Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [78]
“The sixteen were seated in a straight line across the stage,” Herman Shumlin recalled, “and when they read their parts for the first time, it was clear they meant business … Maybe (in part, at least) the absence of women in the cast had something to do with it too. With no good-looking actress to make them feel self-conscious, they seemed to forget they were actors of long experience, with all kinds of past performances and position to live up to. Instead, they gave themselves up completely to the emotional fury of the play and into the guiding hands of the director.”
“Tracy was perfect. Tracy made the show. But then Tracy got worried and he said he wouldn’t do it. He had to shoot a priest in the play and he said he’d rather not.” Henry O’Neill, the actor playing Father O’Connors and a fellow Catholic, could see that Tracy’s torment was deep and genuine and not simply a dodge, and he took him downtown to see a priest. As Shumlin remembered it, “The father told Tracy he need have no scruples,” but then Wexley fixed the problem by writing the priest’s death out of the script altogether, finding the mere threat of his shooting more effective in sustaining the tension than the act itself.
Erskine quickly got the show on its feet, marking out the individual cells—each just two and a half steps wide—on the floor with a piece of chalk. Tracy spent a lot of time miming the window in the back of his cell, looking out to such an exaggerated degree that Erskine, three years his junior, made a memorable comment: “Spence, I didn’t tell you to break the window, I told you to look through it.” His point, which Tracy took to heart, was that a good actor didn’t look out the window—he let the audience look out the window.
“He was,” said Erskine, “cooperative and disciplined, and set an attitude for the other performers who followed his lead. He was the kind of actor whom a director leans on for just such behavior.” They spent such long hours at it that Tracy took a room at the Lambs Club, three blocks from the theater, to avoid traveling all the way home to Ninety-eighth Street. Tensions ran high, rehearsal being a thoroughly emotional process, and there were more than the usual flashes of temper.
“I cannot remember,” wrote Tracy, “when I have spent so much time with other members of the cast outside of the theater, discussing the story of the play back and forth. And I don’t think any of us can ever forget the first dress rehearsal inside the completed prison set. It had been all very well to pretend to be clutching at bars on bare and dingy stages—but now, confined within a four-by-nine cell, chafing at real cold steel—well, it was a sensation! The end of the first act found us rushing out into the wings, desperate for cigarettes. Nobody had any intention of staying in the cell longer than necessary.”
Never before had Tracy immersed himself so deeply in a part, and never had he felt so completely drained by one. “As Killer Mears he had to expose a less-winning phase of his personality,” Erskine said, “one which might unlock secrets of his inner self and which he would have preferred to remain hidden. It is a choice many actors have to make but which only the artists can survive.”
Tempting fate, Shumlin set the New York opening of the play, still titled All the World Wondered, for February 13, pointing out that the numerals in “1930” added up to thirteen. Tryouts took place at Parsons’ Theatre in Hartford beginning on the sixth, and the cast, to a man, was dubious. “They all felt that the play was a good one, an unusual one,” Shumlin said, “but they were almost all a little doubtful of its chances for success. This was hardly astonishing since it departed