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Lardner found an atmosphere more to his liking among
the small revues put on by more intellectual and creative types. The Author’s
League, The Dutch Treat Club, The Lambs Club, and a group associated with the
Algonquin Round Table, all produced his small nonsense plays, whether they were
intended to be produced or not.
The first to make it to the stage was "The Tridget
of Greva." In the fall of 1922,
"Tridget" was performed by members of the
Algonquin Round Table (or as Donald
Elder says, "more or less associated" with the
Round Table) in a revue called The
Forty-Niners. It was a follow-up to their
successful show earlier that year, No Siree,
which contained many short sketches in the same
nonsensical vein as Lardner’s.
From all accounts, "Tridget" was well received,
though the revue as a whole was a
flop. In his book American Musical Revue, Gerald
Bordman credits "The Forty-Niners" with changing the direction of musical revue
from a revue with sketches and
music to a revue of music because of its complete failure
and intellectual demands of
its sketches (63). In short, the sort of sketches that
were performed were difficult for
the audience to understand. "Tridget," though,
the quirky and unusual play about
nothing, survived on its own. It is still performed about
a half dozen (official) times a
year.
"The Tridget of Greva" seems to be a
transitional play for Lardner. Like the sketches he wrote
and unlike the later nonsense plays, it is intended for
performance; yet it includes many nonsensical elements,
chiefly in dialogue, later found in the nonsense plays.
From "Tridget" until 1931 with the publication
of "Quadroon," Lardner wrote at least eight
nonsense plays, but only "Tridget" and
"Dinner Bridge" were written for the stage. The
rest were written for newspapers and magazines, written
for a reader’s mind, as were the plays he wrote
earlier for "In the Wake of the News." Because
of their impossible stage directions, instructing actors
to act as if they just came from a waffle house or to
enter through a faucet, exotic and often shifting scenes,
the outskirts of a Parcheesi board to a one-way street in
Jeopardy, unusual casts, consisting of zebus, rats, and
celebrities, and realistic applications of time, acts or
scenes lasting from a few days to a week, the
reader’s mind, is, of course, the only place the
nonsense plays could be staged.
Determining the "meaning" of the nonsense
plays is an impossible and perhaps even nonsensical
endeavor. Many tried to label these plays as
"dada" or as parody of such, but Lardner
claimed no such intention. In an interview with Grant
Overton, Lardner specifically denied writing the plays to
satirize the Moscow Art Theatre, saying he had written
them long before there was such a thing (44), a claim
supported by his plays published in his column "In
the Wake of the News" and by the findings of his
biographers. According to Donald Elder, his first
biographer:
Dramaturgy was Ring’s meat almost
from infancy. He found a good
deal of theatrical inspiration at home.
The repartee in the Lardner
family was swift and uninhibited by the
rules of classical drama.
Their favorite kind of humor was part of
Ring’s heritage as a writer.
They were always amused by the kind of
incorrect grammar and
diction that characterizes the speaker;
they played with words, and
the more outrageous their puns, the
funnier they were. Mrs. Lardner
and the three youngest children were
gifted with a wild kind of free
association, and much of their
conversation culminated in mad
irrelevancies that resembled the dialogue
of Ring’s later nonsense
plays. The Lardner family had a style;
its influence on Ring’s own
style is marked. (243)
According to Lardner himself, he wrote them, and plays
in general, simply because he enjoyed doing so. It was
his lack of intention (and pretension) that convinced
others, such as Ernest Hemingway, substituting for Ford
Madox Ford as editor of the Transatlantic Review,
to prefer Lardner’s natural or "native
dada" to what he considered to be the pretentious
Russians (103) and declare that Lardner’s nonsense
was worthy of serious attention.
Despite
Lardner’s objections, it is difficult to ignore some
of the satirical
arrows shot at American Theater in the nonsense plays.
