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Watch on the Rhine
by Lillian Hellman
Directed by Scott Alan Evans
October 15, 16, & 17, 2005
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street, NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
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An idealistic anti-fascist German flees his country with his children and wife to find sanctuary in America with his wife?s family, only to discover he cannot rest without compromising his deeply held beliefs. This compelling eloquent drama by one of America?s best known playwrights originally premiered on Broadway in 1941. |
| CAST/CREW |
Cynthia Harris*
Fanny Farrelly
Kyle Fabel*
David Farrelly
Margaret Nichols*
Marthe De Barncovis
Terry Layman*
Teck De Branco*is
Francesca Di Mauro*
Sara Mueller
Daniel Oreskes*
Kurt Mueller
Leah Morales
Babette Mueller
Travis Walters*
Joshua Mueller
Sean J. Moran
Bodo Mueller
Mary Louise Geiger
Lighting Designer
David Toser
Costume Designer
Dawn Dunlop
Production Stage Manager
Shelly Tseng
Assistant Director
OPR/Origlio Public Relations
Press Representatives
Music Composed by David Macdonald
*member Actors? Equity Association |
| PRESS |
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| DRAMATURGY |
?Watch on the Rhine is the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees or the seasons or their colors. All other work for me has been fragmented?But here, for the first and last time, the work I did, the actors, the rehearsals, the success of the play, even the troubles that I have forgotten, make a pleasant oneness and have been lost to the past. The real memories of that time are not for the play but for the people who passed through the time of it.? So says the author, Lillian Hellman, in her second memoir, Pentimento. In Watch on the Rhine, it is undoubtedly the people created that move this play above a mere vehicle for political protest. It was written in mid-1940, an outlet for Hellman?s growing concern over the US failure to enter World War II.
Watch on the Rhine premiered in New York on April 1st, 1941, ran for nearly four hundred performances, and won the New York Critics Circle Drama Award. Nearly every review was some variation on the theme of John Anderson?s comment in the New-York Journal-American: ?passionately anti-fascist and often deeply moving.? But all were equally quick to note that, in the words of the NY World Telegram, ?[It] is?a play and not a soapbox. Miss Hellman makes little or no attempt to demonstrate the wickedness of Hitlerism, perhaps assuming that the public needs no further instruction.? The New York Herald Tribune went so far as to award Watch on the Rhine the honor of being ?The first theatrical work of its type to be worthy of the men and women it is celebrating.?
John Beaufort noted, ?Since the drama?may be regarded by some as ?another anti-Nazi play? let us be quick to report that Miss Hellman?s anti-Nazism arises out of her pro-idealism as represented in Kurt Mueller, the principal character. Miss Hellman is here more concerned with Mueller as a hero than with Hitler as a villain.? It is that attention to a sort of dynamic realism that allowed the success of Watch on the Rhine in its 1980 Broadway revival. The director, Arvin Brown, said, of his personal discovery of the play ?My first reaction when I read it was ?This is political,? but then I found myself saying, ?But how I love these people and the way they relate to one another?In fact, I think it can be said that the political meaning of the play grows out of the characters.?
Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans on June 20, 1905, the daughter of a shoe salesman. When she was five years old, her family moved north to New York City. She eventually studied at New York University and Columbia University, but never earned a degree. In 1925, she began reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune, and by 1930, she was employed as a script-reader by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood.
That same year, she met Dashiell Hammett with whom she would remain intimate until his death in 1961. Hammett, a mystery writer and author of The Maltese Falcon, would prove to be one of the greatest influences in Hellman?s life. He reportedly suggested that she write a stage adaptation of ?The Great Drumsheugh Case,? an episode from William Roughead?s Bad Companions which detailed the scandal at a Scottish boarding school when a pupil accused two teachers of having a lesbian affair. Hellman?s adaptation, The Children?s Hour (1934), shocked and fascinated Broadway audiences with its frank treatment of lesbianism and enjoyed a run of 691 performances. It also spawned two film adaptations including These Three (1936) penned by Hellman herself. Hellman also wrote the scripts for such films as Dark Angel (1935), Dead End (1937), and The North Star (1943).
