Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [74]
Great things were expected of Dread, the most ambitious play Davis had written since Icebound, the one that had won him the Pulitzer. The Post’s John Daly hailed the playwright’s return to melodrama, the boldness of his contrivances, the stunning fact that the old master’s theatrics “spit fire and cause squirmings in the orchestra chairs just as his earlier works did when they played on the old Stair and Haviland circuit in the ‘ten-twent-thirt’ days … Mr. Tracy stands up nobly under the punishment, a villain who makes you want to shoot him in the back or kick him in the trousers every time he turns around—so that by the end of the night you expect to hear hisses.”
Harris had planned to move the company to Philadelphia, but a musicians’ strike intervened and the play landed instead in Brooklyn. Stopping at the Lambs, Tracy was asked by Ring Lardner, the renowned author of Alibi Ike and Haircut, what he was doing. “I told him,” said Tracy, “I was going to Brooklyn with Dread and he said, ‘Is there any other way?’ ”
Lardner’s disdain notwithstanding, Dread managed to fill the 1,700-seat Majestic on a Monday night. “In the parlance of the stage,” said the notice in the Brooklyn Standard Union, “overplaying a part means ‘taking it big,’ mostly concerned where grief and semi-madness are the expressive emotions. Dread calls for both emotions in a large measure. Spencer Tracy and Miss Madge Evans play the two important characters with proper reserve. Others might have ‘taken it big’ and ruined what is now a most thrilling piece of drama … The audience called for ten final curtains, which speaks for itself.”
The strong responses in both Washington and Brooklyn would have assured a place for Dread on Broadway but for the fact that the play opened in Brooklyn on October 28, 1929. The next day—October 29—would go down in history as Black Tuesday, the day when huge blocks of stock were thrown on the plummeting market, and paper millionaires were rendered penniless in the space of a few hours. Sam Harris, his funding uncertain, sent both Dread and the promising Swan Song (by the surefire team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) to the storehouse, hinting the Davis play “may be rewritten” but ultimately allowing only one Broadway production to go forth under his management in the year following the crash. The Brooklyn performance of Dread on the night of November 2 was the last ever given anywhere. Louise disliked the play, its obvious hokum, and thought it deserved to close, but Spence was bitterly disappointed and always carried the lingering suspicion it would have made him a star. In May 1940 he lamented its disappearance to Halsey Raines of the New York Herald Tribune, saying that the property he was “most enthusiastic” about, the one he was sure would have been “a box office sensation” had it come to Broadway, was an obscure but singularly nerve-racking play called Dread.
“Now we sometimes laugh about Dread,” Louise later wrote, “and Spencer will relate with great gusto how the family nearly was broken up, of how his mother demanded that he leave the stage and get a job whereby he could be sure of supporting his wife and child, and how his wife said if he left the stage she would leave him. But at that time it was not so funny.” In the wake of the stock market crash, Mother Tracy took note of the fact that her son had worked eight jobs in the fifteen months since the close of The Baby Cyclone. An actor wasn’t paid for up to five weeks of rehearsal, and during the first two weeks of performance a show could close without any notice, making