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COPYRIGHT 2001 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
WHAT HUMORIST H. L. Mencken in the 1920s called "America's third-largest industry" [1] was a Broadway play about Jewish-Irish inter marriage called Abie's Irish Rose which ran for 2,327 performances, opening on 23 May 1922 at the Fulton Theatre on West 46th Street and closing on 22 October 1927 at the Republic Theatre on West 42nd Street. The play opened to mostly negative--if not downright damning--reviews and struggled for the first two months of its run. [2] But it then found its audience and quickly became a sensation. By the time it closed on Broadway in October, 1927 after a record-setting 2,327 performances (a record it held for fourteen years), productions of Abie's Irish Rose had been seen throughout the world; [3] the play had attracted audiences totaling an estimated eleven million people, and it had grossed close to five million dollars. [4] The play's success was a watershed in the evolution of regional theatre in America as well; it ran for months in cities across the country which had never supported a single production for more than a few weeks at a time. [5]
Turned into two films (produced in 1928 and 1946) and a weekly radio show which aired in the early 1940s, Abie's Irish Rose was also revived twice on Broadway (in 1937 and 1954), both times unsuccessfully. The original production of Abie's Irish Rose was perfectly fitted both to its cultural moment and to its era in American Jewish social history. The play which leading theatre critic Heywood Broun had called a "synthetic farce" and the "worst play of the season" and another critic had called a "cheap farce dependent upon stock lines and forced situations" had, according to a Boston newspaper, "not only pleased its public" but "created its public." [6]
This article will argue that Abie's Irish Rose, like other popular plays of the period such as Samson Raphaelson's The Jazz Singer (and like numerous silent films and vaudeville routines) indeed "created" an ethnic Jewish public--by reflecting images which both reinforced that group's image of itself as "Americanized" and flattered its continuing attachment to its ethnic roots. At a time when Jewish sociologists were inventing the very concept of ethnicity to defend Jews from the growing popularity of theories of biological racial difference which consigned Jews to inferior social status, ethnicity took on an increasingly performance-like dimension in American popular culture. Furthermore, as Werner Sollors has pointed out, ethnicity emerges from "dynamic interaction and syncretism" [7] between ethnic groups, rather than from a single ethnic group's history or tradition. Intermarriage could thus be seen, paradoxically, as itself helping to construct each partner's ethnicity.
Anne Nichols, the author of Abie's Irish Rose, was born in Dales Mill, Georgia, in 1891. Her parents were both Baptists, but she converted as an adult to Roman Catholicism. (She was married for ten years to an Irish Catholic actor and producer, Henry Duffy, but it is not clear whether or not her conversion took place prior to her marriage.) She ran away from home at the age of sixteen to find a role in a play; her first job was in the chorus of a Biblical play called The Shepherd King. She then toured in vaudeville, but turned to writing when she and Duffy ran out of money to buy vaudeville sketches. But although she had considerable success in having her plays produced-a play she had co-authored with Adelaide Matthews called Just Married broke stock company records in New York, Chicago and London in 1921 [8]--she had a much harder time selling Abie's Irish Rose to the New York producers, who did not believe the play would be popular. In Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, he tells the story of one producer, Augustus Pitou, who was offered a half-share of the play's profits in return for a $5,000 investment. Pitou turned down the deal! [9]
The play reached Broadway only after the author produced the play herself, mortgaging her suburban home in Douglaston, Long Island, and borrowing money from Arnold Rothstein, the king of New York's criminal underworld. [10] Nichols was the only female producer of her day [11] and she became extraordinarily wealthy from the production. Still, a play about marginalized ethnic groups in American culture was produced by an intermarried Protestant woman who was herself an outsider to the Broadway establishment (dominated not just by men, but by Jews like the Shubert brothers and David Belasco) and by a Jewish gangster who purportedly turned to crime when he was disowned by his father for marrying a non-Jewish girl. [12]
This play by and about ethnic outsiders helped to transform the nature of ethnicity itself by destabilizing notions of Jewishness as given or immutable. Sollors could be writing about Abie's Irish Rose when he argues that ethnicity is a social construct which purports to be an unchanging quality or characteristic of identity and social organization. Although ethnic groups "may pretend to be eternal and essential," he asks, "are they not of rather recent origin and eminently pliable and unstable?" [13] Similarly, the semiotician and literary critic William Boelhower writes that ethnicity emerges out of an essentially visual process founded on different ethnic groups' reciprocal gazes, so that ethnicity resides in the "flux" or force field generated by the activity of looking and being looked at. [14]
