Arthur Laurents

• Born: July 14, 1918
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: May 5, 2011
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other Literary Forms

Although primarily a playwright and author of librettos for several musicals, Arthur Laurents also wrote for both radio and the movies. Shortly after his first Broadway success, he began writing screenplays as well, producing eight over the next thirty years: The Snake Pit (1948, with Frank Partos and Millen Brand), Rope (1948, with Hume Cronyn), Caught (1949), Anna Lucasta (1949, with Philip Yordan), Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Way We Were (1973), and The Turning Point (1977). Because of their wide popularity with moviegoers, Laurents wrote novelizations of both The Way We Were and The Turning Point. His foray into work for television came in 1967, with the script for The Light Fantastic: How to Tell Your Past, Present, and Future Through Social Dancing. In 2000, Laurents published Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood.

Achievements

Among American dramatists of his generation, Arthur Laurents certainly stands out as one of the more versatile: He is the author of plays that have received New York productions as well as of Broadway musicals, several radio plays and one-act plays, Hollywood screenplays, novels based on screenplays, and a teleplay. Other plays or musicals have been given minor productions—all this while Laurents himself has become involved in directing, both his own works and those of others, and even in coproducing a film. A few of his radio plays, including Western Electric Communicade (1944) and The Face (1945), have been selected for inclusion in collections of “best” one-act plays. His first Broadway success, Home of the Brave, won for him the Sidney Howard Memorial Award in 1946; this was followed in the next decade by three additional Broadway productions: The Bird Cage, The Time of the Cuckoo, and A Clearing in the Woods.

In the mid-1950’s, Laurents began his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, writing the librettos for a series of musicals—an association that would last a decade and result in two of the most important works in the genre, West Side Story and Gypsy. The libretto for the latter work is so strong that it could almost stand on its own, without the songs, as a serious play, making it both the culmination and the epitome of a long line of book musicals. Little wonder that Sondheim singled out Laurents as one of the best book writers in the musical theater, or that he collaborated with him on the original Anyone Can Whistle. Sandwiched in between the musicals with Sondheim was Laurents’s last Broadway play Invitation to a March, although his full-length work The Enclave did receive an Off-Broadway production in 1973.

Beginning in the late 1940’s, Laurents lent variety to his writing career by work in film, providing screenplays for a number of well-received movies, including Anastasia, Bonjour Tristesse, The Way We Were, and The Turning Point, the last of which he coproduced and which won the Writers Guild of America Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the National Board of Review Best Picture Award. The 1960’s and 1970’s saw Laurents extend his expertise to yet another area of theatrical activity when he began to direct a number of his own works, including the highly successful London and New York revival of Gypsy during the 1973-1974 season. He also directed the Broadway blockbuster La Cage aux Folles, which won the 1984 Tony Award for Best Musical.

Biography

The son of a lawyer (Irving) and a schoolteacher (Ada), Arthur Laurents was born in Brooklyn on July 14, 1918. A summer camp gave him his first theater experience when he was cast in a play, The Crow’s Nest, for his ability to climb up a ship’s mast and remember his lines at the same time. “Theatre is fantasy, and you can make it all come true,” he remarked in a later interview, when asked of his love for theater. He was graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and continued his education at Cornell University, earning a B.A. degree in English in 1937. He wrote radio plays until World War II, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army and eventually worked in films that helped train the troops. The Face, a short radio play from that period, appeared in The Best One-act Plays of 1945-1946.

After a few partially successful plays (such as Home of the Brave in 1945) and failed dramatic efforts, Laurents found Hollywood and his flair for writing mysteries and thrillers, such as Rope and The Snake Pit. He tried Broadway once again with The Bird Cage in 1950, and in 1965 he collaborated on the more successful Do I Hear a Waltz? with Richard Rodgers and Sondheim. His play A Clearing in the Woods was praised by critics as “ambitious and original.” Laurents visited the musical genre once more in 1957 and wrote the book for Sondheim’s and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, finally experiencing all the joys of a full Broadway hit; the film version (1961) earned eleven Academy Awards. The next musical success, Gypsy, was a collaboration with Sondheim and Jule Styne. It has been revived several times, including in 1989, with Laurents directing and Tyne Daly in the role of Rose, a role that had been played by Ethel Merman in the original and by Angela Lansbury in the 1974 revival.

