Shaw in America (Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals)

Abstract

As L. W. Conolly makes clear, George Bernard Shaw had no great love for America. His expressed opinion of the United States “normally consisted of a toxic mix of contempt and mockery” (2). Despite many invitations, he did not visit the country until 1933, at the age of seventy-six. This was despite the fact that during this time, the United States saw forty-four national premieres of Shaw’s plays, eleven of them world premieres, including those of Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and St. Joan. The United States was Shaw’s largest source of income during the period between his first American premiere—Richard Mansfield’s 1894 production of Arms and the Man—and his death in 1950. In the period between 1909 and 1977, there were 190 American productions of Shaw’s plays. Connolly notes that between 1894 and 2020, “not a year went by without a Shaw play opening or running somewhere in the United States” (4).During the period when Shaw was very actively negotiating the productions of his plays, he dealt with an American theater that was going through a major transformation from both the business and the artistic standpoints. Shaw’s first negotiations were with traditional nineteenth-century actor-managers like Richard Mansfield and Arnold Daly, actors with egos to match his own who acquired the rights to a play and then set about raising money for a production they would cast and produce and probably take on an extensive tour, as well as starring in a New York production. With the rise of the theatrical syndicates at the turn of the century, Shaw found it necessary to negotiate with producers like Charles Frohman and Lee Shubert, for whom theater was primarily a business. Eventually finding his way around the syndicates, Shaw took full advantage of the semi-professional Little Theatre movement that began in the teens and of university and other amateur theaters that were devoted to art, often to the detriment of business concerns, which was not pleasing to Shaw. He finally found a congenial home in the Theatre Guild, a subscription theater that was the most distinguished producing entity in New York for drama of literary quality. Along with Shaw, it was to become a home for Eugene O’Neill and it produced plays by most of the other American literary playwrights of the mid-twentieth century, including Phillip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams. The Theatre Guild was run astutely by a group of directors who were equally concerned with art and commerce.Given the significance of the American stage to Shaw and of Shaw to the American stage, it is remarkable that this is the first comprehensive stage history of Shaw in the United States. The volume is clearly, as its title states, a chronicle of premieres. The entry for each premiere draws on an impressive array of sources to provide the detailed information that makes this book an invaluable historical resource. Conolly refers to “a wide range of previously unpublished archival resources, as well as an extensive array of newspapers, magazines, theatrical memoirs, and scholarly works” (6) among his sources. Each entry includes discussions of Shaw’s contract negotiations; his interaction with producers, directors, and actors; the play’s critical reception; box office returns; and tours following the opening. Each also includes a brief essay on the play’s significant American revivals. The individual entries are grouped together into chapters representing significant phases of Shaw’s history on the American stage. Interspersed with the entries on individual plays are brief accounts of theatrical developments that are vital to understanding the context for productions, such as the American Little Theatre Movement and the Theatre Guild, and developments specific to Shaw’s plays, such as the censorship of Mrs. Warren’s Profession and the controversies surrounding Man and Superman and Geneva.The book’s organization makes it convenient for a reader to access the stage histories of particular plays and to see them in their immediate contexts. Because the text is organized into relatively short blocks of material, it is less satisfying to try to read the volume straight through as a history of Shaw on the American stage—the volume is a chronicle, after all, not a narrative. There are recurring narrative threads, however, that connect the stories of the individual plays. Some of the most compelling involve Shaw’s interactions with particular actors and producers. The accounts of these relationships tend to form a pattern as one reads through the volume, almost like a series of failed romances. In his interactions with Richard Mansfield, Arnold Daly, and William Faversham, Shaw warms to the actor-managers with a great deal of initial enthusiasm and is generous in awarding rights to his plays, but eventually sours on them as disagreements about production issues arise and he eventually parts company, with varying degrees of rancor, moving on to the next glittering possibility.This is even true of his longest and most fruitful relationship, with the Theatre Guild in the person of Director Lawrence Langner, who often traveled to England to consult with Shaw. Beginning with Heartbreak House in 1920, the Theatre Guild produced eighteen of Shaw’s plays, including five world premieres. It was the most profitable producing relationship of his career, earning him about $350,000 (403), around $7,000,000 in today’s dollars. The Guild