Furthermore, how Jewish life was portrayed on the Broadway stage both mirrored and determined how second-generation New York Jews defined their emergent "ethnic" identities. The growth of Jewish audiences for Broadway entertainment coincided with the movement of Jews out of the ghetto--the Lower East Side of Manhattan--and into expanding Jewish neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of New York City. As Jews climbed into the lower middle class, came into greater contact with other ethnic groups in their new neighborhoods (especially the Irish and Italians) and began to acculturate into American society, they still built and sustained Jewish communal institutions like synagogues and charitable organizations. For the children of European immigrants, Jewish life outside the ghetto took shape in the fruitful tension between the ardent desire to shed definably "ethnic" characteristics (including the Yiddish language and its distinctive vocal inflections, facial hair and heavy clothes, and even many religious rituals and observances) and an abiding sense of ethnic Jewish pride and loyalty.
Abie's Irish Rose begins with a conversation among three visitors--a couple from next door named the Cohens and a rabbi, Rabbi Samuels--to the home of businessman Solomon Levy. Cohen is reading a popular comic strip, "Maggie and Jiggs," out loud, Mrs. Cohen is complaining about a recent operation, and the rabbi is pleading for quiet. The Cohens, clearly immigrants, both speak with heavy Yiddish accents; the goateed rabbi, better educated and significantly younger, speaks unaccented English. When the owner of the apartment, Solomon Levy, finally makes his appearance, the phone rings and he launches into a monologue that audiences would have recognized immediately as lifted from the recorded comedy routines of the British comic Joe Hayman, such as his immensely popular "Cohen on the Telephone," in which fractured English, a ridiculous Yiddish accent and multiple misunderstandings are the sources of humor. [15]
SOLOMON: Hello! Who iss it? Yes vot? Me! Yes, it's me! Who am me? Say who am you? What number? I don't know the number! I didn't get the phone to call myself! [16]
Solomon's son, Abraham Levy, then enters with his new bride, Rose Mary Murphy, an actress whom he met in France during his service in the First World War. Abraham, or Abie, is afraid to incur his father's displeasure, and thus introduces his wife as a friend named Rose Mary Murpheski, a change of name which he knows will cause his father to think her to be Jewish. Although the first thing Solomon wants to know, when he and his son are alone, is how much money Rose Mary has, his next impulse is to exult over his son's choice of a Jewish bride, after a succession of romances with gentile women. "We'll have no 'Schickies' in this family," insists Solomon. [17] When Rose Mary compliments Solomon on his "blarney," Solomon is angered; "I once had dealings with a fellow named Murphey, and what he didn't do to me," he explains. "Every time I hear dot void blarney it reminds me of dot lrisher." [18]
In the second act, a rabbi, Dr. Jacob Samuels, marries Abie and Rose Mary as Rose Mary's father, Patrick, and his priest, Father Whalen, arrive by train from California. Patrick's first shock, upon entering the Levy's home, is the sight of the living room decorated with orange trees rather than flowers, the result of an economizing move by Solomon, who prefers edible fruit to perishable blossoms. But Patrick associates oranges with Protestants, and immediately assumes that his daughter is marrying a Protestant. Solomon quickly disabuses him of this notion and both men lament their children's deception. However, the rabbi and priest seem to recognize each other from their mutual wartime service, during which both ministered to the dying without regard to the faith of the wounded. Not only that, but, according to Father Whalen, the American soldiers shared an epiphany of religious tolerance: "Shure they all had the same God above them. And what with the shells bursting, and the shrapnel flying, with no one knowing just what moment death would come, Catholics, Hebrews and Protestants alike forgot their prejudice and came to realize that all faiths and creeds have about the same destination after all." [19]
As Patrick threatens legal action, Father Whalen appeases him by suggesting that he himself marry the couple, to legitimate the marriage in the eyes of the Church. Without telling either the rabbi or Solomon, he performs the ceremony. The already married couple is thus ultimately married twice more [20] (all three nuptials, interestingly, occurring off-stage, as if showing the intermarriage on-stage would be too trangressive for the audience to witness.) After a period in which the young couple is estranged from both families, they are finally reconciled over Christmas dinner [21]--the meal consisting of kosher food for Abie's side of the family and ham for Rose's. The couple presents their fathers with twins; the boy to be named for the Irish father, the girl for Abie's deceased mother.
