422 Making It New: 1900–1945habits of the time that favored circumlocution and cliché, jocularity, sentiment,
pseudo-refinement – and the inevitable happy ending. Whatever their engagement
with social and psychological detail, they tended to remain stuck in convention; as a
result, they were not so much realistic as pseudo-realistic.
In the 1920s, David Belasco (1859–1931) tried to develop a drama of social
concern using naturalistic settings. The use of ordinary domestic and street scenes,
however, could not disguise the sentimentality of his scripts. His enduring
contribution to the theater was probably the romanticized Orient of Madame
Butterfly (1904), written in collaboration with John L. Long (1861–1927). This was
to achieve greater fame when it formed the basis for the Puccini opera, just as
Porgy (1927) by DuBose Heyward (1885–1940), adapted from his own novel (1925)
with the help of his wife Dorothy, was to become far more famous as the source
for Porgy and Bess (1935) by George Gershwin (1898–1937). Both Porgy, produced
by the Theatre Guild of New York, and Madame Butterfly enjoyed considerable
success in their own right; but they could not really match the success of the comedies
of manners written by Philip Barry (1896–1949), S. W. Behrman (1893–1973), and
Robert Sherwood (1896–1955). Barry and Behrman were both characteristically
divided in their aims. The urbane Barry wavered between his comic élan and a
striving for spiritual drama consonant with his early Catholic background; Behrman
tended to vacillate between sophistication and social conscience. So, in his comedies
Holiday (1928), Paris Bound (1929), The Animal Kingdom (1932), and The
Philadelphia Story (1939), Barry slyly undermines conventional worship of wealth
and social status as well as puritanical moralism, whether of the left or the right,
while he moves his characters toward an acceptance of the need for common sense,
humility, and tolerance. Behrman, in turn, gravitated from comedies with a serious
and sometimes political edge, like The Second Man (1927) and Biography (1932), to
plays openly concerned with politics, such as his anti-fascist play Rain from Heaven
(1934), or openly concerned with the problem of writing political drama, such as
the highly autobiographical No Time for Comedy (1938). Few other contemporary
playwrights matched the comic deftness of Barry and Behrman. Robert Sherwood
did so, however, in Reunion in Vienna (1931). So did Howard Lindsay (1889–1968)
and Russel Crouse (1893–1968) in Life with Father (1939). And Crouse and Sherwood
did not confine themselves to comedy. Typical of many journeyman playwrights of
the time, Crouse turned his hand successfully to political satire (State of the Nation
(1945)), melodrama (The Great Sebastians (1956)), and the musical (Call Me Madam
(1950)); while Sherwood was equally successful with romance (Waterloo Bridge
(1930)), the melodramatic thriller (The Petrified Forest (1935)), and social drama
(Idiot’s Delight (1936)).
Sherwood spent many years working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and several
of his plays were turned into successful films. With the arrival of talking pictures,
after The Jazz Singer (1927) proved the popularity of sound, the opportunities
for playwrights to sell both their plays and their scriptwriting skills suddenly grew.
An exemplary figure here is Ben Hecht (1895–1964). In the early 1920s, Hecht began
writing novels, but he did not achieve national prominence until he turned toGGray_c04.indd 422ray_c 04 .indd 422 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM