A Totality of Tom Taggart

The final plays I read for pleasure this year were all by a long-forgotten author named Tom Taggart with whom I have been unfortunately obsessed. In early November I took a trip to the Frost Library at Amherst where many of his plays are archived and spent two days reading as much as I could. These plays are generally unable to be purchased, and have unclear rights holders even if one wanted to perform them, so all of the plays I read are briefly summarized and critiqued below.

Before I do that I want to say that prior to trip I thought of Tom as an interesting, if mediocre, writer who was an interesting example of a mildly creative person trapped in an art-as-commodity system. After reading his plays I walked away with a deeper appreciation of his skill, and even if I would still not stand to say that he has been unjustly forgotten, I think he is worth more attention than he is given, and the work of his that remains in circulation is some of his worst, which is disappointing for his memory, and frankly, for the state of theatre as a whole.

All on Account of Luella- Probably a novel plot at the time, but one that has since been copied by many sitcoms, the local football team is doing poorly, and Luella’s younger brother thinks it is because she is dating the coach and distracting him, so he conspires to break them up. Middle of the road for Tom, it’s an ok show, certainly far from his worst.

Grandma Fought the Indians- A small western town is featured in a movie, and the stars of the film come to town while the citizens try to curry favor. Apart from a pervasive (if understated) dehumanization of Native Americans this was a winning play, and could be a classic of community theater.

Home For Christmas- in a Maine town that’s high on pride and low on money, a young woman tricks her aunt in letting boarders rent empty rooms over Christmas by saying they’re friends from college. Simultaneously she balances the return of her sister, who has taken money and become a film star with a stuck-up nose. This also is a charming comedy that I think deserves more recognition.

Importance of Being Young- Another film star! You can tell which side Tom thinks the bread is buttered on. A former child-start is enrolled at a local college and starts to create trouble with his stuck-up attitude. One of the best things about Taggart, especially his early work, is his rendering of college-age characters who are always lively and fun- think like the cast of Archie. This show is no different, portraying a wide range of personalities, as well as economic conditions, and while it’s a little hokey (as Tom’s work tends to be) it’s also worth revisiting.

Laughing Gas- Honestly I can’t remember a thing about this play. I bet it has something to do with fancy coastal people coming to a midwestern town though!

Mad March Heirs- No fooling, I think I could rewrite this and it could become a TV show- basically a cross between the family from Knives Out and Parks and Rec- a colorful rich family is a bunch of layabouts and the patriarch decides to leave his entire estate to a 23-year old secretary who then gets to decide how the money is spent. A delightful premise peppered with memorable characters that does not get the time to explore itself fully and pulls back its punches at the last moment to the detriment of the work. I’m certain I’m stealing this at some point.

Mr. Justice Jimmy- A teen with a famous lawyer father wants to do well at mock trial, and gets embroiled with proving the innocence of a man his father is prosecuting, while it seems Jimmy’s sister is dating the real criminal. A perfectly reasonable play to pass the time with.

Rarin’ to Grow- a traveling theatre troupe’s car breaks down in Ohio, and while the local diner hosts them while their car is being fixed, the three teen children dream of better lives. A really funny show, that fits within Tom’s mockery of fancy city-folk (which I assume helped his mostly rural audience) and has an ending that doesn’t sit right with our current mores (after being mistreated by his girlfriend a young man states he’s going to wait for her much nicer younger sister to come of age.)

Romance Comes to Willie Parker- Taggart has an odd relationship with ambition- many of his heroes are misunderstood young men who are inventors, but dreaming of life outside of your small town is often frowned upon. This play features a farm in a community which has yet to be electrified. The imperious farmer father gets conned into thinking his farm will be the first in the community, which will lead to great embarrassment until two young men (Willie Parker, and the husband of his eldest daughter) save him with their invention. This is one of the few plays of Taggart’s that I’d say is unreservedly good: it’s funny, it’s original, it’s moving, and it stands up to the expectations, and morals, of today.

