The mechanics of stagecraft are fairly basic. Performers recreate moments of life heightened and condensed for dramatic/comic purposes. Events play out as if in real time, without cuts, on a raised platform where another place and time is brought to life for an audience.
But what if one of the critical elements of standard dramaturgy was altered? What if a play moved backwards? What if you start at the ending, and then rewind it all to the beginning?
That is the concept behind Merrily We Roll Along, a serious play by two comedic writers, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Instead of introducing characters, then bringing them to some conflict or crisis, we first see the conflicts play out, then learn about the characters.
Sound a bit twee? New York theatergoers in 1934 agreed and stayed away in droves. If not for Stephen Sondheim and others, who revived it in 1981 as a much better remembered musical with several revivals, this would be only distantly remembered as a rare Kaufman-Hart bomb.
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| An original poster for the play when it debuted in 1934 seems to suggest a comedy in the offing, rather than a grim parade of travail. Critics gave it positive notices, but it closed after 155 performances. Today it is best known as the basis for a famous musical. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrily_We_Roll_Along_%28play%29 |
The play deploys a massive cast (another reason it failed at the height of the Great Depression was expense) to tell the story of Richard Niles, a fashionably successful playwright who sold his soul and lost his friends to stay on top. Since we are already at the end of the play, this hardly counts as a spoiler. Revelations come in the backwards journey we take of his life, learning how he became such a cad:
ALTHEA: You! You don’t care about anybody but yourself! You’d sell your soul to get a hit. Fashionable playwright! Fashionable prostitute – that’s what you are!
RICHARD (stung): What did you want me to do? Let you play a nineteen-year-old girl? You can see yourself, can’t you, playing that balcony scene in a negligee! Why, they’d have laughed you off the stage! [Act I, scene i]
Althea Royce is not one of the play’s three central characters. Yet she is Merrily’s most pivotal figure, a vain, clutching, utterly phony stage actress who becomes the polestar of Richard’s journey and the source of his moral destruction, as she has been for others before him.
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| Jessie Royce Landis as Althea stands over Mary Philips (drink in hand) as the ever-soused Julia in a posed image for the 1934 play. Landis is perhaps best known for later playing Cary Grant's mother in North By Northwest, while Philips was at this time married to up-and-coming screen actor Humphrey Bogart. Image from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/30e4a680-4a68-0137-592a-5719aef3d072 |
She’s the kind of woman who dumps her doting husband for Niles because she knows the younger man can write her some juicy roles. She doesn’t talk to people; instead she holds court while snubbing old friends who are down on their luck and in no position to help her anymore.
Late in the play, which is to say earlier in her life, we learn Althea began as Annie Riley, “shanty-Irish” as her mother needles her. Like Richard, she reinvented herself to suit an outsized ego.
Althea has her best moments in the first scene, confronting Richard, now her husband, about his latest affair. Like him, she suggests regrets about the life she chose – if only she had any capacity for them.
Opposite them are Jonathan Crale and Julia Glenn, not a couple but seen together for most of the play. He is Niles’s best friend from college, a painter who goads Niles to produce work of social and political substance. She is a witty, alcoholic writer of sputtering output [“I’m never going to write another line, Jonny. Except just enough to keep myself in liquor.”] who hopelessly carries a torch for Niles.
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| Merrily We Roll Along incorporates many real-life events of the day as background elements discussed by characters in the play, such as the trial of Ruth Snyder, who was famously executed for murdering her husband, seen above. "How could a woman do a thing like that?" a man asks. Image from https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-scene-at-the-hearing-for-ruth-snyder-and-henry-judd-news-photo/97306507 |
In Merrily We Roll Along, Crale and Julia are the pair we are expected to care about, a kind of Greek chorus witnessing Niles’s ruin. They are more reactive personalities that way, not engaging on their own.