Hellman?s next stage success, Little Foxes (1939), has become perhaps her most well-known play. It is a chilling study of the financial and psychological conflicts within a wealthy Southern family. In 1941 she further strengthened her position as a leading voice in the American theatre with the success of Watch on the Rhine. Ironically, at its premiere, the worst reviews came from the Communist press, chiding her for giving support to the Allies in what it was then calling a ?phony war.?
Later, in 1952, as a result of Hellman?s well-known and out-spoken political views, she was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Pressured to reveal the names of associates in the theatre who might have Communist associations, she replied: ?To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year?s fashions.?
As a result of her defiance, Hellman?s name was added to Hollywood?s blacklist and she was slapped with an unexpected and unexplainable tax bill. Even worse, her partner, Dashiell Hammett, was sentenced to prison for six months. Alone and cut off from her only source of income, Hellman was soon forced to sell her home. Fortunately, she managed to stage a revival of The Children?s Hour and used the proceeds to relocate to New York.
Hellman continued to write, adapting several works for the stage including Anouilh?s The Lark and a musical version of Voltaire?s Candide which featured a score by Leonard Bernstein. The proceeds from these productions enabled her to purchase some property in Martha?s Vineyard. However, almost a decade would pass before Hellman would write another completely original work. Again, Hammett would suggest the theme. Toys in the Attic opened in February 1960 with Jason Robards in the lead role. Although this would be her last work for the stage, Hellman remained artistically active throughout her life. She taught creative writing classes at the NYU, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And in her later years, she focused on several autobiographical works including An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976). She died of cardiac arrest on June 30, 1984, at her home in Martha?s Vineyard. In her will, Hellman established two literary funds. The Lillian Hellman Fund was to be used to advance the arts and sciences, and the second, intended to further radical causes, was named for Dashiell Hammett, her longtime companion and critic.
Hellman received numerous awards during her lifetime including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Watch on the Rhine (1941) and Toys in the Attic (1960), Academy Award nominations for the screenplays The Little Foxes (1941) and The North Star (1943), and numerous honorary degrees from various universities.
In her memoir, An Unfinished Woman, Hellman herself said ?The theatre is not a natural world for those who question whatever is meant by glamour.? And yet, there is a sort of glamour in her writing (particularly in Watch on the Rhine), something that is, according to Webster?s Third New International Dictionary ?intangible and magnetic.? But it arises from a refusal to fabricate an outward sparkle in her work, instead relying on the nobility of her characters and their dedication to the forces that swing them into conflict. On the opening of Watch on the Rhine, the NY Herald Tribune said, ?Miss Hellman, who knows that violence and highly colored emotions are merely the stuff of our existence in these days of totalitarian warfare, has never been afraid of such things when her story called for them, which is one reason why she represents the best and most typical in American playwriting.?
TACT NYC
Florence Gould Hall October, 2005
Erin Steiner & Scott Alan Evans
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1934 THE CHILDREN'S HOUR
(film 1936 These Three)
1935 DARK ANGEL
(film script)
1936 DAYS TO COME
1937 THE SPANISH EARTH (screenplay with John Dos Passos & Archibald MacLeish)
1939 THE LITTLE FOXES (film 1941)
1941 WATCH ON THE RHINE (film 1943)
1943 THE NORTH STAR (film script )
1944 THE SEARCHING WIND (film script, 1946)
1946 ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST (film 1948 )
1950 MONTSERRAT (adaptation)
1951 THE AUTUMN GARDEN
1955 LARK (adaptation)
1957 CANDIDE (musical)
1960 TOYS IN THE ATTIC (film 1963)
1963 MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, AND ME
1966 THE CHASE (film script)
1969 AN UNFINISHED WOMAN (National Book Award )
1973 PENTIMENTO (film adaptation 1977 Julia)
1976 SCOUNDREL TIME
1980 MAYBE |
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