Abie's Irish Rose capitalized on a number of popular sources of immigrant humor, from comic strips to recorded vaudeville monologues. According to historian and collector Michael G. Corenthal, these routines were so popular that Columbia Records sold two million copies of Hayman's telephone skit alone. The dissemination of these recordings throughout the country led, Corenthal argues, to a kind of metaphorical intermarriage with Christian America. Through them, he writes, "a Jewish personage became a permanent fixture in a majority of non-Jewish homes." [22] Satirizing the difficulties immigrants had acculturating to American society, these routines also made fun of immigrants them selves. The audience for Abie's Irish Rose was expected to believe that Solomon had achieved financial success while retaining all of his demonstrably "ethnic" characteristics.
The performance-like elements of ethnicity are abundantly present in Abie's Irish Rose, and they pertain to both the Irish and the Jews. Abie is putting on an act to deceive his father, but all the characters are performing an identity in one way or another. The scene in Act I in which Abie introduces Rose Mary to his father makes hay out of the identifying features of ethnicity, especially ethnic names:
SOLOMON: Vell, tell me, vhere did you learn does Irish expressions? Sure!
ROSE MARY: (very proudly) From my father.
SOLOMON: (now highly suspicious) Hah! Iss dod so?
ABIE: (interrupting hastily) Why yes, Dad. He was once an actor.
SOLOMON: So? Vell vot is his name? Is it Mary too?
ROSE MARY: My father's name Mary?
SOLOMON: You just said your name was Rose Mary.
ABIE: (interrupting hastily again) His name is Solomon!
SOLOMON: Oh! Your name is Rose Mary Solomon?
ROSE MARY: (very indignant) Certainly not!
SOLOMON: (quickly) Oh, your father's first name is Solomon?
ABIE: (quickly) Yes! (ROSE MARY looks at him--he is too fast for her--she gasps, so quickly has Abie retorted.)
SOLOMON: Oh! Well, Solomon vhot? (Turns to ROSE MARY.)
ROSE MARY: Murphy--(SOLOMON looks as her quickly; ABIE interrupts and finishes before ROSE MARY knows exactly what he is doing.)
ABIE: (quickly) Miss Murpheski.
SOLOMON: Murpheski! say dod's a fine nize name! Now there you are. (ROSE MARY is so taken aback by this interruption of Abie's she is speechless.) At first I tought you vouldn't have a name like dod! You don'd look id.
ABIE: No, she doesn't does she?
SOLOMON: (looking at ROSE MARY) Faces are very deceiving! .... [23]
Abie seems to draw Rose Mary into a kind of vaudeville routine in this scene, for which she is hilariously unprepared. Abie both takes pleasure in becoming involved with a forbidden lover and seeks to domesticate her foreign-ness to gain parental approval. By presenting Rose Murphy as Rose Murpheski, Abie may even, on one level, be expressing his own preference that she be Jewish, as if changing her name made her so. [24] (On her part, Rose tells her father that she is marrying a man named Michael Magee, making for a scene of utter confusion in Act II when the two fathers meet.) Interestingly, when the production transferred after two years from the Fulton Theatre to the Republic, the actor playing Solomon, Alfred Weisman, changed his name to White.
This meta-theatrical element of the comedy provides a major possible reason why ethnic comedy was unsettling to mainstream observers; at a time of widespread animosity toward ethnic Americans, ethnicity was not a social category which could be as easily assigned as it appeared. As Madison Grant had written in his 1916 best-seller The Passing of the Great Race, the Polish immigrants "adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they...
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