The 1970’s saw Laurents’s most successful film work: the screenplays for both The Way We Were (1973, with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford) and The Turning Point (1977, with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine). In 1983, he directed La Cage aux Folles. Returning to writing Broadway musical theater after some years, Laurents pinned his hopes on Nick and Nora (a musical version of the novel and film series The Thin Man), which opened in December of 1991, and which he directed. Nick and Nora closed after one week to depressingly negative but apparently well-aimed reviews.

During the 1990’s Laurents returned to writing drama; six of his new plays were produced at regional theaters and Off-Broadway. The Radical Mystique, also directed by Laurents, is set in a 1970’s party given by well-intentioned liberals for Black Panthers. My Good Name explores self-hatred among successful Jews. Jolson Sings Again, a revised version of a play first produced in Seattle in 1995, deals with the 1950’s anticommunist Hollywood witch-hunt. Laurents repudiated the 2000 production of Big Potato, an examination of Jewish reactions to the Holocaust. Venecia was adapted by Laurents from an original play in Spanish by Argentinean Jorge Accame that had been translated by Laurents’s lover Tom Hatcher. Claudia Lazlo used a play-within-a-play to examine Jewish reactions to former Nazis after World War II.

Laurents published a book Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals in 2009. Laurents died at his home in New York on May 5, 2011.

Analysis

If Arthur Laurents can be said to belong to any group of post-World War II American dramatists, his closest affinity is surely with those who might be called psychological realists and who came into maturity in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, especially William Inge and Robert Anderson. Like them, Laurents is primarily a playwright who focuses on character. He often, though not always, portrays women caught up in the age of anxiety, beset by self-doubt or even self-loathing. Yet unlike either Inge or Anderson, Laurents reveals a solid measure of Thornton Wilder’s influence, both in the generally optimistic philosophy as well as in the nonrealistic stylistic techniques of some of his later plays and musical books. Although he has, like Anderson, decried those playwrights, particularly of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, who value experiments in form and style over content, who make the manner rather than the matter count most, Laurents will depart from strict realism and from a linear method of dramatizing his story when a legitimate reason exists for doing so, as he does in his use of narrators in Invitation to a March and Anyone Can Whistle, in his use of characters to change sets in The Enclave, and in his use of variations on the flashback technique in Home of the Brave and A Clearing in the Woods. As he says in the preface to A Clearing in the Woods, he willingly embraces greater theatricality if it brings with it a greater ability to illuminate the truth.

In that same preface, Laurents provides perhaps his clearest statement of the central insight into the human condition that pervades all of his writing for the theater: If men and women are lonely, and they are, it is because they cannot accept themselves for the flawed, imperfect creatures that they are; and until they achieve such self-acceptance, they will be unable to feel sufficiently, or to give of themselves sufficiently, to experience a sense of completion and fulfillment. When Laurents’s characters are unhappy in this way, when they are hurting within themselves, they lash out and, attempting to deflect their own misery, hurt others. The pattern is as applicable to Peter Coen (Home of the Brave), Leona Samish (The Time of the Cuckoo), and Virginia (A Clearing in the Woods) as it is to Wally Williams (The Bird Cage), Mama Rose (Gypsy), or Ben (The Enclave). Wally, for example, is a sexually disturbed egomaniac who destroys others and eventually himself, while Ben has been hurting for so long from having to keep his homosexuality hidden that he finally decides to hurt his friends back by shocking them into recognition, if not acceptance, of his lover Wyman. Rose is the archetypal stage mother, seeking in her daughter’s accomplishments a substitute for the success she never had. (The influence of parents in Laurents’s work, it should be noted, is not invariably restrictive; for every Rose who uses a child to gain something for herself, there is a Camilla Jablonski—Invitation to a March—who, by example and urging, liberates the child.)

