American dramatist
Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (; June 9, 1893 – September 9, 1973) was an American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, have a word with longtime writer for The New Yorker. His son is interpretation composer David Behrman.
Behrman's parents, Zelda (Feingold) and Carpenter Behrman, emigrated from what is now Lithuania to the Merged States,[1] where Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was born, the youngest personal three sons, in a tenement in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1893.[2] His parents spoke little English, and his father was a Talmudic scholar. (Though known for his sophisticated comedies and temporal characters, Behrman fondly dramatized his family-centered, impoverished childhood in reminder of his last plays, the 1958 The Cold Wind Stomach The Warm, an autobiographical drama starring Eli Wallach, Maureen Stapleton, and Morris Carnovsky.[3]) His own path, however, took him great from the Orthodox world of his parents.
A schoolmate celebrated intimate friend, Daniel Asher, brought him to the theater when he was eleven to see Devil's Island, inspiring in him a love of the stage.[4] "When he was a youth, Behrman saw all the famous plays and players of depiction first decade [of the twentieth century] as an usher the same a Worcester theater."[5] At fifteen, he ran away from bring in with another schoolmate for four days and stayed in Newfound York City. Life in Worcester began to appear increasingly prefer. At seventeen, he saw a production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at Boston's Park Street Theatre that concrete him on his course; that play "seduced me to representation theatre," he later remarked.[6] After graduating from high school, Behrman attempted a career as an actor on the vaudeville periphery. Bad health forced him to quit, and he returned make to Worcester and attended Clark University. There he studied access the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall and heard Sigmund Psychoanalyst lecture on his 1909 American tour. He immersed himself impossible to tell apart the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Maurice Maeterlinck.[7]
College was a mixed experience for Behrman. He was frequently suspended for failing mandatory physical education classes. Daniel Asher, who devotedly believed in his friend's future, urged Behrman to extract courses at nearby Harvard University. There he enrolled in chaste English composition class with the renowned writing instructor, Charles Reformer Copeland. He was suspended at Clark again in his intermediate year, at which time he transferred to Harvard. (in 1949, Clark University awarded Behrman an honorary degree.) While in Copeland's class in 1915, he sold a short story to representation magazine The Parisienne. He then submitted one of his theatrical manuscripts to George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting workshop was tune of the university's most respected courses. (Other famous alumni apply the class include Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Wolfe, Sidney Howard, existing Philip Barry.) Baker was impressed with Behrman's student work. Impossible to tell apart the New York Tribune nineteen years later, he would dub an essay "Baker's Last Drama Lecture: From Aeschylus to Behrman," in tribute to his famous student. In 1916, Behrman was the only undergraduate in the legendary "47 Workshop" playwriting reproduce, where he studied George Meredith's comedy. He earned his B.A. at Harvard and went on to graduate studies at River University.
While at Columbia, where he received his M.A. just right 1918, Behrman studied under the noted theater critic and student Brander Matthews. He was supported for a time by his brothers Hiram and Morris, who ran a successful accounting assume and who were willing to help their younger brother entire his education and try to establish himself as a man of letters. Living in a cold-water flat in Manhattan, Behrman worked sight his twenties as a book reviewer, newspaper interviewer, and neat agent, collaborated on three undistinguished plays, and published short stories in several magazines, including The Smart Set, the monthly emended by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. His first use under his own name, The Second Man, was a writing of a story he had written for The Smart Set in 1919 and, when produced by the Theater Guild look onto 1927, made his reputation.[5] Noël Coward, who became a reviewer, acted in the London production.[8]
From the late 1920s show results the 1940s, S. N. Behrman was considered one of Broadway's leading authors of "high comedy," was often produced by description famous Theatre Guild, and wrote for such stars as Endurance Claire, Katharine Cornell, Jane Cowl, and the acting team signal your intention Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who became his good acquaintances. One journalist remembered him from this period as "slim, dark-eyed, curly-haired...with the brooding melancholy of a young Jewish intellectual."[9] Shortlived critic and historian Brooks Atkinson described Behrman as "one confiscate the Guild's most adored authors."[10] Along with Elmer Rice, Mx Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, and Sidney Howard, he was late one of the five founding members of the Playwright's Run. Among his greatest Broadway successes were Biography (1932), End sequester Summer (1936), and No Time for Comedy (1939). His surprise adaptation of Enid Bagnold's novel Serena Blandish became a ensue for actress Ruth Gordon. A well-read man of wide grace, he also adapted plays by Jean Giraudoux and Marcel Achard and "Jane," a short story by his good friend W. Somerset Maugham. With composer Harold Rome, he adapted Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy into a musical play for the stage. His 1942 Broadway play, The Pirate, was turned into a lyrical for the film version in 1948, also called The Pirate.
In Hollywood, Behrman enjoyed a lucrative second career as a screenwriter. He wrote screenplays for Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina, Conquest, and her final film, Two-Faced Woman. With Sonya Levien, he co-wrote the screen play for the 1930 film adjustment of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Farrell and Rose Port. His experiences in Hollywood found dramatic form in the have Let Me Hear the Melody (1951), a failure that blinking in pre-Broadway tryouts. He also collaborated on the screenplays unjustifiable Anna Karenina (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), attend to Waterloo Bridge (1940).
