Post by dreamer on Jan 19, 2007 19:39:30 GMT -5
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY Play Notes
INTRODUCTION
'Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.'
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy
Written at the end of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story is a remarkable comedy about some serious issues. In this story of a young woman's discovery that 'the time to make up your mind ab out people is never,' Barry explores questions that still seem relevant today--what does privacy mean in the age of the mass media? how can you reconcile class division with the ideals of democracy?
Barry may have been, as some have suggested, a bit too much in love with the upper classes, but The Philadelphia Story suggests that Barry was also truly interested in what constitutes a first class human being. But more than that, what makes Barry's play appealing over fifty years after it was first produced is the timeless charm of the characters and the pure pleasure of his verbal wit. And if the 1940 movie starring Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Cary Grant is perhaps the best known version of the play, it is on the stage where Barry's wit shines and where his comic vision finds its best realization.
BIOGRAPHY OF PHILIP BARRY
(1896 - 1949)
'All things are turned to a roundness. Wherever there is an end, from it springs the beginning.'
-Philip Barry, Hotel Universe
Best known for his sophisticated comedies of manners like Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), Philip Barry was one of the leading American playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s. His popular comedies, which most often focused on the social ri tuals of the upper classes, charmed audiences with their witty dialogue and biting satire. What is most remarkable about Barry's career, however, is the wide range of his interests and talents; not only did he write some of the most successful comedies of the period, but he experimented with dramas based on everything from Freudian psychology and metaphysical speculation to religious allegory. Critics didn't always appreciate Barry's attempts to experiment with form and theme, but they almost unanimously regard him as an important figure in the modern American theater.
Born to middle-class Irish-Catholic parents in 1896, Barry grew up and attended Catholic school in Rochester, New York. After enrolling at Yale University, he began contributing short stories and poems to the literary magazine. He was still working tow ard his undergraduate degree when America entered World War I. Rejected from the army because of his poor eyesight, Barry worked as an attachŽ in the code department of the United States Embassy in London until after the end of the war.
When he returned home in 1919, Barry took one of the most significant steps of his career, enrolling in George Pierce Baker's theater workshop at Harvard. The renowned Workshop 47 was no doubt the most influential theater class in the country, producin g playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and S.N. Behrman and critics like Robert Benchley. The Jilts (later retitled You and I), one of the plays written under Baker's direction, won Harvard's Herndon Prize and soon became Barry's first success on Broadway.
In 1922 Barry married Ellen Marshall Semple and in the years that followed the couple had two sons. A daughter, however, died in infancy, a loss that was to haunt Barry for the rest of his life. While raising their sons, the couple spent a good deal o f time in their French villa in Cannes. Unlike a variety of well-known American writers and artists who had become expatriates after the War, Barry didn't consider himself an exile: 'My home in Cannes gives me perspective.... As soon as I get there, I bec ome completely American.'
Also in the 1920s, Barry found success on Broadway with comedies like Holiday, a satire about American materialism in the Jazz age. It was later made into a film starring Katherine Hepburn, who had understudied the role of Linda Seton during the Broadw ay run, and Cary Grant. But in the Depression era that followed, Barry turned his attention to more serious, experimental dramas. In 1929, he had become a member of the Theatre Guild, an organization created by directors and playwrights and dedicated to producing plays of high quality that would challenge audiences rather than pandering to them for mere commercial gain.
In Barry's Hotel Universe, for example, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1930, a group of disillusioned vacationers are enabled to go back in time and relive significant moments in their past. By the end, each one has worked through a central crisis i n his or her life and returns to the present with a renewed understanding of himself. Critics and audiences alike were more confused than intrigued by the play's serious attempt to address both psychoanalysis and Christian faith. Despite its noble aims a nd the Guild's attempt to enliven the theater-going public with substantial content, the play closed after 81 performances. In recent years, critics have reevaluated the play, one going so far as to say that 'Barry created in Hotel Universe possibly the masterpiece of psychoanalytic drama.' In 1932, Barry wrote another Broadway hit with The Animal Kingdom, a play about the nat ure of marriage and adultery. But beginning with The Joyous Season in 1934, he seemed to produce nothing but failures. To critics, Bright Star (1935) was too depressing and Spring Dance (which Barry adapted from a script by two Yale undergraduates in 193 6) was too trivial. Barry's most ambitious play to date, Here Come the Clowns (1938), a modern version of the Biblical story of Job, opened to mystified audiences and ran for only 8 weeks.
