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NARRATOR: Over the past 60 years, Mark Connelly has
at one time or another been a playwright, producer,
director and actor. He's one of the last remaining
grand old men of the Broadway Theatre. In the early '20s,
writing in collaboration with George S. Kaufman,
he turned out such Broadway hits as Dulcy, Merton of
the Movies and Beggar on Horseback. But it was his solo
effort as author of Green Pastures which brought him his
greatest fame and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930.
The play was later made into a movie and was twice adapted
for television. His talents as a writer have not been
limited to the stage and screen. He's also the author of prize
winning short stories, a novel and a book of memoirs
entitled "Voices off Stage". With all, he's found time to
teach playwriting at Yale and to serve as
President of the Authors League and of
The National Institute of Arts and Letters.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪
JAMES DAY: Mr. Connelly, in your memoirs you say
"My love for the theatre has grown with a familiarity of
its mysteries" or "with its mysteries". What are the
mysteries of the theatre to you?
MARC CONNELLY: Well I don't know what's behind any
hypnosis really what the psychologic pressures are that
come up in you that makes you but the theatre is to me-
well it's a cathedral, as I said in those memoirs.
JAMES DAY: For worship?
MARC CONNELLY: Oh yes. It was- well it began as a church.
You know the first records we have of any theatre are
the ancient Greek plays that were put on in El Fresco
on the way to the Dionysian Shrines and it was always
an author in the middle of this thing and the occasion,
the play, the dance, whatever it was that they gave,
was a device to invite the God to come into the worshippers.
And it was always been an invitation to be
inhabited by deity.
JAMES DAY: It's more difficult to think of it as a cathedral
today. I think of some of the modern trends for example.
MARC CONNELLY: I wished more people did because today's
theatre is a little difficult to identify it as theatre.
It's a place of explosion. It's a place of- well it's still a
place of entertainment and I'm not integrating the
word entertainment because it has to be entertaining.
That was a- I once found myself defining theatre as a
place where one sought truth under pleasant circumstances
and I think that's what it always was. The Greek theatre,
the popular Greek, ancient Greek theatre was a wonderful
catharsis. It was a great way in which to more or less purge
yourself of the humdrum things that preoccupied your time.
It released them and gave you a chance to examine contemporary
morals and morays. It had an excitement that
has never died really.
JAMES DAY: Would it be a place for us to increase our
understanding of ourselves?
MARC CONNELLY: That's what the- that was the idea.
It was medicine too.
JAMES DAY: Medicine in what way?
MARC CONNELLY: Well the Greeks, as you know, built a great
many theatres on the sites of what they call the iscolepio,
the hospitals. And in the days of Hippocrates and afterwards
when they had hydrotherapy amongst the bits of magic,
they always put up a theatre because they knew that the
clown and the mime was just as much of a doctor
as the physicians. And it was a medicine for the
spirit and the soul.
JAMES DAY: Certainly comedy is.
MARC CONNELLY: If you haven't got comedy,
you haven't got theatre.
JAMES DAY: What about theatre as a polemic, a place where
the playwright argues his case?
MARC CONNELLY: I think it almost invariably has at
least a vague didactic purpose behind it. Though when it's
used consciously-
JAMES DAY: Vague.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes it should be vague. Whenever it
becomes specific and whenever it becomes- what it attacks is
identified, it loses some of its magic as theatre I think
and then you might as well be in the classroom hearing
a lecture because the playwright should not be hortatory.
He shouldn't be a lecturer. He's a means of transmission.
JAMES DAY: You've also written that the theatre must have
freedom to function properly. And I think that's pretty
generally understood. But what about today? Freedom seems
almost to move toward license. I think-
MARC CONNELLY: It is a licentious theatre unhappily
and I'm against all the dirtier vulgarities for the reason
that they become boresome, boring. They are-
JAMES DAY: It's one of the first sins of theatre is to
bore the audience.
MARC CONNELLY: Well of course it is and they're to my mind
they're just as stultifying and just as dull as if a man
stood up and kept reciting one word for an hour and a half.
And the youngsters in the theatre who are writing
the, quote, plays, close quote, are after detonations more
than I think expressions. They don't want the-
JAMES DAY: Shock.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes, they want noise and shock. It's an
explosive instrument right now, just as bad as the old
dynamite canes when I was a boy.
JAMES DAY: Maybe the only way to catch attention
in a world where-
MARC CONNELLY: Pardon?
JAMES DAY: Maybe the only way to catch attention in a world
where there's so many detonations on the one hand-
MARC CONNELLY: Well there's a little thing called skill and
craft and invention and imagination. I don't think
that what being off today necessarily substitutes for
those. An audience is always wanted. Not man's always
needed the theatre. He knows that it is a marvelous tonic
and every time a play that has any worth, any skill,
any art in it and any time that kind of play comes along
everybody rushes there. So they were actually going
to kind of a confessional.
JAMES DAY: Are you a theatre goer today?
MARC CONNELLY: Oh yes. I feel that I ought to wear a gas mask
sometimes but I've had good times this winter.
I've enjoyed-
JAMES DAY: You have seen things that you've liked.
MARC CONNELLY: Oh yes. This winter, oh yes. Let me see
if I can name some of them offhand. I like The Good Doctor
for instance. I think that was a very underestimated
play. And personality. It had individuality. That is the one
thing about a play that I look for. Is this the first time the
curtain has ever gone up on any play? That's what I ask
myself, and if I have that- if I get a satisfactory answer,
then I carry away, well, an increase of some kind with
what small stature I have.
JAMES DAY: You were literally born into the theatre.
Your mother and father were both before your birth members
of a touring company.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes, my mother eloped with my father when
he was a handsome young Irish leading man in a stock
company in Boston. And my mother was a daughter of a
very prominent Bostonian. She left a note one day.
She had been told that young Mr. Connelly was not
necessarily welcome because he was a Catholic among other
things and high church Episcopalian area and my mother
didn't say that my father was a renegade
Catholic which, he was.
JAMES DAY: Which he was.
MARC CONNELLY: Oh yes. He didn't do much about church.
But anyway she left a little note saying she was going away
with Joseph and they had some time figuring out who Joseph
was until he was that actor. And-
JAMES DAY: That didn't sit well, hmm?
MARC CONNELLY: Oh no but after a while notices began
arriving from various newspaper drama criticism and it turned
out that their daughter was a wonderful actress and somehow
or another that began to catalyze them. And as the
notices were increasingly good when they came from Shreveport
or Chillicothe or Duluth, they realized that perhaps
Joseph wasn't such a bad husband for Mabel and so they had a
very happy life together. My manager-
JAMES DAY: They had settled down by the time you were
born, settled down in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
MARC CONNELLY: Well they had a baby girl who died
of pneumonia. They were up in Minnesota.
JAMES DAY: On tour.
MARC CONNELLY: On tour and the shock was so great and
their sense of guilt was so great at having contributed
to the baby's death, presumably died of a cold, that they
gave up the theatre and at the behest of my father's
people and my maternal grandparents, they settled
down in a little town just outside Pittsburgh.
My father went into the hotel business there. He knew so
many actors that he had already made clientele. Any actors
who came to Pittsburgh to perform would always come up
to McKeesport and stay at my father's hotel.
JAMES DAY: So you Marcus Cook Connelly grew up with
actors all around him.
MARC CONNELLY: I became that abomination, a hotel child.
I was told not to go into any rooms or any of the clients
of the hotel. There was one gentleman who tolerated me.
I usually arrived when he was shaving. I don't know
whether that made my greeting any warmer but I used to go
talk to him about the civil war, Old Bill Means and he
would stop shaving when he would see that I was really intent
on hearing everything he said. He'd tell me about this
battle and that battle and apparently as Lloyd Lewis once
said, if you can come out of it alive, the Civil War was one
of the most enjoyable experiences a young
man could have.
JAMES DAY: You met Buffalo Bill at this time, didn't you?
MARC CONNELLY: I did indeed. That's the hand, a little worn
now but that's the hand that one day shook his as my father
allowed me to be a waiter. It was an astounding occasion.
I'd never been allowed to do such a thing. I took a glass
of grape juice up to Mr. Cody. Now Mr. Cody you know had an
enormous reputation for drinking anything but grape juice but
that's what he was on the wagon then. I guess he was-
they sort of moved in on him to restrain him. And his circus
was in town, and I was able to bring him a glass of grape
juice on a tray and had very little breath but he said come
here young man. What's your name? I told him. And he said
well it's good to see you and it's good to meet you.
So I met Buffalo Bill. Nothing really.
JAMES DAY: So it was almost inevitable.
MARC CONNELLY: Just a miracle. That was all.
JAMES DAY: Almost inevitable I suppose that you would
go into the theatre given that background.
MARC CONNELLY: Well I had a theatre on the second floor
of my father's hotel where I produced contemporary
drama from my own pen.
JAMES DAY: At what age?
MARC CONNELLY: I was eight and sometime my ninth year I
was still doing it. But they were usually sociological
studies, a brave sailor for instance and a ship caught
fire and he saved everybody's life. And then I was once a
master detective to running down crime as one of the studies
in depth of crime. I remember the Bittle Boys who escaped
from the Western Pennsylvania prison- or penitentiary.
They eloped with the prison keeper's wife and it became
quite a dramatic-
JAMES DAY: Very heavy drama.
MARC CONNELLY: Story in the newspaper.
JAMES DAY: You lost your father when you were
about 12 years old.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes, he died in 1912. I was 11 when
he died. Curious unbelievable. It was incredibility. You lose
your father at 11 it's the most frightening kind of bankruptcy.
You just don't have anything in the world for a while and
you walk around in kind of a daze. And anyway my mother
widowed, ran the hotel until the panic of 1908 which a good
many of your listeners I don't think will recall. That came
along and she lost the hotel. So I had to go to work instead
of continuing my prep school life and going to Harvard.
JAMES DAY: You intended to go to Harvard then.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes I was the first of several generations
in my family who didn't go to Harvard.
JAMES DAY: So you went to Pittsburgh instead of Harvard.
MARC CONNELLY: I went to Pittsburgh, yes.
JAMES DAY: And got a job.
MARC CONNELLY: It was not known as the University City then.
I worked on a newspaper there, collecting classified
ads I remember.
JAMES DAY: What was the first thing you wrote when you
began to write for theatre? It was in Pittsburgh with
the athletic association.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes, Pittsburgh Athletic Association of which
I was the theatre director. It consisted of once a month
getting together some kind of a show and my collaborator
was musical play we did and my collaborator was
the famous Zoel Parenteau.
JAMES DAY: Oh yes.
MARC CONNELLY: Who wasn't as universally famous as he
should have been. He was a very fine musician and a very
fine composer. We wrote a musical play which was done
at one of the big theatres in Pittsburgh. And to everyone's
astonishment did about $18,000 on the week.
JAMES DAY: Was this The Lady of Luzon?
MARC CONNELLY: That was The Lady of Luzon. Probably the
only living person outside of my old friend Burton Muston
whom I see on TV occasionally. He was in it. He would
remember. But that encouraged a local billionaire to believe
that Mr. Parenteau and I ought to do something a little
more ambitious. So we wrote a show here in New York and
it probably was the greatest employment agency for
rewrite people that every existed. The trains to Boston
when we were trying out up there, every train brought in
a half a dozen expert labrets.
JAMES DAY: You've been quoted as saying that everyone who
owned a typewriter took a hand in writing to it.
MARC CONNELLY: Is there a rewrite man here? Well the
crush would have killed the average person.
JAMES DAY: And that show wasn't successful, was it?
MARC CONNELLY: Well not quite.
No. JAMES DAY: That was The Amber Empress, wasn't it?
MARC CONNELLY: It was The Amber Empress. And that was the
title of what I had written but of course everybody in the
world has rewritten it by then. Instead of being a 16 Century
story of the building of a villa in the River Brenta and
the love affair between the doge and a young woman. It became
a story, sort of a natural sequence I guess. It became a
story of a motion picture company working in Venice.
JAMES DAY: So you were stuck in New York.
MARC CONNELLY: I was stuck in New York and I didn't have
enough money to go back to Pittsburgh so I sponged on
a friend who had been a fellow reporter with me on the
Pittsburgh Dispatch and who is now in advertising business,
not a big mogul but he had a living wage enough to
support the two of us.
JAMES DAY: And you met George S. Kaufman at this time then.
MARC CONNELLY: No, not then. I eventually I got a job doing
legwork for Reynolds Wolf who had a theatrical column in
the Daily Telegraph which in those days was a half
theatrical paper and the rest was sports. I met George.
We would be together with our arms on the plush back railing
of a dozen theatres and we became familiar with each other
and began talking and became friends and each discovered
that the other wanted to write plays and so we said let's go
ahead and write a play. And then we met a manager on
our daily rounds named George Tyler who was then
a very important figure in the New York Theatre.
And he was a bold fellow too, and he allowed us each
to write a play. I rewrote an old opera called- old comic
opera called Erminie with Dewolf Hopper and James Powers
I remember. It was the first thing I ever had done in
New York. I was up in the old Circle Theatre. And the young
fellow who did the scenery which was extraordinary attractive
in shades of grey, believe it or not, the young man named
Norman Bel Geddes and that was his debut too. And George
rewrote a comedy that was killed more or less by the flu
epidemic. And I can remember an ad he wanted Mr. Tyler
to take. Avoid crowds. Go see someone in the-
JAMES DAY: Then your first collaboration with him was on
a play that was written for a young English actress
named Lynn Fontanne.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes. Mr. Tyler was her manager, and
she was then playing angenieux roles with Loretta Taylor and
her husband. I can't think of his name. Elizabeth Taylor.
Loretta Taylor's husband's name- well I hope his ghost
doesn't arrive and haunt me. But we were very good friends.
Anyway the two of them starred and her husband decided
that Lynn should have more of a chance than he could
possibly give her writing plays for his wife to star in.
So Tyler agreed and he suggested that George and I cook up
a play. So we did. We wrote a play called Dulcy.
JAMES DAY: Which was a hit.
