then the accumulation of stupidity challenged me and even flattered me—to be attacked as a menace to the theater was the first real sign that I had a contribution to make there. It was like finding out you could hurt the elephant—the only defeat or failure is in being ignored or being told you have appeased it. In either case you are lost—just so much hay for the elephant. I was not hay; I was the barbed wire in it, and so I made far more impression. (Diaries, 62–63)
Not all the reviews were negative: Brooks Atkinson, reviewing for the New York Times, found a small thing or two to like in it, writing that the play possessed a “good theme for a drama of modern customs and amenities. Although Miss Powell has given at least two-thirds of her attention to the befuddled squalors of apartment dissipation, she is not unmindful of the tragic implications; and in one good scene in the third act she shapes them into concrete drama.” In the end, however, the critic found that “the wildness of the party runs away with the play” (n.p.).
Richard Lockbridge, theater reviewer for the New York Sun, was less fond of Big Night, calling it “a really venomous comedy” that “provides food for thought—and, on the part of all males, for wincing. Miss Powell does not care much for men, particularly for men employed as salesmen by advertising agencies, particularly for men who exploit their wives in an effort to promote business” (16). A curious statement, that last: why would any woman “care much” for men who would exploit their wives for business? The reviewer adds, “But the venom of the author’s distaste for all these singularly distasteful persons makes it interesting; gives it a bite and a refreshing air of being about something” (16). That “being about something” may have had more to do with the Group than with Powell.
A recently unearthed copy of the playbill for Powell’s first produced play quoted a review by well-respected theater critic and editor Barrett H. Clark: “The cruelty of what Dawn Powell writes is not an author’s cruelty, it is the facts as she sees and feels them. Perceiving accurately what goes on about her, she dramatizes it without sentimentality, and with something of the brutality of Restoration comedy” (14). These lines must have pleased Powell, who admired Barrett and had heard him lecture at Lake Erie while she was enrolled there. It was Barrett who assisted Powell in getting the Group Theatre to take on the play (Bio, 127).
A final word appeared in the New York World-Telegram. More a summary than a review, the unsigned piece was likely the work of Heywood Broun, that paper’s drama critic at the time. Powell recounts his having joined her dinner party at Tony’s restaurant when Big Night closed (Diaries, 63).
Despite the few kind and even noncommittal words the play received, it was an abject failure, and Powell knew it. She would write in her diary that “I learned out of the attacks on my play more of what I could do, what I was prepared to fight for in my plays, and what I must improve, than in any classroom acceptance of fairly good stuff” (82). Never one to accept defeat, within four months of its pillorying in the press she would complete her second play, 1934’s Jig Saw, the only one of her plays to be published in her lifetime. One commentator notes that in it Powell’s “wit and observation [remained] intact, her topsy-turvy sense of truth and falsehood sparkling from every page. The acute, piercing observations that make her New York novels such madcap wonders are prefigured brilliantly in Jig Saw” (Sexton, 7). The play concerns, among other things, empty-headed materialistic women and, as usual, a sprightly cast of ne’er-do-wells.
In 2001, the Yale Repertory Theatre produced the comedy for the first time in nearly seventy years and for the first time in its original rendering. In November and December 2012, the ReGroup also restaged the play as closely as possible to the way Powell had wanted it: they even scared up her notes from the original production, a copy of which Allie Mulholland generously provided me.
. . .
Jig Saw, produced by the Theatre Guild,86 was more favorably received than its predecessor Big Night had been, but then what play wasn’t? Roy S. Waldau judges that the play, which starred Spring Byington, Earnest Truex, and Cora Witherspoon, “was barely distinguishable from the majority of commercial entertainments that Broadway provides yearly” (187), but that lukewarm appraisal is a far cry from the lambasting that Big Night had received. Waldau goes on to cite a somewhat favorable Brooks Atkinson review that appeared in the New York Times immediately after the play opened:
Miss Powell has learned her craft by close attention to the accepted patterns. She knows when to be daring, when to be perverse, what foibles are most risible and how to twist lines into laughs. . . . Jig Saw may be dull under the surface, but it is bright on top, where facile humors are displayed to best advantage. (187)
Though the review is by no means a rave, neither is it a pan. Powell may have come to learn stagecraft better than she had known it previously, or she had succumbed to convention more thoroughly by that time, and she was fortunate to have left the Group Theatre. Closing after forty-nine performances, this second stage effort was a “modest” little achievement (Sheehy, 126). Jig Saw, in all its “extra-dry urbanity,” was “nearly Big Night’s counterpoint in every way,” quite different in “tone . . . temperament, [and] tactics” from “the scrappy, urgent comedy of Big Night” (Sheehy, 126).
Years after that production of Jig Saw, sounding frustrated with her failure at writing for the stage, Powell had a thing or two to say, whether fairly or no, about theater critics: “The fault it not that they know little about drama, it’s that they know so little else. ‘Life-like’ is a word they use for a form of life they have seen sufficiently on the stage for it to seem normal to them” (Diaries, 191). Soon enough, however, the author realized that the novel was her forte.
. . .
By 1936 she had become accustomed to hearing the same line of criticism of her novels that she had heard about her first play. For example, awaiting the publication of that year’s Turn, Magic Wheel, she feared that the book would “probably . . . annoy people as ‘Big Night’ did, according to the way Carol87 and Halliday88 react. . . . ‘Unpleasant, dreadful people’—what they always say when I have congratulated myself on capturing people who need no dressing up or prettifying to be real” (Diaries, 112). Although the novel earned many glowing notices, it received its share of complaints, too. Edith H. Walton, in an otherwise positive review, wrote that “Amusing and witty as it is, this tale of publishers and writers, of night-club addicts and the padded rich, is not precisely comfortable to read” (“Ironic,” 7).
Worse criticism awaited her second (or third, if we count Whither) New York novel, The Happy Island, published in 1938. In the New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” column, an unsigned review chided the author for choosing to write about the “doings of a pretty worthless and ornery lot of people,” even though she “serves it all up with a dash of wit” (94). Still another complained of the “dimwitted” “playboys and playgirls who cavort through its pages” (Walton, “Café,” 7). In a final insult, William Soskin, of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that Powell seemed to dislike people so much that “the smell of men and women is a stench in her nostrils” (3).89 Soskin clearly had missed Powell’s response, in the very novel he was reviewing, to this exact sort of criticism: The Happy Island’s playwright character, Jefferson Abbott, newly transplanted to New York from a small town in Ohio, has been savagely attacked by the critics as full of “brutality and bitterness,” a despiser of humankind, to which he replies, “I never set out to be a literary Elsa Schiaparelli, dressing up human nature to hide its humps” (118). These words echo Powell’s own response to the familiar charge, but they somehow missed the reviewer.
A less favorable commentary on Angels on Toast than Charles Poore’s, above, found the Chicago/New York novel “cleverly surprising” and Powell a writer with an “exceptionally keen ear for dialogue,” but ultimately faulted the writer for creating “characters who are pretty hopeless because nothing much worth hoping for ever caught their attention” (Van Gelder, “Business,” 6).
A few years later, Powell’s next novel, A Time to Be Born, was called “another of her very enjoyable