Barry quickly redeemed himself, however, following these disappointments with one of his biggest triumphs, The Philadelphia Story, which opened at the Schubert Theatre in New York on March 28, 1939. Critics welcomed Barry's return to the drawing room c omedy that had made him famous. They recognized that The Philadelphia Story wasn't nearly as serious a play as Here Come the Clowns, but that the smart dialogue and characterization showed Barry's talents at their finest. The critic at Newsweek wrote tha t the play 'is a shuffling and uncertain job of playmaking, suggesting a series of card tricks...' but that 'here and there amid the shuffling there emerge ... some true and gleaming bits of comedy writing.'
Just before the United States entered World War II, Barry experimented with an overtly political drama called Liberty Jones. The play was meant to be a powerful indictment of fascism, but audiences found the allegory heavy-handed and it ran for on ly 22 performances. In 1949, Barry was working on Second Threshold when he died of a heart attack at age 53. Like so many of Barry's works, this last unfinished play centers on a man who discovers that he is unable to love. Robert Sherwood, a close friend of Barry's who revised the play for production after the playwright's death, said of Second Threshold: 'It moved me powerfully and excited me greatly. For I felt that he had at last begun to achieve the realization, or the synthesis, of his apparently b ut not actually discordant qualities: his Irish, impish sense of comedy, and his profound, and also Irish, sense of the ultimate sadness of life on earth, the 'endless assault' of evil upon good.'
Decades after his death, Barry's urbane comedies continue to charm audiences. Yet he managed to combine an amazing talent for the established genre of the drawing room comedy with a desire to experiment, to stretch the boundaries of the modern the ater. Living through some of the most tumultuous periods of the twentieth century (World War I, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II) Barry created dramas that investigate such 'modern' political issues as class conflict and tota litarianism. He was also deeply interested in Freudian psychology, and attempted to create dramatic analogues for the problems of alienation and repression. If his experiments were not always well-received by the critics of his day, they have been greete d with new interest by contemporary scholars. Far more than his neglected but significant legacy of innovation and originality, it is Barry's comedies--clever, bright, deeply sympathetic of human frailty, and unabashedly romantic--that have earned him an important place in the history of modern theater.
CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR WORKS
1923 You and I
1924 The Youngest
1925 In a Garden
1926 White Wings
1927 John
1927 Paris Bound
1928 Cock Robin (with Elmer Rice)
1928 Holiday
1930 Hotel Universe
1931 Tomorrow and Tomorow
1932 The Animal Kingdom
1934 The Joyous Season
1935 Bright Star
1936 Spring Dance (adaptation)
1938 Here Come the Clowns
1939 The Philadelphia Story
1941 Liberty Jones
1942 Without Love
1945 Foolish Notion
1949 My Name is Aquilon (adaptation)
1951 Second Threshold (revised posthumously by Robert Sherwood)
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
'Come the Revolution...'
When Barry began writing The Philadelphia Story in the late 1930s, the Great Depression and the threat of a second world war had already inaugurated a period of intense pessimism and economic hardship in America. Unemployment gripped the country, total itarian regimes marched across Europe, and Prohibition was the law of the land. In the spirit of the times, the American theater began to explore the sources and the repercussions of this modern malaise. While the theater world may have welcomed lighter works from Noel Coward and George S. Kaufman, and the movie palaces were filled with the raucous laughter of screwball comedies, the dark mood of the times reshaped the face of drama.
Leftist authors used their dramas to issue a call for the revolution, proclaiming the death of capitalism and exploitation. Not only did playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Clifford Odets attempt to represent the spiritual as well as the political crises that marked the decade, but workers' theater groups across the country were addressing poor economic conditions through social protest plays. Massive documentary works, which partly undertook to get as many actors onstage as possible, chr onicled the plight of the poor and downtrodden. It was the era of the Okies and the Dust Bowl, memorialized in Steinbeck's haunting The Grapes of Wrath. Barriers of class, race, and religion divided the nation with almost impenetrable force. Roosevelt' s New Deal, which seemed to some like the downfall of western capitalism, had not yet begun to revive the economy and many were still suffering.
Clearly Barry, even in his most serious plays, was working in quite a different vein, and he was often criticized for seeming to 'retreat from reality.' Yet even in a drawing room comedy like The Philadelphia Story, Barry was engaging with important, s ubstantive issues of class and social mobility. Nor did he neglect the exploration of the individual psychology, another popular element of the era. Some have even suggested that one of the more ringing messages of The Philadelphia Story--the idea that ' in spite of the fact that someone's up from the bottom, he may be quite a heel. And that even though someone else's born to the purple, he still may be quite a guy'--is meant to be an attack on the class pieties that pervaded the theater of the 1930s and brought so much adverse criticism to the gentle Barry.
