Word: theaters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Towards 4:30* on that "first night" afternoon, some 1,200 people made the Martin Beck Theater resonant with that exhilarating precurtain buzz, like leaves before a storm, which has been familiar to theatergoers for 2,500 years. There was plenty to buzz about. There was the exciting fact that The Iceman Cometh was the first new O'Neill play to be produced since Days without End (1934). There was its cryptic title, clumsily poetic, naively sardonic and intensely O'Neillian, which caused one foreboding wag to suggest that a better name would be The Ice Tray Always...
...Neill career had begun. Before The Iceman Cometh, it had yielded such theater milestones as The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, Mourning becomes Electro, and Ah, Wilderness...
...According to Iceman's Director Eddie Dowling, the actors, who at first were as shy as O'Neill, "warmed up to him after the first ten minutes; they knew he belongs in the theater." They "adored" him because his response was so keen, because he was so gentle and appreciative, and so quick to smile when anyone did something well. When he arrived late for a rehearsal, which rarely happened, they kept asking about him. Says Dowling: "They miss him when he's not there...
Cyrano de Bergerac (translated from the French of Edmond Rostand by Brian Hooker; produced by Jose Ferrer) drops in on each new generation-Walter Hampden accompanied it in the '20s-as a reminder that high romance once lived in the world, or at any rate in the theater. Brightly tricked out, Cyrano is always welcome, for it offers playgoers the satisfaction of witnessing a "classic" and at the same time reveling in shameless sentiment, noble gestures and high theatrical hokum...
Similar raises have been gotten by directors and producers, who probably fired and forgot the wartime underling who cracked: "A good showman today is a man who opens his theater doors and has sense enough to get the hell out of the way before he gets trampled to death by the incoming audience...