Act One. Moss Hart

Act One: An Autobiography
Moss Hart
The New American Library. 1959.

Why read it? The making of a popular playwright. Reflections on acting, playwriting, directing, the audience and the many complex circumstances that somehow coalesce into the success or failure of a play.

Sample ideas: Actors are children. Children desire to attend their own funerals, to see conscience-stricken parents. Actors want to be themselves, but at the same time to be somebody else, and be admired for doing it. Acting is the art of being somebody else. The temperament of actors is the result of being permanently children.

Listening to a tale told in the dark is one of man’s most ancient entertainments. A sense of timing is the key to success. During, the first fifteen minutes of a play, the audience is waiting to see if it is captivated. At the end of that fifteen minutes, it becomes a disparate group of individuals if it is not captivated. No silence is more devastating than the silence of a theater audience. Conversely, nothing is more thrilling than an actor’s walking on the stage and bonding immediately with the audience.

Hart began to study the construction of plays. He read every play he could get his hands on. Stamina is as important as talent to success in the theater. He finished his first play thinking highly of it; put it away for a week and was overwhelmed by its awfulness when he took it up again. Each play is a separate set of problems. Agonizing in writing a play will mean that the audience will be in agony; the agony of writing is transferred to the production. Repetition in the theater—unlike TV and movies—breeds failure. Advice in the theater can never take the place of one’s own judgment. Playwriting is like marriage—no one can tell you about it; you have to live it.

Collaboration between Hart and Kaufman was as simple as putting a page in the typewriter and plugging away at it until they were both satisfied. All plays sound frightful at the first reading. Hart believes that poor reading the first time is part of the code of acting, which actors, of course, deny. The best director is hidden from the audience during the production. The acid test of a play is its very first audience. The pace with which the audience returns to its seats after an intermission is a dead giveaway of how the play is going. He only hears the silences when laughter is supposed to come but does not. The deadly cough that spreads through the audience.

“Serendipity is a word that has fallen into disuse, but there are few words in the language that so graphically characterize the combinations of fortuitous and random circumstances that make up the behind-the-scenes history of almost every play.”

The audience’s laughter means it has taken the play into its own hand and is carrying it along with them. The vital scenes of a play are played as much by the audience as they are by the actors on the stage. An afternoon rehearsal can be a shambles, but the evening rehearsal can be orderly, smooth and perfect: no explanation for it.

Quote: “Nothing is always true in playwriting, acting, producing or directing.”