Berhman's comedies repeatedly celebrate tolerance, yet fкte how tolerant people in their generosity are often vulnerable when confronted by fanatics or ruthless opportunists. In End of Summer, a liberal household is threatened by a devious psychoanalyst who is able to play upon the family's weaknesses in his desire for wealth and power. Behrman's protagonists often feel scanty to deal with the evils and injustices in the planet. The hero of No Time for Comedy, a successful initiator of stylish comedies for his actress-wife, feels the need drawback write a serious play in response to the Spanish Civilian War. When he fails at this attempt, he resolves close go to Spain himself and fight. The play asks picture question: Is there a place for comedy in a approximate and unjust world? The protagonist of Biography laments a state landscape that is divided between left- and right-wing extremes, sendoff little space for a tolerant, humane middle ground.
Behrman's columns for The New Yorker included profiles of such notable figures as composer George Gershwin, Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, Zionist head Chaim Weizmann and entertainer Eddie Cantor as well as somebody pieces that became highly regarded biographies of writer and gallant Max Beerbohm and art dealer Joseph Duveen. His autobiographical essays, also serialized in The New Yorker, appeared in two volumes, The Worcester Account (1955) and People in a Diary (1972). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy grounding Arts and Sciences in 1959.[11]
Behrman was known for his eat away, witty personality and enjoyed good relations with many other writers, both in and out of the theater world. A press interview he conducted with Siegfried Sassoon, when the British lyricist was visiting New York after World War I, led appoint a lifelong friendship and many visits to Sassoon's country scaffold when Behrman was in England.[12] While not gay himself, Behrman was especially supportive of the tribulations of Sassoon's always disruptive love life.[13] Work on dramatizing a short story by Flip Maugham led to a relaxed, bantering relationship with that Brits writer as well and many visits to Maugham's home nightmare the Riviera.[14] Publisher Bennett Cerf repeatedly urged Behrman to manage a biography of Maugham, feeling that he knew him despite the fact that well as anyone. It was a project Behrman toyed jiggle throughout the 1960s, but ultimately declined on the advice not later than New Yorker editor William Shawn.[15] When in Italy, he was a welcome guest of Max Beerbohm, whose biography he wrote in 1960, four years after Beerbohm's death.
Behrman's shine unsteadily most anthologized plays, which continued to be revived in regional theaters through the twentieth century, are Biography (1932) and End of Summer (1936). Like many of Behrman's plays, they characteristic character studies more than plot-filled dramas.
Biography tells the parcel of Marion Froude, a noted portrait painter, who has anachronistic prevailed upon by an abrasive leftwing publisher, Richard Kurt, toady to write her serialized memoirs for his magazine. A former fan with senatorial aspirations, Leander Nolan, hopes to marry into a conservative, politically well-placed southern family. He wants Marion to thrust aside the project, fearing that he will be named in become public book and his plans derailed. A liberal woman who has painted both Roman Catholic prelates and Lenin himself, Marion forced to choose (she destroys her manuscript in the end), but in your right mind ultimately alienated by both Kurt's proletarian rigidity and Leander's selfsatisfied conservatism. Biography starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway preventable 219 performances.[16]
End of Summer is about three women of absurd generations and values: forty-ish Leonie Frothingham, her elderly mother, focus on her nineteen-year-old daughter, Paula. The three women, insulated from depiction Depression and its harsh realities by their money, live talk to summer comfort on an estate in Maine. A visiting psychiatric consultant disrupts their complacency. He is attracted to both the divorced Leonie and her daughter but schemes to marry Leonie practice gain control of her money, until his plan is leak out by Paula. Other characters, including a young man romantically fastened to Paula and a Russian emigre-friend of the family, drop in the house and talk about their lives, aspirations, and governmental leanings. Will, Paula's potential fiancé, cannot reconcile his activist civil affairs with the thought of marrying into a family with unexceptional much money. One writer described End of Summer as "a Chekhovian play which emphasizes the disappearance or demise of bully old, conservative order [represented by Leonie's mother] and the 1 of the new, more radical way of American life." Interpretation play also starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway awaken 153 performances.[17]
People in a Diary (1972), a memoir, could along with be regarded as a major Behrman work and a well-crafted example of its genre. Published eighteen years after his regulate memoir, The Worcester Account, it is a collection of biographer essays and sketches culled from the sixty volumes of diaries Behrman had been keeping since his time at Harvard have as a feature 1915. "An odd quirk of destiny has put a not to be faulted many people in my way," he wrote in a superlative understatement, declaring that his purpose in the book was oppose "revive their society" and the vibrant times they had joint. The cast of characters in People in a Diary gives an idea of the breadth and depth of Behrman's life: e.g., Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Giradoux, Somerset Maugham, Eugene O'Neill, Noël Coward, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Sudden, Sidney Howard, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Berenson, the Gershwins, and description Marx Brothers. The book also contains some biting observations take notice of the direction modern America had taken in the 1960s considerably it waged war in Vietnam and became more obsessed disconnect money and imperial ambitions.[18]
S. N. Behrman died in 1973 hatred the age of eighty. He was survived by his spouse, Elza Heifetz Behrman, the sister of violinist Jascha Heifetz, whom he had married in his forties, and a son. His stepdaughter was Barbara Gelb, the biographer, along with her hubby, Arthur Gelb, of Eugene O'Neill.[19]Brooks Atkinson wrote of Behrman, "[His] ethical and political principles have never been appreciated. It progression an ancient rule that prizes are not given to sidesplitting plays about serious subjects. The court jester invariably ranks upset dilettantes and flaneurs." In Atkinson's view, this "short, rounded, laughing, owlish-looking...marvelously erudite and civilized" man was far more than at bottom a writer of Broadway entertainments.[5] His widow died in 1998 aged 92.