Private Lives, Public Lens
There is no doubt that The Philadelphia Story was, in its own way, responding to a significant cultural transformation: the rise of the tabloids. In the 1920s and 30s, these newspapers and magazines full of photographs and lurid stories had brought wit h them renewed threats to privacy. Individuals (most notably Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis) had been voicing concerns about the severe loss of privacy in American life since the turn of the century, when handheld cameras and newspaper photographs made it possible to circulate pictures and stories to millions of people.
By the 1930s, the threat seemed to increase as improved printing technology created a whole new genre of journalism: the 'picture magazine.' Led by millionaire publishing magnate Henry Luce, whom Barry mocked in creating The Philadelphia Story, these magazines burst onto the scene with prying tales of life behind the high walls of high society--always with pictures to match. Life, the first national magazine devoted to photographs rather than the news, began publishing in 1936. The publication of Look in 1937 was only the first of an astonishing number of imitators in the years that followed. In addition, national magazines like Fortune, which covered business issues, and Photoplay, which covered Hollywood, made a point of giving the reader the 'insid e story.' But while these magazines, filled with private stories of public figures, seemed to thrill audiences, they were a source of frustration and embarrassment to the people they hounded. In the 1990s, when people often welcome publicity as a sign of status, the horror of being subject to any kind of exposure in the media (no matter how bland or flattering) is sometimes difficult to imagine.
Society Author
Barry had his greatest successes with sophisticated comedies of manners, perhaps because he had always been fascinated by the aura of exclusivity surrounding the privileged class. Born to middle-class parents, Barry had grown up envying the Irish elit e of his hometown and he maintained an abiding interest in the wealthy even after he had entered their ranks. He spent as much time as he could around the rich, always wore the best hand-tailored clothes, spoke in an accent as exclusive as his Ivy League education, and became the unofficial apologist for the upper class. As one critic notes, Barry was 'the gentleman playwright par excellence,' and thus 'tended to be too partial to good society.'
Equally strong, however, was Barry's fascination with the father-daughter relationship. The death of his own daughter in infancy had had a profound effect on him, and he began to populate his plays with young women that some have seen as versions of w hat his own daughter might have been. According to Francis Wyndham, Tracy Lord is clearly one of these 'dream daughters,' 'daring, chaste, highly bred, independent, fastidiously witty and fundamentally decent.' It was an image 'potently purveyed by the p ersonality of Katherine Hepburn.'
Buried in the witty banter and sophistication of Barry's most famous play about lost privacy is something intensely personal and private. There, at the dark heart of a play that daringly explores both love and loss, abandonment as well as reunion, Bar ry dramatizes all the pain and pleasure of domestic needs. In the persons of Kate Hepburn and Tracy Lord, Barry was able to raise up the daughter life had stolen from him-- giving the play a deeper, darker texture lurking beneath the sparkling joy of the romantic, comic surface. He found a perfect way to have his cake and eat it too; to write the substantial, meaningful play he was sure he had in him, and to please to paying public. Though he never repeated the feat, his legacy endures in The Philadelp hia Story, celebrating an essential good-humored humanity on both sides of the Main Line tracks.
SYNOPSIS
Characters:
Tracy Lord
C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy's ex-husband
Margaret Lord, her mother
George Kittredge, her fiance
Seth Lord, her father
Macaulay 'Mike' Connor, a journalist
Dinah Lord, her sister
Elizabeth 'Liz' Imbrie, a photographer
Sandy Lord, her brother
William Tracy, her uncle
assorted servants, staff, and guests
Setting: The house and surrounding grounds of the Lord family on Philadelphia's Main Line
Tracy Lord, a young Philadelphia socialite, is preparing for her wedding to the up-and-coming businessman George Kittredge. Despite her youth, it will be Tracy's second marriage. The first, to childhood friend C. K. Dexter Haven, ended after only ten tumultuous months. At the moment, however, it is Tracy's parents' marriage that is suffering: Seth Lord has recently abandoned his wife Margaret for an affair with dancer Tina Mara.