Rufus Comes to Town- As surprised as I was to realize it, this was my favorite play of 2023, one that I desperately want to get a copy of, and a play that I do think deserves wider recognition. Like many of Taggart’s works, it’s a farce, and one that likely started with Tom thinking “hey, where I live [Greenwich Village] is a pretty wacky place.” Two young women need a roommate, and on the day she moves in she’s accidentally buffeted by Russian communists, egotistical opera singers, corny hicks, slick conmen, and others. It’s a wild ride with nothing to say (which it pokes fun at,) but all it does is want to make you laugh, and it certainly succeeded for me.

Margery is Eighteen- This might be a Tom Taggart play. It was written under the name of one of his pseudonyms (Charles D Whitman) but does not appear to have been formally claimed by Taggart later in life. The plot itself is unremarkable, and is a coming of age story about a flighty woman whose reach exceeds her grasp.

Breaking: Authors Ignore Trends That Disprove Their Point; Notes on "How Not to Write a Play" (Walter Kerr) and "Breaking From Realism" (Michael Bigelow Dixon)

There’s been a lot of hurlyburly going on at Pronoia the past few months, so we’re wrapping up the reading left to summarize in a few large format posts, but that’s ok, because I wanted to compare these works anyway.

How Not to Write a Play is a 1955 expansive attack on the writing community (and theater culture at large) by failed playwright and prominent theatre critic Walter Kerr, while Michael Bigelow Dixon’s Breaking From Realism is a series of exercises and workshops for playwrights on how to introduce more fantastical, and dare I say, theatrical, elements into their works.

Despite being separated by more than a half-century the two books (which I read simultaneously) often seem to be in conversation with each other, clearly showing that Walter Kerr’s impassioned pleas went unheeded in the fifties, and I sadly must report that Dixon’s also failed to move the needle, as I found his work unfortunately still needed a decade later.

The key points of each book can be boiled down to this: theater has lost its audience because we have willfully abandoned the charge to entertain the audience, and instead of run into the arms and dictates of realism, creating a boring, didactical, and predictable theater that few people want to watch. Kerr focuses on how we got to this point, through the then-groundbreaking work of Ibsen, how it has grown stale over the last twenty years, and why that’s a problem. Dixon focuses on how embracing non-realistic forms of expression can transport the audience emotionally and therefore make a better case for whatever the playwright is trying to say. Both authors underscore how its theater’s failing, and not the fault or error of the audience, that audiences are dwindling, and that something (ideally something exciting) needs to happen to avert this.

Both men tend to ignore the (to me obvious) counter-theatrical movements that support their points, and instead of acknowledging that what they want is already being done squint their eyes, rub their foreheads, and continue to insist on trying to help people who clearly don’t want any. For Walter Kerr his dream of an exciting, skillful, and rapturously written theater already existed in musical theatre, for Michael Bigelow Dixon his want to see a vast array of non-realistic portrayals has long been a mainstay of sketch comedy.

Instead of trying to make either of these forms palatable, both men just keep gesturing vaguely at their preferred form (traditional dramatic plays) and ask them to be a little more like the thing they don’t want to deal with. At least Kerr acknowledges musical theatre in the last few pages of the epilogue, where he offers a defensive (if an unimaginative one,) saying in so many words that musical theatre is inherently not serious (he always calls it “musical comedy”) and therefore not what he is talking about. Kerr fails to imagine musicals which conquer darker territory such as Next to Normal, Rent, The Mad Ones, or even Hamilton which is humorous but attempts to paint a serious portrait.

Dixon, however, continues to ignore anything whatsoever that is so gauche as to say it wants to entertain in discrete bits, despite the fact that many of the elements he suggests (expressionism, anthropomorphism, virtuosity, and recontextualism, to pick out just a few) have been used for the entirety of the time that sketch comedy has been a ‘serious’ art form. In fact Dixon seems to (I read the book months ago and am relying on my notes) ignore comedy entirely, only using it as an example of the salt that makes the other flavors stand out more.

