pride of place on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Book Review” (Page, Intro At Her Best, xvi).
Yet Powell suffered many bitter professional disappointments; as Vidal says, she endured a “lifetime of near misses” (“Queen,” 23). In her own day, as in this, she was never as well known or as widely read as many believe she deserved to be. Often critics contemporary to Powell wrote mixed reviews of her novels and plays, praising her wit, intelligence, and skill while railing at her so-called cynicism. In her diary Powell responded to the charge: “The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism’” (Diaries, 273). Reviewers too often faulted not her characterizations but, curiously, her characters, calling them unsavory, objectionable, hardly worthy of the reader’s notice. It was the complaint that most exasperated Powell; one sees her over and over again in her diaries wrestling with it, at one time trying to understand the charge, at another to respond to it.
I have always been fond of drama critics . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know nothing about it.
—Noel Coward
The same sort of unfavorable commentary that greeted her novels met her first produced play, Big Night, which she had originally called The Party. It was a satire of the advertising industry that Powell wrote in response to her husband’s having been fired from his position in the late 1920s. Produced by the Group Theatre in 1933, the play, Group Theatre cofounder Harold Clurman remembered, had seemed “very funny” to the actors when first they read it (81); Wendy Smith, too, says that before the Group got hold of it, it was “a tough, bitingly funny drama” (81). A terrible disappointment, it closed after only nine performances. Director Robert “Bobby” Lewis recalled that of all those working at the Group Theatre, “nobody understood Dawn’s characters, her sophisticated dialogue, her wit” (Bio, 128). Sitting in on a rehearsal one afternoon, Powell quipped, “Isn’t that remarkable? . . . That was a funny line when I wrote it” (W. Smith, 115).
Clifford Odets, who recalled landing the bit part of a doorman in the play, spoke of Clurman’s plodding take on Powell’s piece:
It was astonishing how he could take this little comedy with its bitter undertone and relate it to all of American life. In fact, sometimes in rehearsal it became necessary to say, “Don’t try to act all of this solemn stuff, because this is after all a light comedy. Don’t load it all down with these significances. To the contrary, this has to be played as if it’s a series of cartoons in The New Yorker.” (Hethmon, “Days,” 190)
Clurman admitted that the Group had not known what they were doing when they staged the play (100), after which, he recalled, the press “ran screaming” from the performance, “like so many maiden aunts” (100).81 Richard Schickel, in his biography of Elia Kazan, wrote of the play that “Powell thought it was a comedy. The Group thought it was a waste of its idealism” (19). The biographer goes on to say that Group cofounder Cheryl Crawford, “who started directing it, and Clurman, who finished it, kept sobering it up, thus betraying what merits the play had. As Powell, a merry and shrewd social observer, put it, ‘The Group has put on a careful production with no knowledge whatever of the characters—as they might put on a picture of Siberian home life—made up bit by bit of exact details but [with] the actual realism of the whole missing’” (20).
Even though she recognized that the produced play had little to do with what she had written, Powell believed that the critics had roundly censured Big Night for being “too brutal, too real,” her characters faulted for being too seedy, too sordid (Letters, 285).82 Answering the critical complaints, Robert Benchley, “who adored Powell” (Guare, x), wrote in his New Yorker review of the comedy that other contemporary plays such as “Dinner at Eight83 and Dangerous Corner84 are about unpleasant people for the most part, but they wear evening clothes. Are we only to have high-class cads on our stage?” (26).85 A drama critic for the New York Evening Post went so far as to call the play’s cast of characters a “tiresome” band of “odious little microbes” (Sexton, 3–4). Powell responded to the criticism in typically undaunted if defensive fashion:
At first I was dashed, then the accumulation of stupidity challenged me and even flattered me—to be attacked as a menace to the theater was the first real sign that I had a contribution to make there. It was like finding out you could hurt the elephant—the only defeat or failure is in being ignored or being told you have appeased it. In either case you are lost—just so much hay for the elephant. I was not hay; I was the barbed wire in it, and so I made far more impression. (Diaries, 62–63)
Not all the reviews were negative: Brooks Atkinson, reviewing for the New York Times, found a small thing or two to like in it, writing that the play possessed a “good theme for a drama of modern customs and amenities. Although Miss Powell has given at least two-thirds of her attention to the befuddled squalors of apartment dissipation, she is not unmindful of the tragic implications; and in one good scene in the third act she shapes them into concrete drama.” In the end, however, the critic found that “the wildness of the party runs away with the play” (n.p.).
Richard Lockbridge, theater reviewer for the New York Sun, was less fond of Big Night, calling it “a really venomous comedy” that “provides food for thought—and, on the part of all males, for wincing. Miss Powell does not care much for men, particularly for men employed as salesmen by advertising agencies, particularly for men who exploit their wives in an effort to promote business” (16). A curious statement, that last: why would any woman “care much” for men who would exploit their wives for business? The reviewer adds, “But the venom of the author’s distaste for all these singularly distasteful persons makes it interesting; gives it a bite and a refreshing air of being about something” (16). That “being about something” may have had more to do with the Group than with Powell.
A recently unearthed copy of the playbill for Powell’s first produced play quoted a review by well-respected theater critic and editor Barrett H. Clark: “The cruelty of what Dawn Powell writes is not an author’s cruelty, it is the facts as she sees and feels them. Perceiving accurately what goes on about her, she dramatizes it without sentimentality, and with something of the brutality of Restoration comedy” (14). These lines must have pleased Powell, who admired Barrett and had heard him lecture at Lake Erie while she was enrolled there. It was Barrett who assisted Powell in getting the Group Theatre to take on the play (Bio, 127).
A final word appeared in the New York World-Telegram. More a summary than a review, the unsigned piece was likely the work of Heywood Broun, that paper’s drama critic at the time. Powell recounts his having joined her dinner party at Tony’s restaurant when Big Night closed (Diaries, 63).
Despite the few kind and even noncommittal words the play received, it was an abject failure, and Powell knew it. She would write in her diary that “I learned out of the attacks on my play more of what I could do, what I was prepared to fight for in my plays, and what I must improve, than in any classroom acceptance of fairly good stuff” (82). Never one to accept defeat, within four months of its pillorying in the press she would complete her second play, 1934’s Jig Saw, the only one of her plays to be published in her lifetime. One commentator notes that in it Powell’s “wit and observation [remained] intact, her topsy-turvy sense of truth and falsehood sparkling from every page. The acute, piercing observations that make her New York novels such madcap wonders are prefigured brilliantly in Jig Saw” (Sexton, 7). The play concerns, among other things, empty-headed materialistic women and, as usual, a sprightly cast of ne’er-do-wells.
In 2001, the Yale Repertory Theatre produced the comedy
