54
THEATER CHRONICLE
MR.
BENHECHTat the opening of
To Quito and Back
at the Guild
Theater the other night must have felt like a man in a new suit of clothes
which nobody notices. I am not sure whether Mr. Hecht was wearing a
transformation or had actually undergone one, but indubitably the play
at the Guild was intended to reveal its author in a New Phase. The
creator of
Erik Darn
and
The Fmnt Page,
the Hollywood scenario-writer
and Paramount film-producer, has gone Red. That the full effect of this
dramatic quick-change was lost on audiences and critics is in part at·
tributable to Mr. Hecht's own confusion but in the main to the blundering
production of the Theater Guild. I happened to see in mal1uscript the
play Mr. Hecht wrote. It was infinitely more interesting, more playable,
and even commercially more valuable than the play the Guild produced.
Indeed, the staging of this play is proof conclusive that the Theater
Guild, whatever its history and pretensions, is indistinguishable from the
Shuberts in the bright glare of the footlights.
In its handling of
To Quito and Back
the Guild went in for the
kind of tinkering that has made the more groundling managers the
laughing-stock of serious theater people; and, as is usually the case with
the Shuberts when they attempt a non-musical attraction, the Guild
directors, between them, carved the play into a turkey. Mr. Hecht gave
the Guild a play that was in essence autobiographical, a play about an
articulate, eIever man who talked himself to a standstill. But the pro-
ducers, apparently still under the spell of the old superstition that a play
cannot be "talky," proceeded to excise almost all of the hero's connected
conversation and to substitute scenes of action and love interest. What
talk of a semi-intellectual nature was left the hero they camouflaged
as best they could. All the antique conventions of drawing-room comedy
were invoked: the characters in the midst of whatever they were saying
were bounding about the stage, jumping up and sitting down, climbing
over furniture and pacing the floor, going through all the dreary, monkey
tricks of what is known as "stage business." When everything else failed,
the actors were made to deliver their "difficult" lines in as hasty and
apologetic a manner as possible, while every wisecrack was handled as
slowly and revenrently as a soliloquy by Shakespeare. The ironic boom·
erang came, of course, with the morning papers, where the critics dis-
missed the playas talky. Paradoxically, the remnants of talk in the pro-
duced play were just sufficient to make it appear over talkative, and the
patent embarrassment of director and actors only underlined the fact.
In another notable way the producers obstructed the author's com·
munication with his audience. The hero of the play is an American
novelist, whose mixed sincerity and attitudinizing, vulgarity and pathos,
are peculiarly indigenou~ to the America we have just left behind us,
the America of the twenties whose mood Mr. Hecht helped to set. The
awkward, asymmetrical contours of this American type were quite flat-
tened out by Mr. Leslie Banks, an actor of rigid and shiny technique,
