Mark
Jacoby (front) and Jared Zeus (back) in The Play's the
Thing, 2007.
Photo by Gerry Goodstein
Mansky: Life isn’t all theatre.
Turai: Yes, it is. If you write plays.
The Play’s the Thing received its first Broadway production
in New York City in November of 1926 at Henry Miller’s
theatre, and ran for 313 performances. The show was revived
in 1928 at the Empire Theatre. Soon after, it was successfully
re-produced in England, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, South
America, Italy, and Hungary.
Molnar’s
title is of course a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
but with a twist. In Hamlet, the play-within-the-play is
supposed to expose the King in his guilt, but Molnar uses
the convention to exonerate the leading actress. The idea
for the story came to him when he overheard his wife with
her German tutor repeating phrases of love in German.
“My wife
(Lily Darvas) and I were stopping at the Hotel Imperial
in Vienna. She was then learning to speak German. All day
long she had to recite German classical plays. Just for
practice, for hours on end. One afternoon an intimate friend
called on me, and as we were chatting amiably, he suddenly
jumped up. He had heard Lily’s voice in her room,
which adjoined mine, saying in fluent German, ‘I love
you, I love you! I shall die of love for you!’ No
wonder he jumped. And I jumped. Both of us went to the door,
and upon opening it, found Lily quietly sitting in her rocker
reciting declarations of love to her tutor. Utterly harmless,
yet how disturbing it sounded!…That’s how I
got the idea. But you can just as well say I got it from
Hamlet, from that familiar line, you know.”
Among the myriad of themes he wrote about in his novels
and plays, Molnar was keenly interested in exploring the
thin and often disappearing line between reality and illusion,
between life and the stage. There were many times he tried
to stretch the parameters of these worlds, or one’s
perception of them. The Play’s the Thing is no exception.
An overheard conversation becomes a scene on a stage. Truth
becomes illusion and the theatrical pretense becomes reality.
So although it is delightful, this is not merely a frothy
drawing room comedy, but a play that both exposes and embraces
theatrical conventions, creates the effect of encountering
several levels of reality at once, and shows us that we
are all “merely players.”
Born in Budapest,
on January 12, 1878, Ferenc Molnar was probably the greatest
playwright to come out of Hungary. He was celebrated the
world over at the height of his fame in the 1920’s
and 30’s. The American success of his play The Devil
(1908) was phenomenal. Four companies played it simultaneously
in New York: two in English, one in German, and one in Yiddish.
Molnar’s greatest influences were Arthur Schnitzler,
Oscar Wilde, Pirandello, and George Bernard Shaw. He has
often been referred to as the Hungarian Noël Coward,
and his plays were known for their masterly theatrical technique
and their sparkling dialogue.
Eighteen Molnar
plays have been done on Broadway. His most popular plays
are Liliom (1909)–later adapted into the Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical play Carousel in 1945, The Swan (1920),
and The Guardsman (1910)–presented in a musical adaptation,
Enter the Guardsman, at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey
in 1999 with Robert Cuccioli, Dana Reeve, and Mark Jacoby
as the Playwright.
One year before The Play’s The Thing was produced,
Molnar wrote: “1878, I was born in Budapest. 1896,
I became a law student at Geneva. 1896, I became a journalist
in Budapest. 1897, I wrote a short story. 1900, I wrote
a novel. 1902, I became a playwright at home. 1908, I became
a playwright abroad. 1914, I became a war correspondent.
1916, I became a playwright once more. 1918, my hair turned
snow white. 1925, I should like to be a law student in Geneva
once more.”
In 1939, Molnar emigrated to the United States to escape
the Nazi persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War
II. He settled in New York and lived there until his death
on April 1, 1952.
When asked how he became a writer, Molnar said, “In
the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I
did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends,
and finally I did it for money.”
P. G. Wodehouse (Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse), considered
by many to be the quintessential English humorist, was born
on October 15, 1881, in Guildford, Surry, England. Wodehouse
wrote more than 90 books, and collaborated on more than
30 plays and musical comedies; one notable theatrical contribution
being his lyrics for the hit song “Bill” in
Show Boat. He is best known for his Blandings Castle novels
and as the creator of the butler Jeeves, “that subtle
master of prudence, good taste, and ineffable composure.”
Not unlike the
stock characters of Roman comedy, Wodehouse’s servants
are frequently far cleverer than their masters. This is
especially true of Jeeves, “the source of all solace”,
who always pulls his employer out of scrapes. In Right Ho,
Jeeves, Wodehouse wrote “one thing I have never failed
to hand the man—he is magnetic. There is about
him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize.
To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a
charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur,
I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would
check itself in midstride, roll over and lie purring with
his legs in the air.” One can see touches of Jeeves
in Dwornitschek, the footman in Wodehouse’s adaptation
of The Play’s The Thing.
Although Wodehouse and his novels are considered quintessentially
English, from 1924 on he lived primarily in France and the
United States. He was profoundly uninterested in politics
and world affairs. When World War II broke out in 1939 he
remained at his seaside home in France, instead of returning
to England, apparently failing to recognize the seriousness
of the conflict. He was subsequently taken prisoner by the
Germans in 1940 and interned by them for a year, first in
Belgium, then at Tost in Upper Silesia (now in Poland).
He is recorded as saying “If this is Upper Silesia,
one must wonder what Lower Silesia must be like...”
While at Tost, he entertained his fellow prisoners with
witty dialogues. When released from internment, he used
these dialogues in a series of radio broadcasts, aimed at
America (but not England), that the Germans persuaded him
to make from Berlin. Wartime England was in no mood for
light-hearted banter, however, and the broadcasts led to
many accusations of collaboration with the Nazis and even
treason. An investigation by the British security service
MI5 concluded that Wodehouse was naive and foolish but not
a traitor.
The criticism, however, led Wodehouse and his wife to move
permanently to New York. He became an American citizen in
1955, and never returned to his homeland. He was knighted
in 1975 at the age of 93, but his health was so poor his
doctor forbade him to make the journey to England from America.
His career, which spanned seventy years, ended on February
14 of the same year, in his hospital bed, after “a
good morning’s work” on his latest novel.
“I go in for what is known in the trade as ‘light
writing’ and those who do that – humorists they
are sometimes called – are looked down upon by the
intelligentsia and sneered at.” —P.G. Wodehouse
“Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime?
Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.”
—P.G. Wodehouse
Victorien Sardou (1831 - 1908) is perhaps best remembered
today for the play La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's
opera Tosca (1900) is based. The fact that Sardou is chosen
to be the playwright of the play-within-the-play is a humorous
dig and a bit of an inside playwright's joke. George Bernard
Shaw coined the dismissive term "Sardoodledum"
in The Saturday Review, June 1, 1895, deriding the playwright's
high-class melodramas. Shaw believed that Sardou's contrived
dramatic machinery was creaky and that his plays were empty
of ideas. Sardou wrote many plays for Sarah Bernhardt and
though very popular, was the source of much derision amongst
other writers.
