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Rollo's Wild Oat


A King of Infinite Space
“I am beginning to think that Hamlet is a thing to be played
in the privacy
of one's bedroom, Hewston.
We should no more do it before an audience than we
should pray before them.”

Ambition.
How many an otherwise reasonable soul has been misled, waylaid, bamboozled for having nurtured and grown a most unreasonable passion.

And yet…without it, would we have ever left the primordial swamps, built bridges, split atoms, written plays?  What a confounding trait.  In a truly effervescent comedy from 1920, Clare Beecher Kummer*  makes hay of one man’s ambition to delicious effect.

Rollo Webster has only one ambition: to play Hamlet on Broadway. He has an accidental backer (his grandfather has given him a handsome sum to set himself up in business), an opportunistic producer pulling the strings, and a troupe of well-heeled Shakespeareans on the payroll.  And as lack of talent has never deterred the ambitious thespian, he is well on his way to opening night.

But to get there, he must hide the plan from his grandfather, give his sister a small role, pray his aunt holds her tongue, martial his valet's show business aspirations, and find a way to win the favor of  his Ophelia—a chorus girl who can’t get big shows because she doesn’t like to stay out late and an actress too overcome by stage fright to act.

What a tangled web.

When the dust settles, many a dream is shattered, while many true callings are revealed, and family secrets that have long hobbled the Websters are exposed–and very very much to the good. 

As for ambition...perhaps it need not be realized if its pursuit leads to an unexpected happiness.

I  ♥ Hamlet
One of the funniest plays with the most endearing characters and cleverest dialogue of its day (see this glowing review, and this!), it is certainly a refreshingly light response to a tragedy. But it is the play’s unexpected outcome(s) that distinguish it from the already good company it keeps with many a Hamlet-based play.  There is a long tradition of theater (and film) celebrating its favorite icons and mocking its own excesses. Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) reduce classical performance to a vulgar con game; Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982) memorably captures the worst behaviors of rehearsal and the hysteria of live performance; Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967), Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale (1995), and Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare In Love (1998) relish the misadventures that mysteriously lead to stage triumphs, as does the current movie Birdman.

Within that tradition is a special scripture that refers specifically to Hamlet, and those sacred texts begin, of course, with ... Hamlet. Hamlet is “playing” Hamlet, when he decides to feign madness. Then, his advice to the players, for both its counsel—“speak the speech…trippingly on the tongue”—and its warning—“do not saw the air too much with your hand”—is a model of acting instruction and an evocation of the worst excesses to which actors succumb. But shortly after he disparages bad actors, he lauds the players visiting Elsinor for being more stirred to passion than he himself can be.  His disgust with bad theater is equal to his faith in the power of theater.

Small wonder that so many plays written since have held up Hamlet and the role of Hamlet as the nonpareil of theatrical expression. There are roles that loom large in the public consciousness, and larger in the imagination of the acting community, but Hamlet, stands above them all.  The melancholy Dane is probably the most famous character of all English theater, and the image of a young man pondering the skull of a jester an icon that speaks volumes on theater, youth, mortality, anxiety, and vengeance.

That Rollo is in most ways not that tortured young man is part of the comedy in both a silly and a not-so-silly way. The laughable absurdity of his playing such a complicated and tormented character is evident on its face. Rollo’s aspirations are simple, and his soul untroubled: he is not Hamlet. But the ways in which he is Hamlet both
satirize how it has been enshrined over the years and illuminate the great work. Though guileless and good-natured, Rollo is a young man on the outs with his family, unable to follow in his father’s footsteps and unwilling to conform to the older generation’s plans for him, just like Hamlet.  He also has a vision for his production of the play, in which most of the characters will play in conventionally high dudgeon, while he and Ophelia will be simple, plain-spoken, accessible human beings. When Rollo describes it, the idea is laughable, but it is a pretty accurate conception of Hamlet’s relationship to the world around him.

