Abie’s Irish Rose: “A Genuine Manhattan Folkplay”
GROUCHO: Didn’t you ever see a habeas corpus?
CHICO: No, but I see Habeas Irish Rose.
— Animal Crackers, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, 1928
Even the opinions of geniuses — make that especially the opinions of geniuses — could use a grain of salt. This morning I read an old play, a play I’ve known a lot about for a long time, but had never actually read or seen. I was familiar with the basic plot, and with references in the lyrics of numerous songs. But mostly, I was familiar with hilarious statements from witty geniuses about how unimaginably awful this play was.
Well, maybe I was just in a good mood this morning, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy (he paused to take a deep breath before continuing) Abie’s Irish Rose! It seems perfectly appropriate, and not some travesty of justice, that Anne Nichols’ comedy held Broadway’s long-run record for fourteen years. It’s delightful! Its success was deserved.
Sure, it’s a somewhat musty and cobwebbed situation comedy, but from today’s vantage point it’s not much more cobwebbed than early Neil Simon — and as with early Neil Simon, its mustiness is countered by a generous amount of tightly-written surefire comedy material. Some critics claimed audiences laughed at this play because they were unsophisticated, but a reading of the play suggests that they laughed because it’s consistently and surprisingly funny.
The supposed ethnic caricatures are nowhere near as noxious as many commentators have suggested. Yes, there’s a Jewish father and an Irish father who disapprove of intermarriage, and their parts are written in dialect — why not? — but these are endearing characters rendered with humor and humanity. A couple of years into the show’s Broadway run, the P.E.N. Club’s Mary Austin was quoted in Alexander Woollcott’s column declaring it “not only a good play in the technical sense; it is something infinitely better. It is a genuine Manhattan folkplay. Miss Nichols’s play has the rhythm of the common speech.”
The play’s archenemy was Robert Benchley, who concocted a new capsule description of the show for each issue of the humor magazine Life. To Benchley, Abie’s Irish Rose was “the comic spirit of 1876”; it was “all right if you never went beyond the fourth grade”; it was “America’s favorite comedy, God forbid.” “People laugh at this every night,” goes one Benchley lament, “which explains why a democracy can never be a success.” In another capsule, he described the play by simply asking, “Will the Marines never come?” When Benchley asked for reader submissions, the winning entry came from Harpo Marx himself, who declared Abie’s Irish Rose “no worse than a bad cold.”
But I haven’t found many true pans of the May 1922 Broadway opening, just light condescension. Charles Darnton in the Evening World calls it “a simple little thing that you might expect to find flourishing considerably east of Broadway.” William B. Chase in the Times notes that “a highly sophisticated summer audience took the little comedy very heartily, laughing uproariously at its juggling with some fundamental things in human life.” Even Percy Hammond’s negative review in the Tribune doesn’t approach Benchley’s wrath; he merely notes his own “inability last night to enjoy the proceedings.”
And Woollcott liked it! He was in Paris when the play opened, and didn’t get around to seeing it until it had been running for two years. In his New York Sun column of May 10, 1924, he finds Abie’s Irish Rose “moderately enjoyable” and “amusing all the way through,” with “inevitable and emphatic humor” and “hearty and unabashed sentiment” which Woollcott compares with Dickens’. He goes on to “wonder with frank bewilderment how [my] fellow scribes of the journals and the gazettes came to find it so distasteful a bore that they still use the play as a synonym of all that is cheap and ornery in the American theater.” Woollcott also says that some of the play’s harshest critics had not actually seen it.
Of particular Marxian interest: Woollcott published these thoughts less than two weeks before his fateful “discovery” of the Marx Brothers in I’ll Say She Is. His follow-up (with the Mary Austin quote) ran on May 19, the day of the I’ll Say She Is opening. And shortly thereafter, a note was delivered to the Marx Brothers in their dressing room during intermission: “We are enjoying your performance immensely. Box orchestra right,” signed Anne Nichols.
Anne Nichols was a remarkable figure who deserved better than the disrespect heaped upon her work by writers who ought to have considered her a peer. The author of Broadway’s classic Jewish-Irish love story was neither Jewish nor Irish, despite her clear familiarity with both cultures. She was a Protestant from Georgia who ran away to become a performer, then a playwright, and eventually a novelist, producer, and director. She had written a couple of moderate successes, including the book for the musical Linger Longer Letty, when inspiration struck and she wrote Abie’s Irish Rose in three days. It had two respectable runs on the west coast, but when years of effort failed to attract New York producers, Nichols pawned everything she owned of value and produced the show on Broadway herself. If she felt hurt by the scorn of Benchley and company, success probably softened the sting. She was the author and sole financer of the biggest hit in Broadway history, and it made her independently wealthy long before it closed.
Alexander Woollcott understood this. He concluded his May 10 column:
“The future historian might note that the play, in manuscript, was scorned by every manager to whom it was shown… So, four years after Anne Nichols wrote it, she produced it herself. And even when, after its disconsolate first night in New York, the public during the first few weeks seemed inclined to stay away from it in droves, she still had sufficient faith in it to keep it going until the tide turned. Discouraged dramatists when low in their minds might do well to read the history of Abie’s Irish Rose. It should make them dry their eyes and jump for joy.”
