No Time for Comedy is unlike anything you have ever seen, I feel sure. It is funny and clever - much of the dialogue is of Jane Austen caliber - but it joyfully refuses to go any of the places you think it probably might. It is political, and pointed, but never preachy, except to call attention to the motives of those who would preach. It is at once a parody of a witty Broadway comedy of the nineteen-twenties, -thirties, and -forties, and the apotheosis of it; and a part of it also contains a convincing and fairly furious repudiation of itself. For this 1939 play seems well aware that its very style is about to be subsumed by world conflict...
No Time for Comedy concerns the immediate circle of a married couple who are also comic playwright and a leading actress. (These parts were originated by
Laurence Olivier and
Katherine Cornell). This marriage seems to be unraveling, for the playwright has come under the sway of a new muse who demands that he ditch his light-comedy ways to write something more relevant. And that plot point is not just a dramatic stratagem to be deftly resolved, either - for when the play was written and first produced, fascism was on the rise in the world.Behrman's brilliantly constructed plot is continually re-positioning itself, looking at its situation and its issues from every possible angle - without, I might add, resorting to theatrical trickery,except the most honest kind: the plot and the theme are both driven by amusing and full-blooded characters, delicious to play. But the script is playing a kind of three-dimensional chess: there's a delicious hint - but only a hint - of consciousness of its own artifice that is more common in the works of Giraudoux and Anouilh. (In fact, only a year before writing this play, Behrman premiered the first English-language version of Giraudoux' impudent update of the sex lives of Greek gods,
Amphitrion 38.)
The hit play, which also toured the United States with Cornell, even reaching this city in 1940,was promptly made into a movie with
James Stewart and
Rosalind Russell, but though the screenplay's revision (by Casablanca's Julius J. and
Philip G. Epstein) is fairly charming, it does not even try to capture the play's kaleidoscopic genius.
Though it was penned around 1939,
No Time for Comedy feels spectacularly current, touching as it does on foreign conflicts, women's roles in society and in marriage, theartist's dependent status in American society. It is a feast for thought and an emotional roller coaster and it's very funny too. And if that doesn't sound like the perfect antidote for election tension syndrome, well, ring a doctor for a second opinion.
Playwright Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (1893-1973) came to a life in the theatre after being bowled over by a production of Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra. Behrman had a reputation for high comedy; some of his other international successes included
Biography (previously read by ESTP several years ago),
End of Summer, and
The Pirate (written for
Alfred Lunt and
Lynn Fontanne, and later made into a
Cole Porter movie musical with
Judy Garland and
Gene Kelly)
. He also wrote the book for the celebrated musical adaptation of
Marcel Pagnol's
Fanny.He was an excellent friend to many of the leading names of the day -
W. Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward,
George Gershwin, and Groucho and
Harpo Marx were just some of his pals. (Coward himself directed
Biography in London.) He wrote two vivid volumes of memoirs, and many Hollywood screenplays, including several Greta Garbo vehicles.
No Time for Comedy is, in all the best ways, as sophisticated and modern a play as you can expect to see this season. Here is the cast director
Jeff Steitzer is deploying, as of the time of this writing:
Mark Anders, Lisa Carswell, Raymond Chapman, Amy Love, Terry
Edward Moore, and Jane Ryan.
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