[In the following preface, Shyer discusses “nonsense plays” and Kaufman's contribution to the genre.]

The next few pages … are devoted neither to the presentation nor discussion of contemporary plays; rather they look back at another era in the American theater, specifically, at two of its practioners: George S. Kaufman, who spent a long and phenomenal career on Broadway as playwright, director, producer and drama critic, and Ring Lardner, whose stories and satires recorded the oddities of American life and language during the first few decades of this century. Although both the works presented here were written in the 1920's, we might, with some justification, call them new plays for both are coming before a contemporary audience for the first time—Lardner's The Gelska Cup has never been reprinted or collected (in fact it has even escaped detection by the satirist's bibliographers) and Kaufman and Ryskind's Something New is being published here for the first time.

We might even extend this aspect of contemporaneity a bit further; these two nonsense or “Dada” plays—the spirit of which, if not the exact form, is with us today in the creations of Kenneth Koch and Charles Ludlam—have at their core a rebellious nature that reflects a modern sensibility. Not only do these parodies repudiate the notion of a rational universe and its corresponding mimetic portrayal in literature; they also dispose of most conventional literary elements from metaphor to linear continuity to coherence itself. Lardner, the recognized master of the nonsense play, creates a novel imaginative world in which the non sequitur is made the elemental unit of a new syntax and incongruity determines every occurrence.

Many of the nonsense plays and absurdist parodies that came out of the twenties were infused not only with this appreciation of the ridiculous but with a critical attitude as well. They assaulted the conventions, contrivances and pretensions of a prospering commercial theater. The authors of such plays included Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Kaufman and Lardner; all of whom came out of the newspapers and magazines, unencumbered by the theater's cherished traditions and inherited practices. These plays were often performed by the writers and their literary friends at such largely amateur entertainments as the Dutch Treat Club shows, the Lamb's Annual Gambols or at one of the annual Authors League benefits. The best known of these amusements was probably No, Sirree!, “an anonymous entertainment by the Vicious Circle of the Hotel Algonquin” in which critics and other writers mocked the plays of such contemporary dramatists as Samuel Shipman, Zoe Akins and A. A. Milne, reducing the style and substance of the imitated objects to absurdity. Later a number of these writers assembled a professional revue called The 49ers in an unsuccessful attempt to take Broadway; Lardner's first biographer, Donald Elder, described the satiric entertainment as a “gesture of defiance at the commercial theater.”

Like European Dada, the native nonsense play also assaulted the seriousness of art and the holiness of the artist. Lardner, for one, cheerfully violated the sanctity of literary names throughout his career; one of his late parodies, Abend Di Anni Nouveau featured a character list made up of distinguished contemporary creators, among them Theodore Dreiser—a former Follies girl, Heywood Broun—an usher at Roxys, H. L. Mencken—a kleagle in the Moose, and Ben Hecht—a taxi starter. But if there was one supreme target at which the darts of parodists were aimed, it was Eugene O'Neill, the man who was to his era the very image of the artist. The awe and reverence he and his new kind of psychological drama inspired made him an inevitable candidate for comic deflation. It was Lardner who wrote the best known of the O'Neill parodies: a humorous alternative to Mourning Becomes Electra, the massive tragedy which stretched across three nights, thirteen acts and several dinner intervals. It was entitled Quadroon—“A Play in Four Pelts Which May All Be Attended in One Day or Missed in a Group,” and consisted mainly of luncheon and dinner menus for the lengthy intermissions plus slightly altered cast lists (Lavinia, Christine, Fred Astire) and useful bits of information: “Leave your ticket check with an usher and your car will come right to your seat.” The Great God O'Neill also came under the wary scrutiny of George S. Kaufman. In No, Sirree! he appeared as the “1st Agitated Seaman” (there were two others played byMarc Connelly and Alexander Woollcott) in “The Greasy Hag,” a comic reduction of Anna Christie which democratically offered the audience an O'Neill setting of their own choosing: “Vote for One. Backroom of Billy the Bishop's saloon or Fireman's forecastle on a freighter bound east from Rio.” And several years later in the Marx Brothers musical Animal Crackers (1928), which Kaufman wrote with Morrie Ryskind, the character of Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) periodically excused himself from the play—“Pardon me while I have a Strange Interlude”—and bared his sub-conscious to the audience in an O'Neill-inspired interior monologue:

Strange how the wind blows tonight. It has a thin eerie voice … drab, dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures, Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138 …

Such humorous replies to the “genius” of O'Neill (others were written by Frank Sullivan and Donald Ogden Stewart) express more than the comic penchant of a particular era. Like the nonsense play itself, these diversions somehow communicate the spirit of American comedy; they were independent, scornful of authority (be it literary or any other kind), irreverent and in full possession of a cheerful skepticism.

The first of the plays included here, Something New was copyrighted in 1929 by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (who would later collaborate with Kaufman on the Pulitzer Prize-winner musical, Of Thee I Sing) and was probably written a few months after the opening of Animal Crackers; the two works were actually submitted for copyright on the same day. Something New is actually an amalgam of scenes that must have been modeled on similar moments in conventional Broadway dramas of the 1920's (and no doubt Kaufman witnessed many such episodes during his years as the theater critic of The New York Times), only here by means of some comic tampering and an arrangement that is to a sequence of individual scenes what the non sequitur is to dialogue, their potential absurdity is fully realized. After this short parody, Kaufman's next project was a collaboration with Ring Lardner, the author of our other selection. The play was June Moon, a satire on Tin Pan Alley that was to give Lardner what he had always wanted but had not yet achieved: a Broadway hit. This, incidentally, was not their first association; Kaufman had known Lardner for some years, he had appeared as an actor in two of his parodies for the Dutch Treat Club shows and he directed the first of Lardner's nonsense plays, The Tridget of Greva.

The second play in this section, Ring Lardner's The Gelska Cup was originally published in 1925 (the same year Lardner wrote his most famous short story, “Haircut”) and appeared in the old Life, a humor magazine that featured the early writings of Benchley, Sherwood, Connelly, Kaufman and Dorothy Parker. Although the piece lacks the economy and some of the verbal agility of its better known counterparts, and a few of the jokes may elicit grimaces, it has all the features of the other nonsense plays: characters who fail to appear, deleted scenes, improbable settings, non sequitur, and also a few new elements that expand the possibilities of theatrical representation—stage directions and cues for the audience, running commentary on the low quality of the work and motivation for actors who want out of the play.

Lardner is perhaps the more radical of the two parodists discussed here. Whereas Kaufman exposes the current deficiencies and excesses of theater practices, Lardner obliterates not only traditions and conventions of the stage but also the absurdity of the form itself. His targets are not nearly so often the failings as they are the imperatives of the stage: program credits to identify actors and characters, the necessary division of action into acts, the limitations of realistic scenery, the methods of imparting information to an audience and easing a play forward—his is a comic indictment of the entire theatrical engine. But both Kaufman and Lardner move beyond the limits of criticism. In the end, they do not attack the absurdity of the theater, they celebrate it.

An incidental note on the authorship of Something New:

Dec. 7, 1977

I can't give you the slightest bit of information about “Something New,” since I have no memory of having written it. Are you sure you've got the right guy?

It is true George and I talked over a lot of ideas, and he would occasionally make notes and type them up afterward. But this one rings no bell at all …

Yours mystifiedly,

Morrie Ryskind