BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THEATER

"At Joe Allen, a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street where denizens of the theatre world have been convening for nearly six decades, the walls are lined with posters of Broadway's legendary duds. In the early days, for a show to make the display, it had to close in less than a week. Qualifying flops included such productions as 'Drat! The Cat!,' a sex farce about a Victorian Cat burglar  (eight performances), and 'Via Galactica,' a seventies rock opera about a trash collector who lives on an asteroid (seven performances)."
Rachel Syme. "ShowStoppers" in The New Yorker (June 3,2024)
**
ON FOUL PAPERS
"In the Elizabethan Theatre, the original manuscript of a play. To avoid plagiarism the dramatist sold his 'foul copy' to his company, which would produce a 'scrivener's copy' from it. This would then be endorsed and officially licensed on the last page."
Terry Hodgson. The Drama Dictionary. New York: New Amsterdsam Publishers, 1988)
**
 
ON CREATING THUNDER WITH CELLOPHANE

"...Peter Harvey, who designed a cheery bosky dell
in the park, complete with a cellophane thunderstorm. You don't see many cellophane thunderstorms these days, and I was suitably grateful."

Brendan Gill, reviewing  the musical "Park" in  The New Yorker (May 2, 1972)
**

ON THE THEATRICAL PHRASE "BREAK A LEG" TO WISH THEATER PERSONS WELL


Superstition against wishing an actor Good Luck! has led to the adoption of this phrase in its place. Popular etymology derives the phrase from the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, the actor turned assassin, leapt to the stage of Ford's Theater after the murder, breaking his leg in the process."
                    Internet information

I prefer another explaination of the origin of the phrase:
In some English theaters the curtains were weighted at the bottom with piano legs. To wish an actor "break a leg" meant
you hoped the curtain would be raided and lowered so many times
with great enthusiasm that a piano leg or more than one leg would break.
**

 JONATHAN MILLER ON DIRECTING & DIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE

"Condemnation and ridicule of the Actors' Studio style of training is general. 'I don't care how somebody feels about a part -- that's between him and his conscience,' Jonathan (Miller) says ' What I want is an actor who can say a line eighteen different ways. I am not running a clinic.' Yet a few minutes later he is talking about the relation between his current job and the one he was trained for. 'Directing and diagnostic medicine are mirror images. In both cases you're concerned with small physical signs which connote deep inner states. But you work in opposite directions." 

Alison Lurie. "What Happened in Hamlet" in Words and Worlds : from Autobiography to Zippers (Encino, Ca.Delphinium Books, 2019) 
**
THE POET/CRITIC RANDALL JARRELL WANTED TO WRITE A PLAY

"I spent last winter translating The Three Sisters and Cheryl Crawford is going to produce it with the Actor's Studio. I want to write a play myself but it's rather like joining some church-- I need to believe in the plot first."     

Randall Jarrell in a letter to Robert Penn Warren  (July 1954)Randall Jarrell's Letters, edited by Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985) 

SO WRITE A PLAY --SPEECH FROM AN 18th CENTURY COMEDY

VAPID: Now do write a play - and if any accident happens, remember,it is better to have written  a damn'd play than no play at all -- it snatches a man from obscurity.

Frederick Reynolds. The Dramaid (1793)
**
MOTHERS IN CLASSICAL AMERICAN DRAMAS

"Classic American drama is haunted by monstrous mothers. Vain, vampiric mamas prowl through plays from Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie" to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," from Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" to Sam Shepard's "Buried Child." For those guys, mothers are either harpies or sirens --villains or traps."

Helen Shaw., "Mothers of Us All" in The New Yorker (May 13, 2024)*

ACTORS NEED NOT BE EXTROVERTS

"...folk assume actors must be extroverts, but a lot aren't; many performers are big presences on stage, but quite shy off. There is, after all, a huge difference between pretending your somebody else and being yourself."

John Cleese. So,  Anyway... (New York: Random House, 2014)
**
HOW TALL MUST A PLAYWRIGHT BE? 

2 October 2005 --- "Some drunken lads at the buffet bar as we are queuing to get off the train at King's Cross, one of whom was trying to explain to the others who I was.    'Really? He's tall for a playwright."         
 Difficult to tell if this was wit or drink, but quite funny nevertheless. 

Alan Bennett. Keeping on Keeping on (New York,Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) **

ONE OF THE BEST CURTAIN SPEECHES DELIVERED BY A PLAYWRIGHT

On the opening night of THE GREEN PASTURES (winner of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) by Marc Connolly

"Years ago, George Kaufman and I made a pact. If either of us ever dared address a first night-audience, the other was privileged to open fire immediately with an elephant gun. Mr. Kaufman happens to be sitting on the aisle in row B. I bid you good night."

Marc Connelly. Voices Offstage (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968)

**
STAGE PERSONALITIES

Harris, Rex
Was not Mex-
ican.
(Say, does this verse scan?)

Burton, Richard
While rehearsing Hamlet heard
Some critic dubbed him "The Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare."
What he felt about that sobriquet is not entirely clear.

Ethel Merman
Cd afford to buy ermine,
Or, if she preferred, mink.
She had no interest in living like a monk.

David Mamet --
His characters rarely said "Damn it."
No. Their dialogue ran along the lines of
"#N$^** %$#@@@E%$@@^)(*^$#@$fuck off!"

LJP