American drama during
Lardner’s time was dominated by the lavish scenery
of David Belasco and the
naturalistic or realistic movements. Lardner’s
nonsense plays satirize all attempts at
naturalism in two distinct ways: first, by including
"realistic" settings of both
space and time which are impossible or impractical to
reproduce, and secondly, by
writing stage directions for the actors that are
impossible to communicate to an
audience. Drawing attention to the futility of realistic
depictions of time in the
theater, Lardner directs that the curtain be
"lowered and partially destroyed to denote
the passage of four days" in "Abend di Anni
Nouveau," or that it be "lowered for
seven days to denote the lapse of a week" in
"I. Gaspiri." In "Taxidea Americana"
the
play is delayed and the crowd remains until the following
Tuesday, at which point
they begin going home. Such directions provide, as
Delmore Schwartz has observed,
"a concise definition of the limitations of
naturalism in the theater" (52). The
locations of his plays are also oftentimes impossible to
reproduce, whether because of
their fantastical nature—"A one-way street in
Jeopardy" in "Abend di Anni Nouveau"
or "The Outskirts of a Parchesi Board" in
"Clemo Uti"—or because they are too large
to be reproduced even by Belasco himself, as is the case
with a a football stadium
with bands and fans in Act V of "Taxidea
Americana." Finally, the "realistic"
directions for the actors defy communication to an
audience. In "Abend di Anni
Nouveau," three giggling men are directed to
"give the impression that one of them’s
mother runs a waffle parlor"; "Clemo Uti"
includes the directions "She exits as if she
had had waffles"; and in "Cora, or Fun at a
Spa," a character "looks as if she had once
gone on an excursion to the Delaware Water Gap."
Such information is impossible,
of course, to convey. Besides the various limitations of
space, time, and knowledge,
working against the possibility of appearing real on the
stage is the constant
awareness on the part of audience and actor that what is
happening is, in fact, a play.
From the fisherman in "The Tridget of Greva"
who remarks that the wind is coming
from "off-stage" to the waiter in "Abend
di Anni Nouveau" who remarks that after
the murders of all of the characters, the play will have
to be recast, Lardner’s
nonsense characters are constantly reminding the audience
of their own and the play’s
own fictional nature. The message is clear: Nothing on
the stage is, nor can it be
"real."
Though this message is common in many forms of
experimental drama, it is
likely that Lardner’s attitude toward realism in the
theater expressed in the nonsense
plays had a satirical motive (deflating the over-reacher
and the pretentious), rather
than a philosophical one. Unlike the dadists, futurists,
surrealists, expressionists, and
members of other avant guard movements, Lardner
subscribed to no known theories
of drama; in fact, his alliance with the "common
American" would force him to
eschew any such "highbrow" intellectual schools
of thought.
Deflation of the
pretensions of the theater, then, may have a more
personal motive. The nonsense plays may be a sort of
gentle revenge for the way Lardner was treated by the
popular theater. Certainly, forcing two Broadway
theatrical producers to enter a scene riding pelicans and
an actor to enter through a faucet has something more
than simple nonsense behind it. Lardner’s complaints
and frustrations voiced in "Why Authors" are
all addressed in one way or another in the nonsense
plays. Lardner said that the actors didn’t like
"The Other World" because no one had a big
enough part: in most of the nonsense plays, characters,
and thus actors’ roles, are replaced almost as soon
as they enter the stage. No character (actor) dominates a
nonsense play; in fact, they are often upstaged by rats,
milch cows, laughing horses, and other animal acts.
Lardner also complained that actors had a habit of
embellishing his scripts with their own lines. In the
nonsense plays, the author retains complete control.
Actors do not have the power to revise because before
they could do so, they are themselves revised out of the
play. The character listings at the beginning of the
plays rarely reflect the actual characters who appear in
the plays; in the extreme, "Abend di Anni
Nouveau" has all of the listed characters killed in
the opening scene. Even when characters appear with their
limited lines, they are interrupted by Lardner himself,
through the use of intrusive and sometimes lengthy notes.
In the nonsense plays, Lardner himself retains control of
the script—something he was unable to do in the
theater. The plays are, for the most part, unproducable,
and that may be the only way Lardner thought they could
remain his exclusive creative property.