Rollo’s attempt to play Hamlet, then, gives Clare Kummer not only a chance to mock the absurdities of turn-of-the-century Shakespeare performance and idolatry, but also a way of bringing the themes of Shakespeare to a contemporary audience. She gives us a play that is not about the challenges and rewards of bringing a neophyte to Shakespearean greatness (cf. Paul Rudnik’s 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet) but rather a play about the meaningful satisfactions of bringing Shakespeare and all he represents to earth, a la Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).  Rollo’s challenges and failures in the part are the triumph of the Rollo’s Wild Oat, and laughingly echo the words of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (1915):
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;   
Am an attendant lord, one that will do   
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,   
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,   
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;   
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;   
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—   
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Along the way, this playful play from 1920 takes fond swipes at other popular theater of its day as well. Its portrayal of the Shakespearean Player, still a holdover from the late 19th century, right down to the actress who has been using the same wig for Ophelia since at least 1885, is painfully familiar to anyone who has been subject to a reverential Shakespearean pageant. At the other end of the spectrum, sensational entertainments, music hall follies and vaudevilles still had their broad audiences, and they are the domain of Rollo’s good-hearted, but self-serving and unimaginative producer.  Meanwhile, European experimental staging was beginning to catch on in America in 1920 in the form of the “new stagecraft,” with its non-realistc sets and lighting innovations, even while other authors of the post-War theater were exploring a new realism (such as Icebound and The Hero, from recent Metropolitan seasons).  Rollo’s vision for his production is a marvelous combination of both, with a single unchanging set, dynamic lights, and yet a devotion to “simple and natural” portrayals.

Where does Rollo’s Wild Oat fit in this theatrical menagerie? A light comedy, surely, but of its own stripe. Alexander Woollcott was a great fan of Clare Kummer’s work, and remarked in one of his notices that she was "the only American playwright with a style so recognizable that you could spot her authorship by listening to a single scene.”  Her play is a purely theatrical creation, buoyed by whimsy and optimism, with preposterous but beguiling characters, who are so funny, so touching, so real in spite of their very implausibility because, like most of us, they are set apart from every style of the day—sophisticated, vulgar, expressionistic, self-serious—and simply their flawed, charming, hopeful selves.

The Play's the Thing
It is asking a lot of a breezy comedy to look for its deeper significance, and one need not ask too much of Rollo's Wild Oat. Its sparkling dialogue and winning characters are more than enough to woo the most reluctant analyst.  In Brooks Atkinson's view
he was another adoring critic—it was Clare Kummer's "everlasting virtue that her comedies have never acknowledged the existence of ideas as germs of play-making. If her characters had ideas or lived by them, they would be indistinguishable members of the vast bourgeoisie."

But the play's heart and inspiration should not be overlooked.  In proposing such a preposterous ambition for a pleasant but disaffected young man, she captures the same yearning for change that haunts the works of more "serious" playwrights and the growing youth culture that so radically broke with the rules of its parents following the First World War.  By so successfully mocking stage conventions, as well as stage ambitions, which are embraced by both the young and old, she questions the prevailing norms of the day through their stand-ins on stage: tradition, experimentation, exploitation. And by proposing a happily-ever-after ending she does not shy away from the questions she has raised, but rather finds a new way ahead, one that eschews the distracted fantasies of youth and rebellion, but also brings together the generations in better mutual respect and understanding of one another.  And unlike Hamlet, everybody doesn't have to die
.

In the end, Rollo’s ambition alters, and not only his, but many characters’ misalignments are righted.  In presenting a play about that distinctive forward human motion, and a play that offers an offbeat perspective on the evolving state of its own art, Metropolitan happily offers Rollo's Wild Oat as its second for a season of Progress.

- Alex Roe


*That Beecher jumps out to the literary reader.  Indeed, Clare Beecher Kummer was grand-niece to Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Further, she was cousin, through her second marriage, to William "Sherlock Holmes" Gillette, and mother-in-law to Roland Young, of Topper and The Philadelphia Story fame.  Rollo's Wild Oat was a vehicle for Young, and A Successful Calamity (1917) was written for Gillette.


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