lost an equivalent amount of money on the productions, largely due to Shaw’s royalty demands, while it gained greatly in prestige. The relationship soured in 1938, when Langner refused the offer to produce Shaw’s Geneva because, he wrote to the playwright, he was “playing into the hands of the breeders of racial hatred by ranging [himself] . . . on their side” (402). Shaw’s reply to his letter, calling Langner “the most thoughtless of Sheenies” (402), did nothing to change his mind. Conolly makes clear that the relationship between the two men, and between Shaw and the Theatre Guild, was never the same after this incident, although Langner made several efforts during the 1940s to get Shaw to agree to revivals of other plays. Shaw put his refusals down to the wartime taxation rates.Shaw was notoriously and consistently tough in American royalty negotiations, demanding 10 percent of gross receipts, or a sliding scale beginning at 15 percent, when most authors were getting more like 5. This often made for tension and created financial problems for a producer, but hardly ever did Shaw relent on terms, even to keep a show open. The same is true of cuts to his scripts. With a very few exceptions, Shaw was adamant about retaining every word in his lengthy scripts. This was made painfully clear to William Faversham, who had made a success of Getting Married in 1917 and gone on to produce Misalliance, which did not do as well. Unbeknownst to Shaw, he cut twenty minutes from the play, trying to keep his audiences from getting bored with all the talk. The New York production had closed and the show was on tour by the time Shaw heard of the cuts and cabled Faversham to restore the cuts immediately or close the show. He followed up with a letter in which he bid the actor “Farewell,” saying “you are useful to me only as a terrible example of a manager who succeeded when he did what I told him, and failed when he thought he knew better than I what was my business and not his” (268). Faversham was never given another Shaw play to produce.Some surprising trends emerge from the chronicle as well. Shaw was very generous in entrusting American premieres of his plays to college drama societies and amateur theaters. The world premiere of Caesar and Cleopatra was performed by the students of Anna Morgan Studios in Chicago, as was the American premiere of Candida. Major Barbara was entrusted to Smith College and other plays to Vassar and Carnegie Tech. The Little Theatre Movement was also well represented among Shaw’s American premiers, including the Toy Theatre of Boston, the Little Theatre of Philadelphia, Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, Civic Theatre in Springfield, Ohio, the Little Theatre of Dallas, and the Grolier Club of New York. Shaw often gave uncharacteristically generous terms to these theaters. Perhaps less surprisingly, he was also very generous to the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that was closest thing the United States has ever had to a national theater. Unfortunately, it only operated between 1935 and 1939, when it was closed down as a result of criticism by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for being too left-wing, but Shaw had given it carte blanche to produce his plays in 1937 with the very low royalty of fifty dollars per week, and left it free, Conolly notes, to produce them “when, where, and how they liked” (405). Within two years, the FTP had mounted multiple productions of eight Shaw plays throughout the country, including productions of Androcles and the Lion with all-black casts in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.Conolly’s final chapter, “Posthumous Shaw,” is very illuminating about the scope of Shaw’s presence in American theaters after 1950. Although there were sixteen productions in the 1950s in New York City alone, Conolly notes, shifting “cultural tastes and values in the 1960s” (433), along with a declining attention span in audiences, made Shaw less producible on Broadway. Since his death, however, his work has been kept very much alive on American stages, mainly by Off-Broadway and other small theaters, such as Circle in the Square and the Roundabout in New York, and many regional theaters like the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Yale Repertory Theatre, and LA Theatre Works. Of primary importance since 1962 has been the Shaw Festival in the small town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which, Conolly notes, has produced all of Shaw’s plays, some many times over, and is still going strong in 2023. Conolly’s wide-ranging account in this chapter gives vivid concreteness to his remark that there has not been a time since 1894 when a Shaw play has not been running in America.It would have been useful to have summary narratives like the one in the final chapter placed periodically throughout the book, to supplement the chronicle of premieres with a sense of the general ubiquity of Bernard Shaw on the American stage. Granting the focus on the premieres as a given, however, the alphabetical list at the end provides a sense of the constant presence of his plays throughout the United States and the volume as a whole provides an extensive compendium of evidence for his intense and continued interest in being produced in English-speaking North America. The many fascinating accounts of productions in this first comprehensive stage history should spark a great deal of interest and future work on Shaw’s production history in the United States and Canada.