The diminished sense of self-worth exemplified by so many of Laurents’s characters has an individual psychological basis, but it can also be greatly exacerbated by social forces, such as prejudicial attitudes and the drive to conform. The prejudice may be racial, as in Home of the Brave, West Side Story, and Hallelujah, Baby!, or sexual, as in The Enclave, while the conformity may be either in the area of perpetuating the success syndrome through seeking a comfortable economic status, as in A Clearing in the Woods and Invitation to a March, or in the inability to break free of repressive sexual mores and conventions, as in The Time of the Cuckoo and Invitation to a March. Finally, Laurents’s characters are often plagued by an impossible dream, by a desire to find magic in their lives. Sometimes the magic is short-lived, as it is for Leona in The Time of the Cuckoo or for the young lovers in West Side Story; at other times, it endures, as it does for Camilla, Norma, and Aaron in Invitation to a March or for Fay Apple in Anyone Can Whistle. Indeed, characters such as Camilla and Fay (complicated women who need and, luckily, find heroes) come closest to embodying Laurents’s ideal of being free and wholly alive, of enjoying each and every moment, an ideal that he seems to have inherited from Wilder. If Laurents’s upbeat endings sometimes seem slightly forced and if his sentiment once in a while veers over into sentimentality, he remains an intelligent, sensitive, and thoroughly professional man of the theater.

No one would claim that Laurents belongs among the indisputably first-rank dramatists (with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, for example). Still, he has produced, along with librettos for two of the best works of the musical theater—West Side Story and Gypsy—one or two memorable plays that readers will return to and little theaters will revive: The Time of the Cuckoo and Invitation to a March. The latter work, in fact, with its deft handling of tone and comfortable assimilation of Wilder’s philosophical outlook and stage techniques to Laurents’s own purpose, may finally be seen as his most significant play.

Because Laurents’s major efforts are so varied in form and structure, he remains difficult to categorize. He resembles both Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller in his hatred of prejudice and his compassion for those who must hide a facet of themselves, whether racial or sexual, to avoid rejection. In Laurents, however, it is not only, or even primarily, the other person or society that seeks to limit his characters’ world; rather, the central characters themselves, through their psychological inhibitions and moral or sexual repression, circumscribe their own existence. Like several other playwrights from the decade immediately following World War II, Laurents has not always escaped criticism for his “group therapy session” or “pop psychologizing” plays, which have, admittedly, sometimes ended with victories too contrived or too easily won: Simply recognizing one’s own frailties does not always assure a newfound freedom and integration and maturity. Laurents’s accurate reading of modern human beings’ injured psyches, awash in the anxiety and self-doubt that inevitably accompany any search for an ethical system running counter to traditional social and sexual mores, remains in somewhat uneasy balance with his innately positive view that the individual can win through to a sense of personal wholeness. Yet Laurents dramatizes this tension with such honesty and in such understated terms that Coney’s and Leona’s and Norma’s victories seem to be the audience’s own; the illusion complete, they, too, at least momentarily hear a waltz. Like his spokeswoman Camilla in Invitation to a March, Laurents at his best can be an adroit stage manager, gently pulling the strings that have always moved audiences in the theater.

Home of the Brave

A taut drama about prejudice during World War II, Laurents’s Home of the Brave dramatizes how the experience of being condemned as an outsider, being made to feel different from others, affects the victim. Although not as theatrically elaborate as Peter Shaffer’s Equus (pr. 1973) three decades later, Home of the Brave employs a surprisingly similar dramatic strategy: A doctor attempts to uncover the cause of a patient’s symptoms by having the patient, under the influence of drugs, abreact, or therapeutically act out traumatic events from the past; what might appear to be flashbacks, then, are more accurately considered as deeply embedded memories now reenacted. Private First Class Peter Coen (nicknamed “Coney”) suffers from paralysis and amnesia brought on when, of necessity, he left behind his friend Finch during a dangerous reconnaissance mission on a Japanese island. For a long time, the sensitive Finch (he retches after having to kill an enemy soldier) had been one of the few to refrain from—and even physically defend Coney against—the anti-Semitic remarks rampant among the other soldiers. Especially guilty is Colonel T. J. Everitt, a former company vice president who makes Coney the butt of his resentment over finding himself at war, not seeing any connection between his attitudes and those of the enemy.

Coney has been on the receiving end of such hatred ever since grade school, and Doctor Bitterger counsels that for his own good Coney must, to a degree, become desensitized to such unthinking prejudice. Under the pressure of their fatal wartime mission, Finch had hesitatingly called him a “lousy yellow . . . jerk,” and Coney sensed then that Finch had caught himself just in time to prevent “Jew bastard” from slipping out. When Finch died and Coney’s gut reaction was to be glad that it was not he who was killed, he felt shame and guilt, and he continues to imagine that there was some connection between the momentary hatred he experienced for Finch and his not staying behind and dying with him. Although Bitterger helps his patient understand intellectually that he acted in much the same way in which anyone else might have under the same circumstances, this realization does not sink into Coney’s heart until another soldier, Mingo, recounts a similar experience.

Coney is not the only soldier whom Mingo tutors. Their commander, Major Robinson, though—like Mingo and Finch—essentially free of judging others in terms of racial distinctions, still experiences some difficulty in knowing how to command a group of men. Younger than some of the soldiers under him, Robinson attempts to compensate for lack of experience through an excess of enthusiasm, seeing war metaphorically as a game to be won. He cannot easily admit that his men might instinctively know more than he does—he fails, for example, to see T. J. for the bigot he is—nor does he fully understand that they deserve respect as men just as much as he does as an officer. Mingo, already overly sensitive to the fact that his poet-wife is better educated than he, has recently received a “Dear John” letter telling him she is leaving him for another man. When, as a result of the mission on which Finch was killed, Mingo loses an arm, he feels doubly afraid to return home, since as a disabled person he will now be one of society’s outsiders.

When Coney discovers that Mingo, too, despite his crippling injury, felt glad to be alive when he saw comrades die, he has a vision of his communion with all humanity: Despite differences, all men are fundamentally the same. Two frightened individuals can now go home from the war brave enough to start life again. Together Coney and Mingo will open the bar that Coney had originally planned to run with Finch. The land to which they will return is not yet free of the prejudice that wounds men like Coney and Mingo, and this helps keep Laurents’s ending from being too saccharine. If the revelation that Coney receives seems perhaps too meager to effect much in the way of a permanent cure, Laurents’s play is for that very reason both honest and understated.

The Time of the Cuckoo

Perhaps because of the perennially popular 1955 Katharine Hepburn movie Summertime that was adapted from it, The Time of the Cuckoo will probably remain the best remembered of Laurents’s plays. This bittersweet romance concerns a clash of cultures, of lifestyles, that occurs when Leona Samish, a thirtyish American single woman, has a brief affair in Venice with the somewhat older and attractively silver-haired Renato Di Rossi. As Leona remarks, Americans abroad carry with them “more than a suitcase”: They bring a whole trunk load of attitudes and values, manners and mores. New World brashness confronts Old World charm; money—in the person of the boorish Lloyd McIlhenny on a hop-skip-and-a-jump tour with his wife—meets culture; and puritan guilt and repression come up against an instinctive lust for life. Partly under the tutelage of Signora Fioria, at whose pensione the action occurs, Leona can overcome her initial qualms and experience her night of love with Di Rossi, a devoted father enduring a now loveless marriage.

Signora Fioria and Di Rossi both serve as foils to the American tourist in matters of sexual morality. Di Rossi, regarding himself as a kind of spokesperson for Mediterranean culture, believes that abstract notions of right and wrong simply do not exist; to live life fully and to make contact with others is the only good, and so he bemoans the tendency of Americans to always “feel bad” and wallow in sexual guilt. Signora Fioria, who had an affair while her husband was alive and is having another now, also deems as “impractical” any morality except discretion, urging others to live life as it is, being certain only to leave it a little “sweeter” than they found it by entering a giving relationship from which they do not necessarily get anything in return. The values of these two Italians gain added weight when Laurents shows the shortcomings of the traditional notions of sexual morality by which another American couple, the young, beautiful, blond Yaegers, live and love. Eddie Yaeger, an artist whose later work has never measured up to his first exhibit, suffers from painter’s block; his wife June, earlier married to a musician, suffers from something even less tangible but equally destructive: the romantic ideal that a wife must be her husband’s complete life. She attributes Eddie’s infidelities with Signora Fioria to his temporary inability to create, and she reconciles with him—albeit in an uneasy truce—only after he comes around to her strict notion that love cannot be love without complete fidelity. Into this subplot, Laurents introduces as well a staple theme of the 1950’s, lack of communication, through Eddie’s comment that language is often a method of “excommunication” and June’s observation that people without the ability to talk might feel less alone.

What finally prevents Leona and Di Rossi from achieving even a shaky truce is not so much their differing attitudes toward sexual morality and the need for love as a failure within Leona herself. A woman who prides herself on independence but who is increasingly hiding her insecurities behind drink, she underestimates her attractiveness to Di Rossi; if she at first acts insulted by his forwardness, she later thinks he must want her only for her money. What finally brings her around to Di Rossi is not, however, his and Signora Fioria’s accusations that she actually insults herself by having so little self-esteem, but rather his gift of a garnet necklace, a gesture so overwhelming that she—together with the audience—hears a waltz. When it appears that he has made money off her by exchanging her dollars for counterfeit on the black market, however, she rejects him. Emotionally bruised herself, she must hurt others by telling June about Eddie and Signora Fioria. The “wonderful mystical magical miracle,” the impossibly romantic ideal she had hoped to and did fleetingly meet in Italy, evaporates quickly, yet it leaves Leona with a new awareness of her limitations: her inability to love herself; her need for someone outside herself to confirm her value and self-worth by wanting her.

Her souvenirs of Venice—two wine-red eighteenth century goblets that she buys in Di Rossi’s shop and the longed-for garnet necklace that he gives her—suggest by their color her long repressed passion. That she insists on keeping the necklace, that she must take something tangible home with her, indicates her insecurity, her need for things as a proof of feelings. Leona has not yet outgrown her inability to give of herself without getting something in return, and she finds it difficult to believe that others can either: When the street urchin Mauro, who has been trying to swindle her all along, offers a souvenir for free, she still instinctively wonders why, rather than simply saying thank you. It is not clear whether she will return to America any the wiser, but at least she stays in Venice to complete her vacation rather than fleeing further experiences that might test her conventional moral code.

A Clearing in the Woods

A Clearing in the Woods concerns a woman who must confront the past in order to move into the future, thus continuing Laurents’s exploration of the need for psychological wholeness. The most theatrically intricate—and, according to the playwright’s own testimony, the most difficult yet satisfying of his plays to write—it does not lend itself to simple categorization. Laurents himself discounts all the formulas—flashback, dream, nightmare, hallucination, psychoanalysis, psychodrama—that might readily describe this play in which not only the woman Virginia but also her three former selves appear onstage. Even stream of consciousness does not seem an accurate enough classification; perhaps nonrealistic fantasy, with a dose of Expressionism, comes closest. Each of Virginia’s three earlier selves is seen mainly in the way she interacts with a man—father, teenage “lover,” husband—in acted out fragments of her past experience.

Jigee, Virginia as a little girl of nine or ten, rebels against both the restraints and lack of attention of her father Barney; she feels, in fact, cut off from both her parents—distant from a mother too absorbed in her father, as well as jealous of her mother’s hold over him. In a plea that he pay attention to her, she cuts off his necktie, wishing it were the tongue that had lashed out. Virginia’s initiation into sexuality is seen through Nora, her seventeen-year-old self who goes off with a woodchopper, as simultaneously in the present, Virginia enters the cottage for an abortive assignation with George, a suspect homespun philosopher who counsels enjoying the pleasures of today that lead to pleasant memories tomorrow while he advocates a belief in “Nothing,” for then there can be no risk of disappointment and disillusionment. Virginia’s lack of success in marriage is seen through twenty-six-year-old Ginna’s relationship with Pete. The big man on campus, he had married her thinking she was pregnant; he never reaches his potential, and his life seems to have peaked at twenty. No longer sexually excited by her and believing not only that she has given up on him but also that she actually feels glad when he fails, Pete is temporarily impotent, effectively emasculated by Ginna.

Like Virginia now, neither Nora nor Ginna wanted to be ordinary; each wanted a life somehow special and set apart from that of ordinary people. This same desire stands in the way of Virginia’s marrying Andy. Two years before the present time of the play, she had called off their engagement on their wedding day, knowing that he would always be simply a competent researcher rather than a brilliant discoverer. Virginia now invites him to cross over the magic circle and enter the fantasy world of the clearing in the woods with her, hoping to erase that day as if it had never happened, but like Ginna with Pete, Virginia demands that Andy live up to her goals for him and will be angry if he fails, while he is happier accepting and living within his limitations. Because Virginia has never been satisfied with herself, she has placed unhealthy, destructive expectations on others. As Bitterger does for Coney in Home of the Brave, Andy acts as a kind of therapist for Virginia, helping her see that she has never really loved anyone, even herself, and that she has consequently destroyed the men in her life. Yet as each of the men returns in the present, she discovers that her impact on them has not been wholly negative: The boy in the woods, who actually thought Nora pretty and not ordinary, surreptitiously left a bouquet of flowers behind; Pete, now remarried, reveals that Ginna actually provided color and excitement in his rather ordinary existence; and Barney, now on the wagon, can be reconciled with his adult daughter by their mutual understanding that a parent sometimes needs more love than a resentful child is willing to offer. Virginia, by becoming content with herself as she is rather than seeking a false image that could never be, can finally accommodate her former selves rather than deny their existence. By accepting them for what they can teach her about herself, she can reach integration and move freely and with hope into the future.

Invitation to a March

Invitation to a March is a charming romantic comedy about people’s need to march to no drummer at all, even to break out and dance. Deedee and Tucker Grogan have come east to the Long Island coast to see their son Schuyler married to Norma Brown. Deedee and Norma’s mother, Lily, the widow of a General who starts each day with a flag ceremony complete with toy bugle, are conventional, status-happy women: Deedee has wealth, Lily, social position, and both are morally proper; yet their limited lives are dull, dreary, without adventure, and it annoys them even to think that others might have something more. The bride-to-be’s one peculiarity is her propensity to fall asleep for no apparent reason; this odd habit is her quiet revolt against the conformity and complacency that surround her. She sleeps because life is not worth staying awake for—that is, until Aaron Jablonski, riding on a horse in the rose-colored light, arrives to fix the plumbing and wakes her with a kiss. If Schuyler’s mother, Deedee, is literary cousin to Lloyd McIlhenny from The Time of the Cuckoo, Aaron’s mother, Camilla, is drawn in the same mold as Signora Fioria and Renato Di Rossi.

Although many of the characters in Invitation to a March at times face front and unselfconsciously and ingratiatingly address the audience, taking them into their confidence and interpreting for them, Camilla is the chief of these narrators—and the playwright’s mouthpiece. There is more than a little of the down-to-earth philosophizing of Wilder’s Stage Manager about her, and more than a bit of Wilder’s point of view within the play. A wacky individualist, a free spirit who treasures the adventures life offers, Camilla knows that one can deaden life by not living it the way one wants to; since time passes and one does not have many chances, one must take the opportunities that present themselves, as she did twenty years earlier during a summer romance with Aaron’s father—who turns out to be Tucker Grogan and thus will be the father of the groom no matter what. Tucker had made Camilla feel attractive simply by wanting her, and for all these years the memory of that time, nurtured by imagination, has sustained her so that she has wanted no other man. She found her magic.

Norma’s similarity to Camilla reveals itself in her penchant for tearing up calendar pages, an act symbolic of her desire to break free from the restrictions of a confined, regimented life. In the play’s title passage, Camilla warns about all the marchers in the world who try to take away one’s individuality, who want one to toe the line, to move in lockstep, as do those in the military. It is easier and safer to submit than to assert one’s difference, but it is finally deadly dull to do so. Although Norma feels no guilt after her first night with Aaron, it takes some time before she can break free and dance by giving up the prospects of a secure and success-oriented life in suburbia with a lawyer-husband and replace that goal with her love for Aaron. Eventually, though, they do hear their waltz, and they do dance off.

Camilla makes no excuses for her conduct; what she did was right for her. If she has any guilt, it stems from her selfishness in letting Aaron love her so much that he finds it temporarily difficult to love another. Tucker is not perfect either; finding it awkward to communicate with other men, he has never made enough effort until now to reach out to Schuyler. Although Schuyler, so much the prisoner of conventionality that he cannot respond to feelings, finds the shoe Norma kicks off before she dances away, he is no Prince Charming—in fact, he confesses to not believing in princes anymore—and so he symbolically falls asleep, a victim of the march, while his fully awakened and alive beauty waltzes off with another.

Jolson Sings Again

Laurents revisited a political theme included in his initial movie script for The Way We Were. Having been briefly blacklisted himself, Laurents had wanted the film to examine the morality of informing about one’s friends during Hollywood’s blacklisting days in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but the director eliminated that theme, preferring to focus on the romance between the film’s stars. The play’s title refers to actor Larry Parks, star of the movie The Jolson Story, who testified about the activities of his comrades before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communists in Hollywood. Newsboys selling papers reporting Parks’s testimony shouted, “Jolson Sings Again!”

In the play, four friends find their relationship damaged when subpoenaed to testify before the committee. The story explores the questions of where to draw the line against informing on one’s friends and whether to associate with such informers. When Andreas testifies before the committee, Julian, a young gay playwright, breaks with Andreas, the director who had turned Julian’s plays into major successes on stage and screen. Although Andreas is ashamed of what he has done, he defends his actions by asserting that making films was so important to him that the fear of blacklisting and being prevented from working in Hollywood overcame his feelings of guilt. Further he claims that he only named persons already named and, therefore, had not hurt anyone. Robbie, a Hollywood agent who is having an affair with Andreas, condones his behavior, but Robbie’s husband Sidney, an uncompromisingly liberal screenwriter, condemns him.

Julian continues to have his plays produced on Broadway, where blacklisting did not apply, but when staged by other directors, his plays do not succeed. After having avoided Andreas for ten years, Julian finally turns to him with his latest play. Laurents’s characters explore the complex interplay between personal principles and individual self-interest as each person faces the prospect of being blacklisted and prevented from pursuing a Hollywood career.

Claudia Lazlo

The setting is a regional theater company rehearsing a play about an opera singer with a Nazi past in post-World War II Austria. The main play portrays the interactions of actors, director, and stage manager during the rehearsal. In the play-within-a-play, Claudia Lazlo is a brilliant soprano denied work in postwar Salzburg by a U.S. Army captain because she was a card-carrying Nazi. An admiring Jewish American lieutenant takes up her cause, offering to marry her to help her gain permission to resume her singing career.

As in Jolson Sings Again, Laurents examines the problem of where to draw the line between principle and self-interest. In the play-within-a-play, he asks what price an artist can morally agree to pay in order to pursue her career and questions how many political sins even a transcendent artist may be forgiven. The rehearsal scenes explore the way actors identify with the characters they portray, permitting Laurents to depict how directors, managers, and actors react to the text of a play.

Bibliography

Barnes, Clive. “Bad Idea Kills Nick and Nora.” Review of Nick and Nora. Post (New York), December 9, 1991. According to Barnes, “a bad idea turned sour.” He points at Laurents’s multiple contribution as the main reason for the show’s failure: “This is not a musical. It is a ‘bookical’—a book with songs rather than a songbook.”

“Decades Later, Naming Names Still Matters.” TheNew York Times, March 14, 1999, Section 2, p. 7. Frank Rich interviews Laurents about Jolson Sings Again. Laurents describes his reasons for writing the play and explains his dislike for people whose testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940’s and 1950’s destroyed the careers of their friends.

Guernsey, Otis L., Jr., ed. “An Ad Lib for Four Playwrights.” In Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers on Theater. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974. A conversation among Laurents, Sidney “Paddy” Chayefsky, Israel Horovitz, and Leonard Melfi, in which Laurents proves the most insightful regarding playwright expectations of directors and actors in production.

“Gypsy Stripped of Spirit.” Review of Gypsy. Post (New York), November 17, 1989. This revival of Gypsy, with Tyne Daly in the role of Gypsy Rose Lee, was the second (a 1974 revival starred Angela Lansbury, and the original 1959 production starred Ethel Merman). Laurents directed this version and is here credited, with some reservations, for its success.

Kaufman, David. “When the Author Insists on Directing the Play, Too.” The New York Times, February 11, 2001, Section 2, p. 5. Laurents explains how his dissatisfaction with other directors led him to undertake the task and discusses difficulties he discovered when directing his own plays.