Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [36]
Transcribing The Valiant, Fox Island, Washington, 1921. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
Tracy involved himself with the Prom Committee and was elected premier of Alpha Phi Omega, the house fraternity at West Hall. Then Professor Boody urged him to come out for debate: “Spencer, you get in and out of more arguments than any student in this school. You belong on the debating team.” The Mask and Wig produced only two plays a year—winter and spring—and each play was good for only one or two performances. Both Spence and Lorraine wanted to do a play a month, but the others weren’t sure they could afford the time away from their studies. When they forged ahead with plans for two performances of an obscure one-act called The Dregs, the backlash wasn’t entirely unexpected.
William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide had been announced as the fall play, but the director would be Professor H. H. Allen, new to Ripon and not at all familiar with Tracy’s work. Spence and Lorraine made a pact: they would both try out for the leads, but if one got the lead and the other did not, then neither would do the play. Casting was announced on October 17, 1921. As expected, Lorraine got the part of Ruth Jordan, the female lead in Moody’s perennial favorite, but Spence drew only a supporting role, that of Ruth’s brother, Philip. Lorraine promptly resigned her part, a calculated act of loyalty to Spence that roiled the Mask and Wig and got everyone talking. “The Dean called me in to question my refusal, and suggested that perhaps the reason Spence didn’t get the part was because he had been neglecting his studies. That didn’t satisfy me, although I knew that Spence wasn’t too enthusiastic about studying. That was when we decided we’d have our own acting company with rehearsals at my house, and we called ourselves The Campus Players.”
The following day, the school paper carried the announcement that The Dregs had been put aside in favor of The Valiant. The latter would be performed by Spencer Tracy and Lorraine Foat at the Municipal Auditorium on Thursday and Friday evenings, October 27 and 28. Working from Tracy’s own hunt-and-peck transcription, the Players began the process of nightly rehearsal. The Valiant was simple enough to stage, all the action taking place in a prison office, the warden and the chaplain trying to confirm the condemned man’s identity just as he is about to die. A girl comes to see him, thinking he may be her long lost brother, but he sends her back to her mother convinced that her brother had died a war hero. The girl’s part was meaty enough, laden as it was with stark emotion, but the play really belonged to the actor playing the mysterious prisoner who called himself Dyke.
As a boy Tracy had learned the trick of immersing himself in a part. The hours he spent in the nickelodeon were the equivalent of study, and once he had it, he could replay it in performance—not strictly as the character but the character as filtered through his own set of experiences. He now did the same with the text of the play, imprinting it so thoroughly on his memory he’d never have to reach for a line, a thought, an action. “Because possibly of his military training, perhaps through natural instinct, Tracy always manifested unusual poise,” Professor Boody said. “He could stand still, remain in character, and do nothing but act.”
Although the theater wasn’t filled to capacity as it had been for The Truth, the advance word bolstered the crowd considerably from the several hundred who typically turned out for Tom Mix and William S. Hart on Thursday nights. The set was minimal: a desk, a few straight-backed chairs, a water cooler. Jennings Page and Jack Davies, in their respective roles as the warden and the prison chaplain, provided the somber setup, Tracy making his entrance about five minutes into the action. He was calm and cynical, unashamedly guilty of the murder for which he was about to