During the twenty years between his graduation from Cornell University in 1937 and the opening of West Side Story twenty years later, Brooklyn-born Arthur Laurents had mixed success as a playwright.1 Two of his plays (The Bird Cage and A Clearing in the Woods) didn’t last a month; one (Heartsong), closed in Philadelphia. Home of the Brave lasted sixty performances, but did get sold to a Hollywood studio. Only The Time of the Cuckoo had a respectable run. The films for which he wrote screenplays during this period were not commercial or critical successes. Laurents’s fame would come as book writer for the classic musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, and La Cage aux Folles (which he also directed), and as the writer of the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point in the 1970s.
Much of Laurents’s good fortune, from getting a break as a writer for radio to working with famous Hollywood directors and actors during World War II, to his part in the creation of West Side Story, came from personal connections, particularly his friendship with director–choreographer Jerome Robbins, the initiating force in the making of West Side Story. This is not to denigrate Laurents’s talent. He was a gifted writer who wisely took advantage of the opportunities that came his way.
Laurents was also a famously difficult person. Harold Clurman, who directed two of Laurents’s Broadway plays, observed that in Laurents ‘sensibility and a defensive aggressiveness are combined in precarious balance. The slightest rebuff, or what he suspects as one, makes him bitterly antagonistic; praise, encouragement, and affection melt him.’2 Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Laurents on four musicals (West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?) recalls that ‘Aplomb was not one of Arthur’s chief virtues, and his tirades could be heard as far as Scranton.’3
Radio, Wartime Work, and Connections
Laurents moved back to New York after college and, while working at Bloomingdale’s department store, took an evening course in writing radio drama taught by Bill Robson, a producer at CBS. Robson arranged for his network to buy Now Playing, Tomorrow, a script Laurents wrote for his class. The star of that first show was Shirley Booth who would star in Laurents’s Heartsong and The Time of the Cuckoo. Listeners liked Now Playing Tomorrow, so until World War II Laurents had steady work writing for radio shows like Lux Radio Theatre.
For most young men, World War II put careers on hold. Laurents was lucky. At basic training at Fort Monmouth near the New Jersey shore, he befriended Bob Hoskins, who happened to be the son of a senior aide to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thanks to Hoskins’s well-placed father, Laurents was transferred to the US Army Pictorial Service, located in an old film studio in Astoria, Queens, where he was assigned to be a screenwriter of official Army training films as well as a writer of radio scripts for the Armed Forces. The director of his first film script was none other than George Cukor, one of the greatest directors of the studio era. Throughout the war, Laurents was fortunate to work with major Hollywood and Broadway talent while socializing at night with people in the New York theatre and dance world who would soon be in positions of power.4
Fraught Friendship: Laurents and Jerome Robbins
During Laurents’s five years doing military work in Astoria, he had an affair with Ballet Theatre ballerina Nora Kaye5 while also enjoying sex with a number of men. Through Kaye, he became friends with dancer–choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose 1944 ballet Fancy Free would later the same year be adapted into the musical On the Town, also with a score by Leonard Bernstein. Although Laurents at the time had no experience writing for the stage, Robbins had tried without success to convince Bernstein that his new friend should write the book for On the Town.6 Through the next decade and a half, Laurents and Robbins would have a turbulent professional and social relationship that would eventually lead to Laurents’s collaboration on West Side Story and Gypsy. Robbins found Laurents an agent and a producer for his first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, and, after the war, asked Laurents to write the book for a musical about a ballet dancer. Laurents turned in a draft whose central character was a ruthless, egotistical dancer modeled on Robbins himself. Robbins’s biographer, Amanda Vaill, mused, ‘What this says about Laurents’s opinion of his friend Robbins is an interesting question.’7 Eventually the writer pulled out of the project, which became the short-lived 1948 musical, Look Ma, I’m Dancing. Laurents’s friendship with Robbins became somewhat strained when the director–choreographer betrayed friends in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953,8 Laurents recalls that Robbins said:
‘I suppose I won’t know for years whether I did the right thing.’
‘Oh, I can tell you right now,’ I answered. ‘You were a shit.’9
Throughout Laurents’s memoirs, he attacks informers who betrayed their friends during the years of the Red Scare and blacklist. His 1995 play, Jolson Sings Again, is loosely based on the betrayal of another director–informer, Elia Kazan.
Despite Robbins’s testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Laurents remained friendly with Robbins, but their relationship unraveled because of Robbins’s behavior during rehearsals for West Side Story and his insistence on more prominent billing than his colleagues received. Laurents later wrote of Bernstein’s, Sondheim’s and his anger at Robbins, ‘The four of us had started the show together, created it together, had a wonderful time being together, but three of us weren’t talking to Jerry. There was no pleasure in that; if anything, there was an additional load of resentment because he had caused the estrangement, he was why “together” had lost its meaning.’10 Laurents would work with Robbins two years later on Gypsy, but their relationship was never the same. The surviving collaborators on West Side Story, Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, chose not to take part in Robbins’s memorial service almost forty years later.
Broadway Debut: Home of the Brave
One crucial theme of West Side Story is prejudice. In the musical’s original conception, East Side Story, the source of the intra-gang conflict was anti-Semitism, rather than bigotry against Puerto Ricans. Anti-Semitism is a theme that appears in Home of the Brave and in some of Laurents’s later plays.