Suddenly, Tracy's precocious younger sister Dinah reports that a story about their father's affair will be appearing in the gossip magazine Destiny. Before panic can set in, brother Sandy announces that to stop publication of the story, he has agreed to let a reporter (Mike Connor) and photographer (Liz Imbrie) from Destiny do an exclusive story on Tracy's wedding. Angered at the prospect of this violation of her privacy, Tracy vows to beat the unwitting journalists at their own game, 'giving them a picture of home life that will stand their hair on end.' Indeed, she takes control of the interview entirely, parodying the role of the socialite and confirming Mike's disdain for the wealthy.
Later, however, Mike and Liz discuss his growing interest in Tracy while the bride-to-be, who has read Mike's collection of short stories, begins to change her opinion of the outwardly tough reporter as well. She offers to support his literary aspirat ions but he turns her down. Dexter interrupts, arriving with his wedding present for Tracy. With Mike watching, they discuss their failed marriage. Dexter accuses Tracy of being cold and distant, which accusation George later echoes unknowingly. Thoug h Tracy insists she only wants love, her own father repeats the charge, calling her a 'perennial spinster.'
When Mike and Tracy return drunk from a party the night before the wedding, they discover a passionate, mutual desire and run off to the pool. Returning from their skinny-dipping, they encounter George and Dexter, only to have George assume they've ha d an affair. To protect Mike from the enraged George, Dexter punches the unsuspecting writer himself. He then tries to convince Dinah, who witnessed most of the night's chaos, that she was only dreaming.
The next morning, Tracy comes downstairs with Mike's watch but without any notion of what she has done the previous night. Dinah's 'dream' helps her remember, vaguely, and when Mike shows up looking for his watch, she is certain she has done something dreadfully wrong. To confirm this, she receives a note from George calling off the wedding; but when the aspiring politician finds out the publisher of Destiny will be at the wedding, he tries to 'let bygones be bygones.' Instead, Tracy now decides to cancel the wedding, only to realize she has a huge wedding party but no groom. Mike volunteers, despite his engagement to Liz, and Dexter offers to help as well. Forced to make up her mind on the spot, Tracy then makes her announcement to the assembled guests--only to realize that she has at last become a complete human being.
SOURCES
Barry's play about a magazine's invasion of a society girl's wedding grew out of this particularly modern 'tabloid' atmosphere. Indeed, The Philadelphia Story began as two short lines in one of Barry's many notebooks: 'The family in the process of bei ng studied for a piece in Fortune. Most unfortunate.' With this tidbit of inspiration, Bary combined careful observation of his favorite subjects, the idle rich. While on a visit to St. Paul, Minnesota, he heard of a peculiar local plague: some hardbit ten residents had a cottage industry blackmailing prominent wealthy families by threatening to expose their private lives. Returning to the East with these two elements, Barry followed his wife's suggestion to set his new play within the rarified air of Philadelphia's social elite. Helen Hope Montgomery, an eccentric socialite from Philadelphia's Main Line, was the original model for Tracy Lord. Her family and Barry's had become very close over the years: Barry was godfather to Montgomery's son and d edicated the play to her.
But in conceiving his play, Barry also began to draw on the personality of Katherine Hepburn, an actress he admired and whom he wanted for the title role in the play. The two had become friendly working on the movie of his play Holiday and later as nei ghbors. One day Barry took Hepburn for a walk, outlining for her the idea for his latest play. She recognized the potential in it, and the proximity between Tracy Lord and her own nature; he was excited enough at her response to send drafts of acts by s pecial messenger. Hepburn's response was doubtless derived in part from her own identification with the character she was to play. In what one critic describes as the 'family obsessed, deeply private, ultra-snobbish Philadelphian' the actress saw hersel f. Finishing-school product of old New England stock, proud daughter of a wealthy doctor and a free-thinking mother, she had even been married to an actual Philadelphia Main Line husband.
Furthermore, Hepburn--a notoriously private woman--was embroiled in her own Tracy-Lord-like battle to protect herself from what she thought of as a 'shameless expose.' In 1939, her brother Dick, an aspiring playwright, presented her with a play that he had based on her life. The play, Sea Air, not only represented revealing scenes from Hepburn's lengthy affair with Howard Hughes, but it also contained unflattering caricatures of her family, Hughes, and Barry. Sea Air had been accepted for production at the Hedgerow Theater in New York when Hepburn and the rest of her family finally persuaded her brother to bury the project. Like his star, Barry was himself a very private person. In fact, he felt so strongly about protecting himself from the press that very little is known about his family life. Some critics have argued that this reticence on Barry's part is to blame for the neglect of his work that followed his death.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
INTRODUCTION
'Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.'
