Word: behrman
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...Behrman's other stage vehicles include Jacobowsky and the Colonel, No Time for Comedy, and the current Cold Wind and the Warm. When the motion picture version of Jacobowsky appeared last year, one New York critic commented that Nazism and anti-Semitism were not fit subjects for a humorous approach. "He was dead wrong," Behrman says, pointing out that Franz Werfel had told him the true story from which the play was taken at Max Reinhardt's Hollywood home. "Also present was the composer Arnold Schonberg; they were all refugees who had lost everything to the Nazis, but they...
...prove his contention that there is no such thing as "no time for comedy," Behrman cites the story of Sigmund Freud's reaction when his apartment was looted by the Nazis. "How much did they take?" Freud asked. "$200." "That's more than I ever got for a visit," he replied...
...Behrman's favorite modern playwright is the late Frenchman Jean Giraudoux; Giraudoux's characters, he says, are "human beings of acute sensibility; they are not thugs or sadists, but suffering, cultured people." He does not find much value in the angry works of John Osborne or in the experimental theatre of Samuel Beckett. "Osborne is an arresting writer; he makes you listen to him, but his characters are monsters and have no awareness that they are monsters...
...Beckett, Behrman says, "I did wait for Godot, but I found he had nothing to offer me." Beckett, he adds, avoids a problem by never having Godot enter the scene, and "I imagine that if he did come in he would utter a platitude. I hate wisdom by implication; it smacks of intellectual chicanery." He recalls a course in Croce that he took at Harvard: "He said that you have no ideas until you have expressed them; there is no such thing as having good ideas and not being able to put them into words...
When one of Behrman's plays is a success, he goes to work for a while on the New Yorker magazine; when it's a failure, he goes out to Hollywood. He says he regrets having spent so much time in Hollywood; he should have written more plays to increase his repertory rather than running out to the West Coast for six months at a time. In connection with his Hollywood experience, he recalls once being asked by producer Sol Wurtzel to do a screenplay for Dante's Inferno. "That requires a lot of research," Behrman replied. "Oh, no," said...