The City of Dreadful Confusion

One Superfluous Citizen of New York Objects to the Existence of all the Others

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

AT 8.15 on a rainy evening in New York last Winter my town car picked up a pleasant dinner party and started for the Plymouth Theatre where nightly and sweetly The Pirates of Penzance was being played. (This nonchalant reference to my town car gives a fine, hoity-toity accent to the ensuing plaint and would mislead only those who never happen to have seen it in a good light. I had won it the preceding May in a game of cribbage. A little later I sold it thankfully for a cool $54. Among its somewhat resentful intimates, it was familiarly known as The Old Sieve. But that is another story.)

The dinner had been given by the Crosby Gaiges. The guests beside myself were Frank Swinnerton, the novelist, and Mrs. Swinnerton, who were sailing back exhausted to London that week, and the newly arrived Osbert Sitwell, currently described in the press (by himself, perhaps) as the visiting English ironist. In the midst of worried speculation as to whether a taxi could be had on such a night, I dazed and crushed them all saying with offensively quiet dignity that my town car was below. I always called it my town car. To be sure, I had no country car. I did not even have a suburban car.

It was 8.25 when the Old Sieve rounded the corner of Madison Avenue into Forty-fifth Street. Ahead of us the night lamps of the Plymouth beckoned in the golden blur which traced the course of Broadway as a cloud of dust tells the scout when cavalry is on the move along some distant road.

The theatre was perhaps a third of a mile away. We had a good ten minutes before the overture would begin. Why, we even had five minutes before the hour it was advertised to begin. But it must have seemed to the wondering aliens as if all the motor vehicles in New York had capriciously elected to drive through Forty-fifth Street to Broadway that night. And dashing along in this raucous glacier of traffic, it took us precisely forty-five minutes to cover that third of a mile. We arrived at our seats just about in time to see the curtain descend on the first act finale, to fish in the dusk for our hats and go forth to smoke a cigarette during the intermission.

AFTER the performance my town car bobbed up miraculously at the very door of the theatre. I had the illusion of its swooping expertly to meet me in the nick of time, but perhaps it had merely been blockaded there since it dropped us, unable to get away. The rain had stopped, the stars winked overhead and we were all scattering on our respective mischiefs. The visiting English ironist announced that he was due in Harlem at midnight, on exploration bent. His tryst was some murky cabaret at a famous crossroads of our latter-day Ethiopia. How far off might that be? I gave two miles as a rough estimate and offered to drive him there.

"But Pve made a definite promise to be there at midnight. That gives me only an hour," he said. "I am afraid I shall have to walk."

And off he went up the street afoot.

I tell this mild anecdote not because it was an extraordinary picture of New York life but because it was a quite painfully ordinary one. The rain exaggerated slightly, but only slightly, the grotesque and hysterical congestion which, on any night, makes the main roadways converging on Times Square seem like the swarming radii from the stadium just after the Army and Navy Game.

Even on a starry night of no importance, when no World Series and no returning Lindbergh lifts the stream of visitors to flood tide, the streets threading the theatre district present the same monstrous spectacle of snarled, churning, chattering traffic.

Nor can you escape its oppressive tedium and endless exasperation by virilely scorning a taxi and going afoot. You may swing down some distant sidestreet for a while, as free and as proud as the cat that walked by his lone. But as you approach the great midway, the crowd thickens, coagulates. It sucks you in, picks you up, crawls along with you, halting and eddying fitfully from time to time and deposits you at last like a stranded cockleshell on the doorstep of some playhouse perhaps—who knows?—the very one you had meant to go to all along.

Your feelings and your raiment are equally rumpled. Your toes have been trodden to a pulp. You have been degradingly mauled by the witless democracy of which you are a sheeplike part. You try to remember whether you have just been anachronistically mixed up in some campus cane-rush or have merely been shopping for a few Christmas trinkets in the jolly December stampede at Macy's. You realize with something of a Where-am-I? start that the place oddly resembles the lobby of a theatre and you totter gratefully to your seat, there to enjoy such portions of the play as you can hear above the swish of programs, the good heart-to-heart talk about poor Maymie—going on in the seat ahead of you— and the audible bronchitis of the other playgoers who sit back and accompany the play by strumming softly on their catarrhs. Into these familiar sounds is woven the cawing of a thousand Klaxons from the sulky traffic jam in the nearby street, the sharp football signals of the taxi-starters and now and again the shuddering detonation of dynamite, where the nightworkers, bless their hearts, are burrowing at perfectly splendid new subways so that more and more lovely people will be able to squeeze into New York. Of course at matinees, you do not hear all these reverberations. They are drowned out by the riveting machines at work next door, like busy little beavers, on a brand new theatre.