MARC CONNELLY: Yes thank goodness. And Lynn became an
established figure, and about six months later she married
a young man named Alfred Lunt.
JAMES DAY: Then you wrote To the Ladies for Helen Hayes
and The Deep Tangled Wildwood, Merton of the Movies.
But after several years-
MARC CONNELLY: Merton of the Movies, they're going to do
into a musical I just heard. I don't know who's doing it.
JAMES DAY: After several years of collaboration why you no
longer worked with George Kaufman? You were still
friends. Why did you break up the collaboration?
MARC CONNELLY: Well we only stopped public collaboration.
We always- if I wrote anything I showed it to George and
George usually showed me what he was doing and as a
matter of fact, just before he died we were going to do
another play together under a joint names but I wanted to
do a play. I did a play called Wisdom Tooth alone to see
whether I could possibly get through a play under my
own devices and George wanted to do a play of his own.
He wrote The Butter and Egg Man and George immediately
went back to collaboration because he was- he knew
he had an enormous aptitude for collaboration and we had
an aptitude for a great many things but collaborating
seemed to speed up his adrenaline and I don't have
to point out that he was enormously successful.
I wrote a good many plays alone. I didn't have much success
with them. Success with some. But anyway we always would-
we do skits and all sorts of semi amateur
collaborations together.
JAMES DAY: You of course had one great success.
Do you recall the evening of February 26, 1930, the night
that Green Pastures opened?
MARC CONNELLY: I do indeed. I was the night after The Apple
Cart opened and I thought what are they going to do to me
because the critics didn't like The Apple Cart and-
JAMES DAY: You thought they wouldn't like
Green Pastures as well?
MARC CONNELLY: Oh I was pretty well certain that they wouldn't
and the producer was very gallant gentleman who had
made a fortune on Wall Street and by some kind of ESP
managed to get out of Wall Street about 15 minutes before
the crash with all his money intact. And I don't know maybe
he wanted to do as an act of contrition or something but he
went into the theatre and looking around for play and as
a matter of fact he was playing bridge with George Couple
one night and he was asking George if he had a play and
George says no but Connelly's got a new one.
JAMES DAY: Which you hadn't been able to get produced for
well over a year.
MARC CONNELLY: Every manager in town had turned it down, yes.
JAMES DAY: Controversial?
MARC CONNELLY: No terror I think set in the moment they
read it when they discovered it was a play of an entirely
*** cast and the character God to be played by a ***.
That sort of discouraged any deep potention to what the
script might have in the way of merit. But Arthur, oh dear,
great producer, he did dozens and dozens of the best plays
of the late '20s and the '30s. Oh isn't that awful.
He's Lacuni I got in your head sometimes.
JAMES DAY: What happened when the curtain went down?
MARC CONNELLY: Well I want to tell you about this.
This one man who said I've read the play twice and if
I knew how to do it I would do it. And I know he meant it too.
Oh dear, what is his name? I hope it comes to
me before I'm off the air.
JAMES DAY: Let me ask you again what happened that night
when the curtain went down at the end of the-
MARC CONNELLY: Well when the curtain went down the audience
indicated we had a hit alright.
JAMES DAY: Virtually exploded.
MARC CONNELLY: Oh yes. It did. They were rebuilding the
roof for weeks afterward. But I was in the state of shock and
a state of exhaustion too because I'd been working day
and night on the rehearsal. I directed it. And getting the
curtain up had been really a strain that almost knocked
me out. My partner, my producer had nothing but
confidence. It was terrifying to see his ebullience and
to see his belief that the play was really going to be big.
He says and if we go to jail, he says I think it will be a nice
thing to do. It will be quite an honor to go to jail because
we thought we might. We didn't dare open it out of town for
the reason that we didn't feel it would be the same tolerance
possibly in Philadelphia or Boston that there would,
might be in New York we hoped for. And because an
awful lot of hoodwinks would see it as a sacrilegious horrible
piece of latter day defeltry and all, instead of which,
thank goodness, every one of the orthodox churches found
that it was essentially quite simple and quite innocent and
as a matter of fact even reverend we never had
any trouble with.
JAMES DAY: You've said one of your purposes in writing
it in the introduction was to offset the loss of interest
in religion that so many of your generation were becoming
agnostic. But you yourself were and have remained an agnostic.
MARC CONNELLY: I consider myself as an agnostic. Yes, certainly
I felt I was sort of a pantheist in the sense that I was
perfectly ready to entertain the merits and recognize and
honor the merits of any religion. Almost any religion
that lasts 500 years is pretty good religion until the police
move in, police sergeants and the people that start shoving
the believers around and begin offering such stringent
restrictions that it's no longer fun. And I think that the
general idea of God would provide for a certain amount of
amusement on his part and a tolerance that most of
the religions don't dare offer.
JAMES DAY: Thank you very much.
[Theme Music]