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy
Written at the end of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story is a remarkable comedy about some serious issues. In this story of a young woman's discovery that 'the time to make up your mind ab out people is never,' Barry explores questions that still seem relevant today--what does privacy mean in the age of the mass media? how can you reconcile class division with the ideals of democracy?
Barry may have been, as some have suggested, a bit too much in love with the upper classes, but The Philadelphia Story suggests that Barry was also truly interested in what constitutes a first class human being. But more than that, what makes Barry's play appealing over fifty years after it was first produced is the timeless charm of the characters and the pure pleasure of his verbal wit. And if the 1940 movie starring Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Cary Grant is perhaps the best known version of the play, it is on the stage where Barry's wit shines and where his comic vision finds its best realization.
BIOGRAPHY OF PHILIP BARRY
(1896 - 1949)
'All things are turned to a roundness. Wherever there is an end, from it springs the beginning.'
-Philip Barry, Hotel Universe
Best known for his sophisticated comedies of manners like Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), Philip Barry was one of the leading American playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s. His popular comedies, which most often focused on the social ri tuals of the upper classes, charmed audiences with their witty dialogue and biting satire. What is most remarkable about Barry's career, however, is the wide range of his interests and talents; not only did he write some of the most successful comedies of the period, but he experimented with dramas based on everything from Freudian psychology and metaphysical speculation to religious allegory. Critics didn't always appreciate Barry's attempts to experiment with form and theme, but they almost unanimously regard him as an important figure in the modern American theater.
Born to middle-class Irish-Catholic parents in 1896, Barry grew up and attended Catholic school in Rochester, New York. After enrolling at Yale University, he began contributing short stories and poems to the literary magazine. He was still working tow ard his undergraduate degree when America entered World War I. Rejected from the army because of his poor eyesight, Barry worked as an attachŽ in the code department of the United States Embassy in London until after the end of the war.
When he returned home in 1919, Barry took one of the most significant steps of his career, enrolling in George Pierce Baker's theater workshop at Harvard. The renowned Workshop 47 was no doubt the most influential theater class in the country, producin g playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and S.N. Behrman and critics like Robert Benchley. The Jilts (later retitled You and I), one of the plays written under Baker's direction, won Harvard's Herndon Prize and soon became Barry's first success on Broadway.
In 1922 Barry married Ellen Marshall Semple and in the years that followed the couple had two sons. A daughter, however, died in infancy, a loss that was to haunt Barry for the rest of his life. While raising their sons, the couple spent a good deal o f time in their French villa in Cannes. Unlike a variety of well-known American writers and artists who had become expatriates after the War, Barry didn't consider himself an exile: 'My home in Cannes gives me perspective.... As soon as I get there, I bec ome completely American.'
Also in the 1920s, Barry found success on Broadway with comedies like Holiday, a satire about American materialism in the Jazz age. It was later made into a film starring Katherine Hepburn, who had understudied the role of Linda Seton during the Broadw ay run, and Cary Grant. But in the Depression era that followed, Barry turned his attention to more serious, experimental dramas. In 1929, he had become a member of the Theatre Guild, an organization created by directors and playwrights and dedicated to producing plays of high quality that would challenge audiences rather than pandering to them for mere commercial gain.
In Barry's Hotel Universe, for example, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1930, a group of disillusioned vacationers are enabled to go back in time and relive significant moments in their past. By the end, each one has worked through a central crisis i n his or her life and returns to the present with a renewed understanding of himself. Critics and audiences alike were more confused than intrigued by the play's serious attempt to address both psychoanalysis and Christian faith. Despite its noble aims a nd the Guild's attempt to enliven the theater-going public with substantial content, the play closed after 81 performances. In recent years, critics have reevaluated the play, one going so far as to say that 'Barry created in Hotel Universe possibly the masterpiece of psychoanalytic drama.' In 1932, Barry wrote another Broadway hit with The Animal Kingdom, a play about the nat ure of marriage and adultery. But beginning with The Joyous Season in 1934, he seemed to produce nothing but failures. To critics, Bright Star (1935) was too depressing and Spring Dance (which Barry adapted from a script by two Yale undergraduates in 193 6) was too trivial. Barry's most ambitious play to date, Here Come the Clowns (1938), a modern version of the Biblical story of Job, opened to mystified audiences and ran for only 8 weeks.
