood Krutch of The Nation categorized Men in White as a “genuine work of art.” Several months later, the play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of 1933. Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford founded the Group Theatre in 1931. By all accounts it was a hotbed of novel theories on acting and the social role of the theater, petty jealousies, love triangles, and political foment. Inspired by the Stanislavsky system of acting (named for the director of the Moscow Art Players, Constantin Stanislavsky), Strasberg and his colleagues developed a rigorous curriculum that guided generations of successful stage and screen actors. Perhaps Strasberg’s most significant albeit controversial contribution to what came to be called Method acting was an emphasis on improvisation and affective or emotional memory. In rehearsals, Strasberg extracted painful psychological moments, or affective memories, from the actor’s real life to help animate the raw emotions called for by the script at hand. The process was brutal in its exposure and reduced many actors to tears. He also ordered his actors to trail real physicians in the hospital to gather a realistic sense of the profession. Stage and film director Elia Kazan played the minor role of a young physician named Vitale in the original production of Men in White. Fiftyfive years later, he chillingly recalled Strasberg’s directorial modus operandi: