Tad Mosel

• Born: May 1, 1922
• Birthplace: Steubenville, Ohio
• Died: August 24, 2008
• Place of death: Concord, New Hampshire

Other Literary Forms

Although Tad Mosel is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play All the Way Home, much of his best work was written for the hour-long or ninety-minute drama venues in early television. Between 1953 and 1962, more than twenty original Mosel scripts appeared on television. By the mid-1960’s, virtually all television drama was in series with recurring characters, though Mosel had one last teleplay broadcast in 1968, and a television version of his stage hit All the Way Home in 1971. For the American Bicentennial in 1976, he wrote two episodes of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series The Adams Chronicles. He also wrote two screenplays, Dear Heart (1964, a revision of his 1956 teleplay The Out-of-Towners) and Up the Down Staircase (1967). His books include an anthology of his teleplays, Other People’s Houses: Six Television Plays (1956), and a biography of actress Katherine Cornell (1978).

Achievements

There is no doubt that Mosel’s greatest accolades came from his 1961 Broadway hit All the Way Home, which ran for 333 performances, was nominated for a Tony Award, and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. But even before that success, he had established himself as one of the top names in television drama in the 1950’s. In 1967 his screenplay for Up the Down Staircase was nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America award. For decades a member of the editorial board of TV Quarterly, the journal of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Mosel was also an influential member of the Writer’s Guild of America and was a delegate to the meetings that created the International Writer’s Guild. Mosel received honorary doctorates from two Ohio colleges: the College of Wooster in 1963 and his hometown college, the College of Steubenville, in 1969.

Biography

Tad Mosel was born George Ault Mosel, Jr., in 1922 in Steubenville, Ohio, a small industrial city on the Ohio River. Though his family moved to New York only eight years later, his teleplays, notably Ernie Barger Is Fifty, The Lawn Party, Presence of the Enemy, and That’s Where the Town’s Going, are often set in small Ohio River towns and consciously crafted from his memories of Midwestern life. His father, George Ault Mosel, Sr., an advertising executive, and his wife, Margaret, shared their love for the theater with their son, taking him as a child to serious dramas instead of typical children’s fare. He particularly recalled being star-struck by Katharine Cornell in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (pr. 1923, pb. 1924) in 1936, at the age of fourteen. More than forty years later, he wrote a biography of the stage legend.

Entering Amherst College in 1940, Mosel immediately found a home in the college theater department, which produced his play The Happiest Years early in his junior year. World War II interrupted his undergraduate work, however, and he served in the U.S. Air Force Weather Service, also editing his squadron’s newspaper. After the war, Mosel completed his degree requirements at Amherst, receiving a B.A. in 1947, and did graduate work at the Yale School of Drama. At Yale he studied more experimental modern playwrights and wrote a Luigi Pirandello-inspired one-act that became one of his most-acted pieces, Impromptu.

During his Yale years, the new medium of television was in need of original scripts, and Mosel was contracted to expand a treatment into a script for Chevrolet Tele-Theater in 1949. Unsure of the new medium’s potential, he landed a steady job as a clerk for Northwest Airlines while he continued to write scripts for the weekly drama series Omnibus and to pursue graduate study at Columbia. Then in 1953, only months after completing his master’s degree, he sold his first original teleplay, Ernie Barger Is Fifty, to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and he was established full time as a television writer.

All the Way Home, a stage success in 1961, was one of three Mosel plays in New York that year: The one-act experimental drama Impromptu and his musical Madam Aphrodite (music and lyrics by Jerry Herman) both appeared Off-Broadway. A successful film adaptation of All the Way Home in 1963 gave him the Hollywood contacts to adapt one of his teleplays into the 1964 film Dear Heart, and three years later, he wrote the screen adaptation of Up the Down Staircase.

In 1975, when WNED-TV in New York prepared for the U.S. bicentennial by creating a miniseries on one of the founding families of the United States, The Adams Chronicles, Mosel was chosen to write two of the episodes, including one about the Amistad case, which Mosel explored in film drama two decades before Stephen Spielberg’s film Amistad (1997). In his later years, Mosel devoted himself to teaching rather than writing, though as late as 1984, a new Mosel original drama was produced at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Analysis

Equally versatile in three dramatic media—live stage, television, and film—Tad Mosel has a knack for adapting material from one medium to another. His stage hit All the Way Home was adapted from James Agee’s posthumous novel A Death in the Family; his film Dear Heart was expanded and revised from his own teleplay; he adapted the stage play and film classic The Petrified Forest for television; his last film Up the Down Staircase adapted a popular novelized autobiography of a young teacher’s experience at a tough city school; and he rewrote his teleplays The Five Dollar Bill and That’s Where the Town’s Going as stage versions for a dramatic publisher. In going from novel to stage, he skillfully compressed the action, eliminated minor characters, and transmuted some of the narrator’s words into dialogue. In going from television to film, he took advantage of the possibilities of exterior shots and expanded action in many locations.

Stylistically, Mosel’s plays tend to be dramatic realism—with the notable exception of Impromptu. They tend to be about ordinary people at peak moments in their lives and to move toward bittersweet or unresolved endings. As such, they are typical of most plays of the mid-twentieth century, but what is extraordinary is that Mosel wrote this way for early television, when audiences, and sometimes network executives, were said to demand neat resolutions and happy endings. Thematically, Mosel’s drama, both on stage and on television, tends to explore societal conventions, with at least one character, not always the protagonist, consciously running counter to those conventions. The unconventional character is frequently an alcoholic, an artist, or simply an average American opposed to changes in American society.

All the Way Home

Readers of the James Agee novel A Death in the Family, on which Mosel’s play is based, are confronted with profound structural differences between the two works. The narrative style of the novel is stream of consciousness, in which past and present flow back and forth between the current experience of the characters and their memories. Time is very fluid in Agee’s novel. In the play, on the other hand, Mosel has ordered the action so that it progresses chronologically. Critics praised a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Masterpiece Theatre dramatization of the novel in 2002 for adapting the stream-of-consciousness style for television, comparing Mosel’s adaptation unfavorably. Yet Mosel’s decision to edit the action in a linear fashion was probably the right one for 1961, and its rightness is confirmed by the play’s receiving the Pulitzer Prize in Drama that year.

In this play, the unconventional character, a common Mosel type, is the title character of the novel, Jay Follet, whose death provides the tragic climax to the play. He is light and easy-going in general, though a point of tension in his marriage is his chafing at the religious strictures, not so much of his society, but of his devoutly Catholic wife, Mary, and her family. In the opening scene, Mary hesitates even to tell her six-year-old son Rufus about her pregnancy until she checks with a priest. This religious tension is confined to the narration in the novel, though Mosel brilliantly inserts just enough consciousness of it into the play’s dialogue for the audience to feel the tension.

Another tension that Mosel is able to keep visible between the lines is Mary’s concerns over the alcoholism of Jay’s brother Ralph. Mosel’s dialogue makes it clear, without explicitly stating it, that Mary at one time had similar concerns for Jay, but that he had given up drink for his family, and she perceives Ralph’s visit in the opening scene to be a potentially bad influence on her husband and the family. The family tensions over alcohol are part of the received matter of the novel Mosel is dramatizing, but the situation parallels his 1958 CBS teleplay Presence of the Enemy. In both plays, the alcoholic brother is presented with some sympathy for the judgmental way in which his frailty is stigmatized, though in neither play is he the moral center. The way that these concerns are made visible in a very indirect way is typical of Mosel’s dramatic technique.

Impromptu

This play, which Mosel calls a product of his “Pirandello period” during graduate school at Yale, is not at all typical of his style, yet is one of his best and most-performed works. Mosel mentions the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello because the plot and structure of Impromptu are very much like those of Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (pr., pb. 1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922), in which a group of actors are given the task of producing a play without scripts or directors, ordered to do so by a tyrannical and unseen stage manager.

As innovative as that plot may sound, it was already old hat in theatrical circles when the play was first performed in 1961—or even when it was first written in the late 1940’s. Yet, there is more to the play than a self-consciousness in which actors toy with the conventions of characterization. First, Mosel deliberately simplifies the cast for this short, one-act play. There are only four characters, two male (Ernest and Tony) and two female (Winifred and Lora). Ernest and Winifred are the seasoned theatrical professionals; Tony and Lora are the younger and less experienced ones. Yet there is a difference between Ernest’s experience and Winifred’s: for Ernest, the aging leading man, his experience gives him a false sense of self-importance as he gives orders to the others, especially Tony. For Winifred, experience has only made her cynical. She provides a great deal of the play’s humor, but it is usually at the expense of another character.

In addition to exploring the conventions of dramatic characterization, however, Impromptu also probes into the twentieth century actor’s presuppositions about acting, a fact that doubtless accounts for its popularity among community and professional companies. Ernest’s self-importance and Winifred’s cynicism will not allow either of them to go beyond the level of playing stereotypes. Tony, on the other hand, wants to be more emotionally realistic, but the only way he can do so is to be himself rather than a character. Lora finds a middle ground in her desire to play against her type casting. She is always cast as the ingénue, and she wants to play the matron. With Winifred it is the other way around. When arguing over such casting difficulties leads to Tony’s leaving, Winifred finally breaks through her cruel pose and defends him, though the play ends with Tony gone and others unsure if their play was successful.

That’s Where the Town’s Going

This stage adaptation of Mosel’s television play illustrates his gift for dramatic compression. In That’s Where the Town’s Going, he illustrates the tensions between the past and future of a small Midwestern town with just four characters, only three of whom are central to the plot. The difference between the past and present of the town is expressed partly through characterization, for Hobart Cramm was a poor boy from the “wrong” side of town (River Street), and Wilma and Ruby Sills were the rich girls from the “posh” side (Ohio Street). However, now that all three are middle aged, the town has changed, Cramm is a successful New York businessperson, and the sisters, reluctant to admit that the glory of their family name has faded, blame one another for the fact that neither one ever married. The play is a realistic portrait of the fate of small Midwestern towns in the 1960’s: The population was shifting from downtown areas to planned housing developments such as the Shadyside of the play—optimistically named, as one character observes, for there is not a single tree in the area. The Sills’ property, conversely, has retained its trees, but only by filling them with concrete. The abandonment of the downtown reflects the abandonment of Wilma Sills, who had once turned down Cramm’s proposal of marriage because his prospects seemed so poor. When Wilma turns down his second proposal, her sister Ruby, who had always criticized Cramm, marries him instead, leaving Wilma with her regrets.

Bibliography

Burack, A. S. Television Plays for Writers. Boston: The Writer, 1957. This anthology of teleplays from the golden age of live television in the 1950’s opens with a helpful introduction addressed to would-be writers and includes an afterword by each writer. Mosel’s comments describe how the supposed limits of the medium of television are not as confining as they seem and actually lead to a creative discipline.

Mosel, Tad. Other People’s Houses: Six Television Plays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Mosel’s generous introductions to each of the six plays in this anthology give us the most complete picture available of his ideas on the craft of drama.

Tessier, Brian. “There Was Gold Dust in the Air.” http://emmys.com/foundation/archive/vault/fal 1998/page3.html. Text of Mosel’s comments used as fillers for the 1998 Emmy Awards Show, available on the Emmy website. Presents Mosel’s recollections of the early days of television.