JULIA: Jonny, we saw the last of Richard Niles eight months ago – the day he got on that boat. He’s met The Crowd. Jonny! He’s met The Crowd, and there he goes! [Act II, scene i]
The first scene is dynamic, vibrant, and mordantly funny in a way the rest of the play never recaptures. Crale is already banished at this point; having painted an unflattering portrait of Niles and made his feelings about Althea clear, he is not welcome at their home. Julia still lingers, barely tolerated, making soused quips at their pretentions.
After that scene reaches a climax, the rest of the play has difficulty recapturing its spent energy. What mostly follows are vignettes showcasing how Niles went wrong over the years, with a good deal of deterministic plotting and on-the-nose dialogue.
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| A swank Manhattan bistro, Le Coq D'Or, is the setting for one scene of the play. The headwaiter is told: "The trouble with your place, Louis, is that one not only sees everyone one wants to see, but also the other kind." Above, the interior of today's Benoit New York replicates the look of early 20th century dining. Photo by Evan Sung from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/dining/09french.html |
Crale lectures Niles he must give up writing his popular plays for social realism in line with the beliefs they espoused when students:
RICHARD (pacing, thinking): It’s hard, Jonny. I’d rather have your respect than anything. But’s it’s hard to know which way to turn. When you’ve had nothing all your life, and suddenly got all this, maybe you have to be stronger than I am to push it aside. That’s what I meant by a couple of years more –
CRALE: No, Richard. You’ve got to make a clean cut. (He pauses a moment) Right from the very core. [Act I, scene iii]
This puritanical conceit underpinning the play made more sense in the turmoil of the 1930s, when American capitalism looked ripe to fall. Art was supposed to celebrate labor and awaken the masses. Niles is presented as a moral failure because his frothy comedies entertain rather than edify audiences. But who says theater can’t be fun?
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| When Merrily We Roll Along was turned into a musical by Stephen Sondheim and friends in 1981, it flopped harder than Kaufman and Hart, lasting just 16 performances. But unlike the source play, it would become a legend of a different kind, spinning off a number of revivals. Image from https://markrobinsonwrites.com/the-music-that-makes-me-dance/2016/8/26/broadway-musical-time-machine-looking-back-at-merrily-we-roll-along |
Near the end of the play, we meet Niles’s first wife and her parents. They are portrayed as lower-class slobs who bully Niles over his inability to bring money into their home. He wants to write a play set in a coal mine. They want him to drop that and write a guaranteed hit for Althea Royce. This of course will doom an already troubled marriage, but all they see is money. Niles thus never stood a chance.
If we had seen this Niles before the opportunist we are introduced to at the start of the play, there might have been some feeling of loss at his transformation. But by front-loading the character’s worst traits in the first scene, we get a pass on caring for him.
It is why I think Merrily We Roll Along would have worked better as a comedy. Maybe a dark comedy, maybe an acid farce, but something where the fates of the characters are treated whimsically. Here tragic pain underscores the ends of every scene. Since the characters are not that deeply developed in the first place, it is hard to be too invested in them. Except for Althea, who is more of a schadenfreude situation.
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One
important difference behind the eventual success of the Sondheim musical is the
high quality of its songs, many of which become well-loved standards. Another
is a more openly playful atmosphere underscoring the tragedy found in
the original play. Above, a scene from a 2019 staging. |
When the play does take up a more comedic spirit, it is often successful. Althea’s mother is a splendid force of nature, and the side patter between character moments is reliably amusing:
ROSAMOND OGDEN: Everett, why didn’t you marry for money instead of social position? I’m awfully rich, you know.
ALBERT OGDEN: Here, here, now! Don’t you give people the wrong impression, my dear. I loved you from the minute I looked you up in Bradstreet’s. [Act I, scene i]
The concept of scenes being rolled backwards is clever, if confusing. It must be even more confusing on stage than on the page, where actors must keep playing younger versions of themselves and stay recognizable to the audience. In Sondheim’s musical, players actually resorted to wearing shirts emblazoned with their character’s names.
Making audiences work too hard to enjoy your play is a bad idea. Merrily We Roll Along fails both in terms of engagement and in making its unusual structure pay off at the end. But something of value about it seems to have endured, albeit in a much reworked form.
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