If there are any
direct influences on Lardner’s nonsense, they
probably come from the world around him—the actions
of friends and strangers, and the sounds of the new
American landscape. In a way, Lardner’s nonsense is
simply another journalistic endeavor for him; he reports
the world as he sees it. Much of the Jazz Age party
mentality that surrounded Lardner was, in fact, random
and absurd. One scene Lardner describes to F. Scott
Fitzgerald, his former neighbor and, at the time, a
recent expatriate, resembles a scene in later nonsense
plays in which characters imitate birds or buildings or
come on the stage for no apparent reason on high-wheeled
bicycles. Lardner describes a Fourth of July party at
Ziegfeld comic Ed Wynn’s house. The party lasted all
evening and spilled over into the next day, when it moved
to actor Tom Meighan’s house. Lardner explains:
"the principal entertainment was provided by Lila
Lee and another dame, who did some very funny imitations
(really funny) in the moonlight on the tennis court. We
would ask them to imitate Houdini, or Leon Errol, or Will
Rogers, or Elsie Janis; the imitations were all the same,
consisting of an aesthetic dance which ended with an
unaesthetic fall onto the tennis court" (Letters
183). Another real-life scene Lardner reports has an
unexplainable and nonsensical feel about it as well:
Well,
what I started to say was that on Friday
afternoon, I had to go
way downtown to buy an algebra book for
John, and I came uptown on a bus. I say
on the roof and a lady sat down beside
me. Her costume
looked as if it had been cut out of a
wash cloth. She said: "What
time is it?" I said: "It is
half past three." She said:
"Oh, I thought
you were a Mexican." (Letters
210-211)
As Lardner says at
the close of the story, "[c]onversations like that
can never be
explained" (211). Lardner did not try to explain
such nonsensical activities that
happened around him; he simply reported them as he had
reported sporting and
political events for years before.
Of course, the
everyday nonsense is distilled in the plays—all
normalcy
evaporates, leaving only the nonsensical. It is then made
even more potent by
Lardner’s exaggerated sense of the absurd. Drunken
party performances and non
sequiturs of the train stand out in everyday life as
contrasts to the mundane and
normal; in the nonsense plays such scenes are the
mundane and normal. The woman
on the train who asks Lardner for the time would be met
by a character speaking his
own non sequiturs; the party imitations would be met by
other imitators or
something even more bizarre—say a zebu or a realtor.
The nonsense plays create a
world in which a gangster can be used as a card table, as
in "Abend di Anni
Nouveau," without anyone finding it peculiar.
Senator La Follette can practice sliding
to base and be interrupted by a farmer on a pogo stick in
"Taxidea Americana," or
Frank Case, the Algonquin Hotel manager can inexplicably
ask the mayor of New
York and the Prince of Wales: "Pardon me, Officer,
but can either of you boys play a
cellophane?" in "Quadroon" and no one is
shocked. The degree of nonsense is higher
in the plays than in his real-life experiences,
exaggerated for comic effect, but the
principle—people behave oddly and say things for no
apparent reason—is the same.
Besides strange situations, one important and common
element of the nonsense plays is the comical and offbeat
sound of many of the individual words. Whether the words
are real or invented, English or foreign, common or
archaic, used in their proper form or in unusual ways,
the odd-sounding words create a tone of strangeness and
playfulness, which sets the sheer enjoyment of nonsense
in motion. Lardner found many words to be funny simply
because of their sound. If the word had a peculiar
meaning, or he could invent such a meaning, the humor was
doubled. Lardner played with unusual or invented words in
his personal life as well as in print. It is reported
that once, while playing a 1920s parlor game, Lardner was
asked to list what he considered the ten most beautiful
words: he listed "Gangrene, flit, scram, mange,
wretch, smoot, guzzle, McNaboe, blute, crene,"
explaining that "blute" is a "smoker who
doesn’t inhale" and "crene" is
"a man who inhales but doesn’t smoke"
(Yardley 237). He loved the word "mange" so
much, that’s what he named one of his homes. In his
plays, such nonsense words, funny at their root simply
because of their sound, appear in a variety of
places—chiefly in the stage directions and in the
listings of characters, but also in the lines spoken by
the characters and even in the titles themselves.
One of the most common uses of the nonsense word can
be found in Lardner’s listings of characters in
which either the name itself or the character’s
occupation is given a funny-sounding title. This habit
harkens back to childhood and to the columns. In 1919,
Lardner used several of his columns to pose questions to
fictional readers and list their responses. The readers
include "Lucius Kamelin, shoehorn agent,"
"Harold Spim, quarrel adjuster," "Charley
Aspirin, stumble mate," "Geo. Plant, weasle
pursuer," "John Sublett, blotter tearer,"
"Artie Hofman, shirt dispenser," and even
himself, R. W. Lardner, as a "collar buttoner"
(3 May 1919 20). These sorts of characters’ names
and descriptions appear in many of the nonsense plays:
"I. Gaspiri" features "Ian Obri, a blotter
salesman," "Egso, a pencil guster," and
"Tono, a typical wastebasket"; "Cora, or
Fun at a Spa" features "Plague Bennett, an
embryo Steeplejack"; and "The Gelska Cup"
includes "Palsy, a toe dancer".