Both books are highly worth reading, especially if you are a producer or writer, and I found myself nodding along to Kerr’s rants, and since his book is more intellectually stimulating I want to leave you with two of his more interesting assertions (in summarized for):

The Rotten Intellegentsia
Kerr states that the conventional narrative about theater is this: theatre is an intellectual practice, one that is cerebral and fortifying for the culture and so it cannot possibly stand up against the sugary desires of the hoi polloi who merely want to be (blech) entertained and so flock to the dumbed down cinema for their candy and sweets, but for the good of mankind we need to browbeat back into the REAL theater and get them to eat their vegetables. After all, what we’re doing is so important.

Kerr instead avers: the theater used to be a place for the common man, indeed every piece of meaningful theater (and he goes further and says, art as a whole) that has stood the test of time has been calibrated to entertain and appeal to a wide audience (here he particularly calls out Shakespeare and Moliere as men who were writing for the cheap seats.) This is not an accident, or an example of towering genius being able to disguise deep truths in pulpy fun, instead it is the pulpy fun that allows for the reveal of deep truths. At the turn of the century, theater (particularly English-language theatre) intentionally turned away the common plumber and the shop-girl in order to gain respectability among the rich class, and when they left them behind, movies were there to scoop them up. It is therefore our fault, and our hubris, which has turned away the audience, and our responsibility to woo them back.

This argument mirrors things I have thought for a long time (and in fact wrote a sketch about- Over Plays, about a fellow claiming Shakespeare was rubbish because it was all swordfights and poison for the entertainment of the audience,) and is something I want to change with Pronoia, where we focus on hopefully exciting work.

The Contradiction of Thesis
Another problem Kerr points to in then-modern plays is the idea of trying to teach lessons or create “thesis plays*”. Basically we’re trying to teach audiences lessons and it never works.

Why? Kerr essentially says that in order to create an obvious, compelling thesis, the author must keep his thumb on the story to make sure it doesn’t get away from him and lose track of the point it’s trying to make. When this happens, Kerr states, characters become tools instead of people, and that a truly interesting character (which he argues is the primary thing that engages audiences) will naturally exist in a state of contradiction, but those contradictions will complicate a clear and present thesis, and eventually will lead to a crisis: either the playwright allows for a breathing, complex, contradictory character and muddies the thesis; or a playwright holds true to the thesis and neuters the character.

In effect Kerr counsels playwrights to not try to “say” anything so much as to “find” characters and put them in situations that allow the audience to extract what they need, want, or can out of that situation. In so doing Kerr speaks into being the value of Barthes “Death of the Author” almost a decade before it is published.

While at first I disagreed with his premise, after he laid out his arguments I thought about my own writing and how the things that I like best and strike a chord with audiences often do grow organically out of character, while the things that languish and I have trouble with are those with too harsh a containment on their thesis. This holds true even for the upcoming Start Your Endings which began with a rather rigid thesis, which softened and then changed through the writing and editing process.

A Final Thought on Non-Realism
Before reading Dixon’s book I noticed a weird, and for me unsatisfying, trend in many plays written after ~2013, many of them from authors I presume to be recently out of their grad writing programs. After reading his book I wondered if students (or literary agents) either directly or indirectly took his lessons about non-realism, and inelegantly welded them on to ungainly frames, similar to Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting being mis-interpreted and misapplied (in her view.)

I noticed that many recent plays were largely realistic, save for one sudden, brief, and discordant surrealistic element that came from nowhere and was scarcely mentioned again. Notably Jaclyn Bauhaus’ India Pale Ale, which is mostly about feelings of alienation as a modern American with south Asian ancestry, but has an extended sequence (“Act III”) that is a nightmare that takes place on a pirate ship. The pirate ship is mentioned before in the script, as is the captain of the ship, but it’s still hundreds of years before the main action, that doesn’t have a direct relationship with the plot of the play.)