THIS is really what going to the play is like in the increasingly unbelievable city of New York. In a fit of nostalgia for other days and other ways, I tried not long ago to think myself back into the Mauve Decade when it was possible to dine with some leisure and move slowly through tranquil streets to see a mannerly play. My conjuring brought forth something like this:

You would have a duck at Delmonico's or the Cafe Martin, jump into a hansom and, through the still bland September dusk, clop-clop over to the Empire, passing Stanford White, perhaps, in the lobby, or Harry Thurston Peck or William Travers Jerome. Or, for that matter, Edna MacCauley. Or Elsie De Wolfe. But enough of this small Beer.

It is 8.15 and Acton Davies is already twittering in his seat. The rising curtain reveals a stately living room with a glimpse of green garden and hedgerow through the wide French windows. A pretty parlour maid enters, carrying a bowl of posies and the talent revealed by her getting it all the way to the piano without dropping it fills the audience with predictions that C. F. will star her before Christmas. A disdainful butler enters next, and from their talk you learn what a pother old Mr. Arbuthnot is making about the harum-scarum Lady Vi's indiscretion and how suspicious it is that young Master Eric has ordered his marc saddled for eleven.

Then the stage gradually grows populous with handsome and faintly catarrhal English actresses who are in a good deal of a flutter because that bluff, misogynistic Mr. Hal Arbuthnot is due that very day from his rubber plantation in the Straits Settlement. One of them would give a penny for poor dear Diana's thoughts, but the little slyboots won't speak and, indeed, is starting to escape to the vicarage through the gap in the garden hedge when, to the barking of a few good beagles and murmurs of "This must be he now!" (of which the virtuosity in sheer grammar makes these English playwrights the despair of their American cousins) John Drew enters. There is rain of applause from the twilight of the auditorium, so steady, so persistent, so fond, that after a half-hearted effort to begin his role, he must needs stop and bow a suave, half-amused bow, a twinkling bow.

The reviewers out front make mental note of the warm reunion, and note, too, that, while mentioning graciously the unfailing urbanity of Mr. Drew in such frothy pieces as Mr. Frohman imports from London, they must not forget to use at least one paragraph deploring his desertion of Shakespeare. With which formalities attended to, Mr. Drew would swing easily into his part and the theatrical season would have been then and there inaguarated. Eheu fugaces!

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That fine classical sigh was rather regret for the conditions under which one went to the theatre in those days, however, than for the things one saw when one got there. Though there is, I think, an intimate connection between the two. If it has seemed to distant onlookers that of late our plays have dealt overmuch with gunplays, stranglings, rape, unorthodox passions and kindred violences, it might be remembered that these plays must be unfolded before harassed and nervewracked playgoers who have squirmed and fought their way through a crazy muddle and din to reach the theatre at all and can hardly be smoothed down and composed in time for the mood of firelight pensiveness which so became the milder dramas of yesteryear.

Then I am quite aware that each generation lifts this same lament, that the audience which went to the Empire in 1897 regarded the city as a very Bedlam of noise and overcrowding. Why, it was only a few years later that Mrs. Patrick Campbell (through the guile of her press agent, the late and still incredible A. Toxen Worm) gained nation-wide fame by spreading tanbark in Forty-second Street to hush that bustling thoroughfare while she was having a go at her art in the Republic Theatre hard by. I suppose that the playgoers of 1957 will look back upon this quaint, quiet village of our day as something almost pastoral and just a wee bit lonely. But I shall have died ere then of sheer exasperation.

Nor am I unaware that in a city where millions lead hot, cramped, unlovely lives, the complaint that one merely cannot go to the theatre with unruffled ease is like an indignant letter written to the Calcutta GazetteTimes during an Indian famine to protest against the intolerable shortage of ortolans and pheasants.

Admittedly New York has grown impossible for living as well as playgoing. And naturally a remedy would occur to any one. There is, as yet, no law compelling any one to live in New York. One can always move somewhere else. But of course one would not quite care to do that.