Литература двух Америк (Jun 2024)
“Everything Around Here Is Worn Out”: Broadway Hit Tobacco Road, 1933
Abstract
The article analyzes production Tobacco Road based on the play by Jack Kirkland, a stage version of Erskine Caldwell’s novel. Staged at the height of the Great Depression, this production had been run on stage for nine years until 1947, remaining the highest-grossing production in the history of the American Theatre. Critics' reviews ranged from delight to rejection, and the authorities of many states opposed its run as an obscene and blasphemous production. The article examines the peculiarities of the play, created by Jack Kirkland, who turned with novel social significance into a slapstick comedy. The play, where the crackers kneaded real dirt on stage and vividly exchanged comic lines, contained a physical score of gags. The actors — the leading character, Jeeter Lester, stood out among them — performed in an eccentric mode. Such things that frightened Americans during the era of an unprecedented economic crisis as poverty, hunger, early marriage, cruelty and promiscuity, being taken to an absurd extreme, evoked during performance not fear but laughter. Photographs of the production, critical reviews and the text of the play allow to reconstruct Tabacco Road and also to compare it with the film adaptation (1941), which had become a response to the unprecedented success of the production. The huge contrast in the type of comic — the sentimental comedy by John Ford and the slapstick comedy/farce staged by Anthony Brown — makes it possible to detect the difference between cinema, restrained by the Hays censorship code, and the theater. Allowing one to laugh at the most monstrous social phenomena, the “dirty” production (such was its reputation) had become a kind of therapy for millions of spectators in the 1930s.
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