Barry quickly redeemed himself, however, following these disappointments with one of his biggest triumphs, The Philadelphia Story, which opened at the Schubert Theatre in New York on March 28, 1939. Critics welcomed Barry's return to the drawing room c omedy that had made him famous. They recognized that The Philadelphia Story wasn't nearly as serious a play as Here Come the Clowns, but that the smart dialogue and characterization showed Barry's talents at their finest. The critic at Newsweek wrote tha t the play 'is a shuffling and uncertain job of playmaking, suggesting a series of card tricks...' but that 'here and there amid the shuffling there emerge ... some true and gleaming bits of comedy writing.'
Just before the United States entered World War II, Barry experimented with an overtly political drama called Liberty Jones. The play was meant to be a powerful indictment of fascism, but audiences found the allegory heavy-handed and it ran for on ly 22 performances. In 1949, Barry was working on Second Threshold when he died of a heart attack at age 53. Like so many of Barry's works, this last unfinished play centers on a man who discovers that he is unable to love. Robert Sherwood, a close friend of Barry's who revised the play for production after the playwright's death, said of Second Threshold: 'It moved me powerfully and excited me greatly. For I felt that he had at last begun to achieve the realization, or the synthesis, of his apparently b ut not actually discordant qualities: his Irish, impish sense of comedy, and his profound, and also Irish, sense of the ultimate sadness of life on earth, the 'endless assault' of evil upon good.'
Decades after his death, Barry's urbane comedies continue to charm audiences. Yet he managed to combine an amazing talent for the established genre of the drawing room comedy with a desire to experiment, to stretch the boundaries of the modern the ater. Living through some of the most tumultuous periods of the twentieth century (World War I, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II) Barry created dramas that investigate such 'modern' political issues as class conflict and tota litarianism. He was also deeply interested in Freudian psychology, and attempted to create dramatic analogues for the problems of alienation and repression. If his experiments were not always well-received by the critics of his day, they have been greete d with new interest by contemporary scholars. Far more than his neglected but significant legacy of innovation and originality, it is Barry's comedies--clever, bright, deeply sympathetic of human frailty, and unabashedly romantic--that have earned him an important place in the history of modern theater.
CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR WORKS
1923 You and I
1924 The Youngest
1925 In a Garden
1926 White Wings
1927 John
1927 Paris Bound
1928 Cock Robin (with Elmer Rice)
1928 Holiday
1930 Hotel Universe
1931 Tomorrow and Tomorow
1932 The Animal Kingdom
1934 The Joyous Season
1935 Bright Star
1936 Spring Dance (adaptation)
1938 Here Come the Clowns
1939 The Philadelphia Story
1941 Liberty Jones
1942 Without Love
1945 Foolish Notion
1949 My Name is Aquilon (adaptation)
1951 Second Threshold (revised posthumously by Robert Sherwood)
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
'Come the Revolution...'
When Barry began writing The Philadelphia Story in the late 1930s, the Great Depression and the threat of a second world war had already inaugurated a period of intense pessimism and economic hardship in America. Unemployment gripped the country, total itarian regimes marched across Europe, and Prohibition was the law of the land. In the spirit of the times, the American theater began to explore the sources and the repercussions of this modern malaise. While the theater world may have welcomed lighter works from Noel Coward and George S. Kaufman, and the movie palaces were filled with the raucous laughter of screwball comedies, the dark mood of the times reshaped the face of drama.
Leftist authors used their dramas to issue a call for the revolution, proclaiming the death of capitalism and exploitation. Not only did playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Clifford Odets attempt to represent the spiritual as well as the political crises that marked the decade, but workers' theater groups across the country were addressing poor economic conditions through social protest plays. Massive documentary works, which partly undertook to get as many actors onstage as possible, chr onicled the plight of the poor and downtrodden. It was the era of the Okies and the Dust Bowl, memorialized in Steinbeck's haunting The Grapes of Wrath. Barriers of class, race, and religion divided the nation with almost impenetrable force. Roosevelt' s New Deal, which seemed to some like the downfall of western capitalism, had not yet begun to revive the economy and many were still suffering.
Clearly Barry, even in his most serious plays, was working in quite a different vein, and he was often criticized for seeming to 'retreat from reality.' Yet even in a drawing room comedy like The Philadelphia Story, Barry was engaging with important, s ubstantive issues of class and social mobility. Nor did he neglect the exploration of the individual psychology, another popular element of the era. Some have even suggested that one of the more ringing messages of The Philadelphia Story--the idea that ' in spite of the fact that someone's up from the bottom, he may be quite a heel. And that even though someone else's born to the purple, he still may be quite a guy'--is meant to be an attack on the class pieties that pervaded the theater of the 1930s and brought so much adverse criticism to the gentle Barry.
Private Lives, Public Lens
There is no doubt that The Philadelphia Story was, in its own way, responding to a significant cultural transformation: the rise of the tabloids. In the 1920s and 30s, these newspapers and magazines full of photographs and lurid stories had brought wit h them renewed threats to privacy. Individuals (most notably Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis) had been voicing concerns about the severe loss of privacy in American life since the turn of the century, when handheld cameras and newspaper photographs made it possible to circulate pictures and stories to millions of people.
By the 1930s, the threat seemed to increase as improved printing technology created a whole new genre of journalism: the 'picture magazine.' Led by millionaire publishing magnate Henry Luce, whom Barry mocked in creating The Philadelphia Story, these magazines burst onto the scene with prying tales of life behind the high walls of high society--always with pictures to match. Life, the first national magazine devoted to photographs rather than the news, began publishing in 1936. The publication of Look in 1937 was only the first of an astonishing number of imitators in the years that followed. In addition, national magazines like Fortune, which covered business issues, and Photoplay, which covered Hollywood, made a point of giving the reader the 'insid e story.' But while these magazines, filled with private stories of public figures, seemed to thrill audiences, they were a source of frustration and embarrassment to the people they hounded. In the 1990s, when people often welcome publicity as a sign of status, the horror of being subject to any kind of exposure in the media (no matter how bland or flattering) is sometimes difficult to imagine.
Society Author
Barry had his greatest successes with sophisticated comedies of manners, perhaps because he had always been fascinated by the aura of exclusivity surrounding the privileged class. Born to middle-class parents, Barry had grown up envying the Irish elit e of his hometown and he maintained an abiding interest in the wealthy even after he had entered their ranks. He spent as much time as he could around the rich, always wore the best hand-tailored clothes, spoke in an accent as exclusive as his Ivy League education, and became the unofficial apologist for the upper class. As one critic notes, Barry was 'the gentleman playwright par excellence,' and thus 'tended to be too partial to good society.'
Equally strong, however, was Barry's fascination with the father-daughter relationship. The death of his own daughter in infancy had had a profound effect on him, and he began to populate his plays with young women that some have seen as versions of w hat his own daughter might have been. According to Francis Wyndham, Tracy Lord is clearly one of these 'dream daughters,' 'daring, chaste, highly bred, independent, fastidiously witty and fundamentally decent.' It was an image 'potently purveyed by the p ersonality of Katherine Hepburn.'
Buried in the witty banter and sophistication of Barry's most famous play about lost privacy is something intensely personal and private. There, at the dark heart of a play that daringly explores both love and loss, abandonment as well as reunion, Bar ry dramatizes all the pain and pleasure of domestic needs. In the persons of Kate Hepburn and Tracy Lord, Barry was able to raise up the daughter life had stolen from him-- giving the play a deeper, darker texture lurking beneath the sparkling joy of the romantic, comic surface. He found a perfect way to have his cake and eat it too; to write the substantial, meaningful play he was sure he had in him, and to please to paying public. Though he never repeated the feat, his legacy endures in The Philadelp hia Story, celebrating an essential good-humored humanity on both sides of the Main Line tracks.
SYNOPSIS
Characters:
Tracy Lord
C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy's ex-husband
Margaret Lord, her mother
George Kittredge, her fiance
Seth Lord, her father
Macaulay 'Mike' Connor, a journalist
Dinah Lord, her sister
Elizabeth 'Liz' Imbrie, a photographer
Sandy Lord, her brother
William Tracy, her uncle
assorted servants, staff, and guests
Setting: The house and surrounding grounds of the Lord family on Philadelphia's Main Line
Tracy Lord, a young Philadelphia socialite, is preparing for her wedding to the up-and-coming businessman George Kittredge. Despite her youth, it will be Tracy's second marriage. The first, to childhood friend C. K. Dexter Haven, ended after only ten tumultuous months. At the moment, however, it is Tracy's parents' marriage that is suffering: Seth Lord has recently abandoned his wife Margaret for an affair with dancer Tina Mara.
