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Don and Roz Chast
at the Broadway opening of "The Tale of the Allergist's
Wife"
July 24, 1975: Josh Logan gives a lecture on his work at the
American Embassy, and I contribute introductory speech,
pointing out (a bit fulsomely) that if Josh did not exist, it
would be necessary for Broadway to invent him; indeed, it
would almost be necessary to invent Broadway. (He has directed
ten shows that ran more than a year, including three that
lasted more than 1,000 performances.) I call on my dim
memories of the Logan machine in action, after the Boston
opening night of William Inge's Picnic in 1953. (Josh
directed and co-produced it.) Josh invited me to have a drink
with him after the show in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton. I
went expecting a quiet chat, a little mutual congratulation
between author and director, perhaps some talk of a lighting
rehearsal the next afternoon . . . Was I (as they say) ever
wrong. At the Ritz-Carlton that night I learned what it felt
like to be among a group of nuclear physicists working against
the clock to beat Hitler to his atom bomb. S.N. Behrman was
there in one bedroom, putting laughs into Act I. Tennessee
Williams was in another bedroom, taking laughs out of Act II.
Josh took me into the bathroom and said: "Ken -- what's
wrong with Act III?" I said it somehow seemed to belong
to another play. Josh thought for a while and said,
"There may be a reason for that. You see, I wrote Act
III." (He nowadays denies saying that; and no doubt he
was exaggerating.) In the living room, Lawrence Langner of the
Theatre Guild was addressing an empty piano stool on the
dangers of trusting audience reaction in New England. The
phone rang. It was Leland Hayward, calling from California. He
proceeded to give a detailed critique of the Boston opening,
totally undeterred by the fat that he had not seen it.
meanwhile a young woman in blue was making some extremely
intelligent suggestions for improvements, many of which were
subsequently incorporated into the text. Nobody knew who had
brought her, and she left without giving her name. I suddenly
realized that there was one notable absentee.
"Josh," I said. "Where's the author?"
"Oh Bill," said Josh. "He's in Palm Springs, I
think . . ." After we had all worked for an hour or so,
the first review arrived. It was a rave. Work stopped, corks
popped. Half an hour later I recall seeing Josh entering the
suite with a crushed newspaper in his right fist and his face
the color of an oyster. He had just read the second overnight
review, by Elliott Norton, and it was a stinker. Within a
minute everyone was back at work.
The extraordinary thing is that out of this madhouse there
emerged a play which (though I never particularly liked it)
ran for 476 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize and the
Critics Award for the Best Play of the Year. The chaos of the
Ritz-Carlton that night taught me more about Broadway than I
could have learned in a decade of drama criticism.
-- from the journals of Kenneth Tynan
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