Often, the nonsense sound of the words is drawn from
foreign or pseudo-foreign sources. Because of
unprecedented waves of immigration into the United States
during Lardner’s lifetime, and the increased
awareness of foreign countries brought on by World War I
and its aftermath, Lardner’s world—first the
newspaper world and then the theatrical and literary
world—was flooded with new, and no doubt to the
American ear, comically unusual sounding, foreign words.
The daily headlines and news stories were filled with
information about unpronounceable world leaders and
exotic places. The streets and the stages were filled
with a variety of accents. Lardner pokes fun at the
superficial aspects of these new and exotic places and
people, using their words and speech patterns for comic
effect. "The Tridget of Greva" is translated
from the "Squinch," a nonsense word; "I.
Gaspiri," defined parenthetically as "The
Upholsterers," is "adapted from the Bukovinan
of Casper Redmonda; "Taxidea Americana" is
"Translated from the Mastoid," and "Cora,
or Fun at the Spa," makes a more subtle allusion to
foreign drama, the French in particular, with its
subtitle, "An Expressionist Drama of Love and Death
and Sex." In other plays, foreign accents, taken to
the extreme, are the source of the humor. In "Dinner
and Bridge," for example, every common accent used
on the vaudeville stage is included and exaggerated.
Characters switch accents in mid-sentence, and are
directed to "talk in correct, Crowninshield dinner
English, except that occasionally, say every fourth or
fifth speech, whoever is talking suddenly bursts into
dialect, either his own or Jewish or Chinese or what you
will."
Whatever dialect
the characters in Lardner’s nonsense plays are
speaking, their
skills as communicators are usually similar. Characters
speak without listening,
ignore one another, and forget the subject of their
conversation. The non sequitur
becomes the essential element of their conversations. In
"Clemo Uti," and
"Quadroon" almost no conversation transpires.
In "Dinner Bridge" the waiter
continually asks questions and leaves before he can get
an answer: as Taylor explains
"He’s been that way for years—a born
questioner but he hates answers." When
characters do talk to each other about the same subject,
there is inevitably
misunderstanding, as when the glue lifters in "I.
Gaspiri" fail to accomplish the most
perfunctory of greetings: the first asks the second how
he is doing and calls him "My
Man," and the second misunderstands the question as
a request to sing "My Man."
Even when the conversation concerns more important
matters the speakers are
unable to maintain interest long enough to communicate.
In "Abend di Anni
Nouveau" the waiter and the second policemen forget
what they are discussing eight
lines into the conversation: the subject is the mass
murder that has just occurred and
the bodies that lay before them.
Lardner distilled
and thus intensified the nonsensical sounds and actions
of his society into the comic tributes to
non-communication and bizarre behavior known as the
nonsense plays. Though they were written for personal
amusement, they were still published, and others were let
in on the joke. His nonsense plays received attention and
praise when they were collected in What of It? and
posthumously in First and Last. Generally, they
were admired for exposing what Lardner’s second
biographer Jonathan Yardley calls "the phenomenon of
non-communication." Some believe the
"non-communication" to be silly and comical;
others find it signifies deep isolation and despair. For
example, one critic says "The significance of his
nonsense plays is precisely this despairing sense that
nothing connects up with anything else" (Holmes 35).
Another tries to account for the despair and the laughter
it oddly brings:
There
was one final stage beyond despair. It is
no surprise to discover
that Lardner turned to writing nonsense
plays and fairy tales in which
the main source of humor is the
unintentional pun and the non sequitur.
From one viewpoint they were simply
extensions of what he had been describing
all along [isolation]. Here, however, the
isolation is so absolute and abstract
that it sheds its human dimension and
becomes an exercise in the absurdity and
impotence of language itself. But in
another way, these diversions recapture
some of the childlike joy that must have
made life seem so fresh to Lardner in
those years when he was deciding to make
his living by making people
laugh—before he, like his characters
and his age, had wised up. (Spatz 110)
The "childlike joy" of the nonsense plays is
unmistakable. The comical scenes
around the breakfast table related in the
"Wake" plays are still present in the strange
but harmless conversations and actions of the nonsense
play characters.
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