Suddenly, Tracy's precocious younger sister Dinah reports that a story about their father's affair will be appearing in the gossip magazine Destiny. Before panic can set in, brother Sandy announces that to stop publication of the story, he has agreed to let a reporter (Mike Connor) and photographer (Liz Imbrie) from Destiny do an exclusive story on Tracy's wedding. Angered at the prospect of this violation of her privacy, Tracy vows to beat the unwitting journalists at their own game, 'giving them a picture of home life that will stand their hair on end.' Indeed, she takes control of the interview entirely, parodying the role of the socialite and confirming Mike's disdain for the wealthy.
Later, however, Mike and Liz discuss his growing interest in Tracy while the bride-to-be, who has read Mike's collection of short stories, begins to change her opinion of the outwardly tough reporter as well. She offers to support his literary aspirat ions but he turns her down. Dexter interrupts, arriving with his wedding present for Tracy. With Mike watching, they discuss their failed marriage. Dexter accuses Tracy of being cold and distant, which accusation George later echoes unknowingly. Thoug h Tracy insists she only wants love, her own father repeats the charge, calling her a 'perennial spinster.'
When Mike and Tracy return drunk from a party the night before the wedding, they discover a passionate, mutual desire and run off to the pool. Returning from their skinny-dipping, they encounter George and Dexter, only to have George assume they've ha d an affair. To protect Mike from the enraged George, Dexter punches the unsuspecting writer himself. He then tries to convince Dinah, who witnessed most of the night's chaos, that she was only dreaming.
The next morning, Tracy comes downstairs with Mike's watch but without any notion of what she has done the previous night. Dinah's 'dream' helps her remember, vaguely, and when Mike shows up looking for his watch, she is certain she has done something dreadfully wrong. To confirm this, she receives a note from George calling off the wedding; but when the aspiring politician finds out the publisher of Destiny will be at the wedding, he tries to 'let bygones be bygones.' Instead, Tracy now decides to cancel the wedding, only to realize she has a huge wedding party but no groom. Mike volunteers, despite his engagement to Liz, and Dexter offers to help as well. Forced to make up her mind on the spot, Tracy then makes her announcement to the assembled guests--only to realize that she has at last become a complete human being.
SOURCES
Barry's play about a magazine's invasion of a society girl's wedding grew out of this particularly modern 'tabloid' atmosphere. Indeed, The Philadelphia Story began as two short lines in one of Barry's many notebooks: 'The family in the process of bei ng studied for a piece in Fortune. Most unfortunate.' With this tidbit of inspiration, Bary combined careful observation of his favorite subjects, the idle rich. While on a visit to St. Paul, Minnesota, he heard of a peculiar local plague: some hardbit ten residents had a cottage industry blackmailing prominent wealthy families by threatening to expose their private lives. Returning to the East with these two elements, Barry followed his wife's suggestion to set his new play within the rarified air of Philadelphia's social elite. Helen Hope Montgomery, an eccentric socialite from Philadelphia's Main Line, was the original model for Tracy Lord. Her family and Barry's had become very close over the years: Barry was godfather to Montgomery's son and d edicated the play to her.
But in conceiving his play, Barry also began to draw on the personality of Katherine Hepburn, an actress he admired and whom he wanted for the title role in the play. The two had become friendly working on the movie of his play Holiday and later as nei ghbors. One day Barry took Hepburn for a walk, outlining for her the idea for his latest play. She recognized the potential in it, and the proximity between Tracy Lord and her own nature; he was excited enough at her response to send drafts of acts by s pecial messenger. Hepburn's response was doubtless derived in part from her own identification with the character she was to play. In what one critic describes as the 'family obsessed, deeply private, ultra-snobbish Philadelphian' the actress saw hersel f. Finishing-school product of old New England stock, proud daughter of a wealthy doctor and a free-thinking mother, she had even been married to an actual Philadelphia Main Line husband.
Furthermore, Hepburn--a notoriously private woman--was embroiled in her own Tracy-Lord-like battle to protect herself from what she thought of as a 'shameless expose.' In 1939, her brother Dick, an aspiring playwright, presented her with a play that he had based on her life. The play, Sea Air, not only represented revealing scenes from Hepburn's lengthy affair with Howard Hughes, but it also contained unflattering caricatures of her family, Hughes, and Barry. Sea Air had been accepted for production at the Hedgerow Theater in New York when Hepburn and the rest of her family finally persuaded her brother to bury the project. Like his star, Barry was himself a very private person. In fact, he felt so strongly about protecting himself from the press that very little is known about his family life. Some critics have argued that this reticence on Barry's part is to blame for the neglect of his work that followed his death.
TO BE CONTINUED ...