In Lilliana Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself a play that has thus far been about college students wrestling with the aftermath of a rape at a campus party (and taking self-defense classes) the last minute throws us backwards through time at a series of parties (where nothing particularly violent happens) and introduces a character we’ve never seen or developed a relationship with.) Notably, I read a pre-published copy of the play where this ending doesn’t exist and is instead a semi-realistic chant by the characters stating a core facet of their identity (which I think works much better.)

*Kerr actually talks about three types of plays: problem plays, thesis plays, and propaganda plays, and this discussion is interesting but we don’t have time for it here.

Critic's Choice (Ira Levin)

Critic’s Choice an old play of zero renown seems to have come about from something like a bar bet, much like Serious Money, but this time it didn’t turn out terribly.

Some old theater critic at some old time put out an idea: hey fellas, I got a killer idea, this guy’s a theater critic, right, well what if his wife writes a play, huh? He’d have to review it, then sparks would fly! That is, in fact, the entirety of the plot of Ira Levin’s Critic’s Choice.

But plot isn’t everything and Levin manages to wring a truly interesting dilemma out of this: a man’s pride in his work vs his desire to support his family. Much like another underrated comedy of the era, A Thousand Clowns, everything in the play is complicated by the presence of a young son: in wanting to show ourselves worthy of respect, and to be a good model for our children, we have to hold ourselves to our values when we might be tempted to let things slide.

The play moves along at a steady clip, this isn’t a play where the key conflict is introduced after a lengthy setting of the exposition, no we’re off to the races by the end of scene one, and she’s already in previews by the end of the halfway point.

Although many of the references are long-past dated by this point, many of the joke setups are still quite modern: a frequent punching bag is the tendency to make everything into a musical, the posterboy in the play being a fictional (and hilarious) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: the Musical!

This wouldn’t be a play from the 50’s without some more uncomfortable elements, most of which are easily ignored except for Parker’s constant fallback to joking about hitting his kids, his wife, or really anyone he is upset with at the moment. For the most part though this is a welcome, enjoyable, and accessible comedy with only the bare minimum of infidelity necessary to stir the pot.

Kodachrome (Adam Szymkowicz): Less Than the Sum of Our Town and Almost, Maine

As a producer the hardest thing to do (besides everything) is to parse the difference between good and compelling. It’s not hard, in fact it’s fairly easy, to make something good, something with no obvious faults, and even a few things in the plus column. It’s much harder to make something that will get people into their cars to drive across town, to part with some money, and, ideally, to live in their heads long after they leave.

Kodachrome, I think, falls on the wrong side of that line. A crueler version of me might say employ the word “twee”, this devilish individual might even break out “pretentious” and would almost certainly say something like “it thinks it’s the new Our Town, when it’s anything but,” however I think that misses the mark. There’s nothing wrong about Kodachrome, but there just isn’t enough right with it to make me care.

Kodachrome can easily be reduced to “Our Town with an ADD problem” or “Almost, Maine with a narrator.” Like Our Town it deals with life in a small town while finding beauty and merit in an average life; like Almost, Maine it’s a show of many disparate characters dealing with the fractured states of love. Unlike other of those two it doesn’t have much new to say and doesn’t have an interesting way to say it.

That’s maybe a little harsh, so in its defense I will say that the show is very cute, it’s heartfelt, and those that stick around for the ending will find a little bit of interest there. I think the show would be excellent for a student group, or a community theater (in all sincerity I wish local theater Company Onstage would do it, it would suit them well,) but it is not the stuff that gets me out to downtown Houston.

Our play proper follows a Photographer (oh yes, all characters are identified by their jobs, even when they have given names.) She shows us around her small Connecticut town, the people who live there, and the heartbreak many of them are facing. She moves us from scene to scene quite quickly (this play firmly finds itself in the modern cinematic style of writing,) and although characters usually have their designated pairs, they mix in with everyone else too.

By the end almost everyone is left a little unsatisfied, but ultimately ok (the characters, not the audience,) as they either gain or lose love. There isn’t much else to say, sadly.