The Snake Has All the Lines by Jean Kerr

Author:Jean Kerr [Kerr, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Out of Town with a Show

Or What to Do until the Psychiatrist Comes

I used to love to go out of town with a show—you miss so much at home. Oh, the exhilaration of being in Philadelphia just as the air is turning nippy, and knowing that somebody else back in Larchmont will have to find the storm windows. Indeed when I was younger and still in love with room service, I felt, like any other red-blooded American housewife, that a whole day spent rewriting the first act was a small price to pay for the privilege of having somebody else make my breakfast and bring it up to me on a tray. I don’t know just when the truth caught up with me. But I have noticed recently that the mere thought of going to Boston with a musical causes me to tremble and drop small objects.

Many people have asked me—well, my father has asked me several times—why playwrights have to take a show out of town to try it out. Can’t they tell anything from rehearsals?

The truth is that the playwright learns a great deal from rehearsals. He learns that the play is brave, haunting, luminous, tender, and hilarious, and that a cardboard container of coffee sent in from the delicatessen costs thirty cents. Everybody tells him how great the play is—the producer’s secretary, the press agent’s wife, the leading lady’s mother. In fact, after spending only twenty minutes peering at a rehearsal from the back of an empty theater, they are so choked up with the magic of it all that they can barely vocalize. They squeeze the author’s trembling hand and mutter hoarsely, “This is it, Sam—it can’t miss.” Not wishing to dispel the universal euphoria, Sam dismisses as unlikely his own secret theory that the play was badly cast, is being badly directed, and may have been badly written. Soon he is making discreet inquiries as to when the balloting closes for the Pulitzer Prize, and finally he comes home to tell his wife, “Honey, I don’t see how it can miss.”

And that’s why he goes to Philadelphia: so he can see how it can miss.

Out of town the first thing he is up against is Murphy’s Law. In Abe Burrows’ definition, Murphy’s Law states simply: if something can go wrong, it will. Now you wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I just happen to be the world’s expert on the things that can go wrong out of town. That’s why I’ve taken up finger painting. The doctor says it will help me to forget. But while I can still remember, I would like to point out a few of the simpler rules for survival, for those of you who may be thinking of writing a play. And it’s no use pretending that you have no intention of writing a play. There are distraught playwrights locked away in the Touraine Hotel this minute who, as recently as last year, were decently and profitably employed by Young and Rubicam or the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company.

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