While Laurents was working in Astoria, he began the script that would become his first Broadway play, Home of the Brave (1945). The script was inspired by an experience Laurents had in basic training. At one barracks inspection, Laurents’s friend Bob Hoskins punched a sergeant who complained about how badly ‘the kikes’ cleaned up the barracks. Hoskins wasn’t Jewish but felt badly for his Jewish friend. A second impetus for the play was Laurents’s new interest in psychoanalysis. During the five years Laurents was in the army, he became increasingly confused about his sexual orientation and behavior. His first psychiatrist believed that all his problems came from his homosexuality, which could and must be cured. Only years later with a more enlightened Hollywood psychiatrist did he become comfortable with his sexual orientation. However, the most powerful inspiration for Home of the Brave came from a photograph that landed on Laurents’s desk of some GIs looking at the mutilated body of a comrade: ‘That photograph haunted me. I pilfered it from the army files and kept it in my drawer. I didn’t know why I knew it was a play but I did.’11
These three elements – the friend’s reaction to an anti-Semitic slur, Laurents’s inability to accept his sexual orientation, and the photograph – combined into the creation of Home of the Brave. The experience of writing for radio and film, which allow free movement in space and time, influenced the structure of Home of the Brave which, instead of being confined to one interior set, alternates between the present in an army hospital and the past on a Pacific Island. The central character is Peter Coen, a young recruit who is extremely self-conscious about his ‘difference,’ his Judaism. He tells the army psychiatrist, ‘None of them are like me.’12 His journey in the play is one of self-acceptance. When we first see Coen in the hospital, he is unable to walk, a result of a psychological trauma caused by the death of his closest friend, Finch, a young private from Arkansas. Through their wartime experience, they became so close that they planned to open a bar together after the war. Finch even joked about Coen marrying his sister. During a feud in a tense moment on an intelligence-gathering mission on a remote island overrun with Japanese, Finch barely stops himself from shouting an anti-Semitic slur. Coen, hyper-sensitive to such slights, feels betrayed by the only person he felt totally accepted him. Shortly after that, Finch is shot by a Japanese sniper. Coen and his fellow soldiers have to leave their wounded comrade to the incoming Japanese so that they can complete their crucial intelligence mission. Coen’s subsequent paralysis is caused by a combination of anger over what he sees as Finch’s betrayal and guilt over having to leave a wounded Finch to be tortured and killed by the Japanese.
From the outset, the psychiatrist knows that Coen’s problem is at heart a societal problem, an inability to accept difference: ‘That kid’s crack-up goes back to a thousand million goddamn people being wrong … They don’t take a man for himself … for what he is.’13 The psychiatrist can only cure Coen’s paralysis by the extreme tactic of shouting an anti-Semitic slur at him: ‘You lousy yellow Jew bastard, get up and walk!’14 Through therapy, Coen comes to realize that his sensitivity about anti-Semitism is based in great part on his own inability to accept his Jewishness – his difference. That sensitivity to anti-Semitism would lead to Laurents’s interest in the first iteration of West Side Story, East Side Story.
It took decades for Laurents to accept that in Home of the Brave, he had not only dramatized his sensitivity about his Jewishness; he had also unintentionally projected his anxieties about his homosexuality onto Peter Coen. Laurents, born Levine, was sensitive enough about the prevailing anti-Semitism in America to change his last name in order to have a better chance of getting a job; however, his memoirs make clear that he was much more sensitive and confused about his sexual orientation. He was unable at the time to accept his homosexuality or to see that the primary relationship in Home of the Brave has a homoerotic element: ‘Had I realized that it could be construed that way, I would have worked overtime to clean it out.’15
Home of the Brave demonstrated Laurents’s ability to capture the language of young servicemen in tense situations. His ear for convincing colloquial dialogue would later serve him well in the creation of the teenage gang members in West Side Story. A 1949 film adaptation of the play (screenplay, Carl Foreman; director, Mark Robson), changed the central character from Jewish to African-American, thus making the key issue racism, not anti-Semitism, even though troops were racially segregated until 1948.
After many changes in directors and leading actors and multiple script revisions, Laurents’s second stage play, Heartsong (1947), about a young couple dealing with abortion, closed in Philadelphia.16 For the next few years, his base of operations would be Hollywood.
Hollywood and Rope
Laurents’s first contract as a screenwriter for MGM earned him the generous sum of $2,500 a week. Working on his first assignment, the psychological melodrama The Snake Pit was a lesson in the pitfalls of screenwriting, including being forced to tack on an unbelievable happy ending and not receiving appropriate credit for his work. After collaborating on The Snake Pit, Laurents had two major screenwriting assignments during the late 1940s. The first was to adapt Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 British stage play, Rope, for Alfred Hitchcock. The celebrated British director had hired his friend, actor Hume Cronyn, to write a treatment based on the play, then hired Laurents to Americanize the British dialogue. Laurents later insisted that even though Cronyn got screen credit for the adaptation, the final screenplay was his alone.17
Loosely based on the famous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, the play and film depict two wealthy young men who murder a college friend, hide his body in a chest in the living room, then hold a dinner party in the same room. The crime is solved by a former teacher and friend who had taught the young men the Nietzschean concepts that led them to think that they were above conventional morality. Everyone who remembered the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks knew that there was a sexual element in the killers’ relationship. Patrick Hamilton’s play is filled with innuendo that the two young men are sexually involved. Given the censorship in Britain at the time, such information could only be hinted at, never overtly presented verbally or physically. The same rule applied in Hollywood where any mention of ‘sex perversion’ was banned. Still, Laurents remembered how Hitchcock delighted in filling his film with homosexual intimations: ‘At Warner Brothers studio in Burbank where Rope was shot, homosexuality was the unmentionable, known only as “it.” “It” wasn’t in the picture. No one was “one.” Fascinating was how Hitchcock nevertheless made clear to me that he wanted “it” in the picture.’18 The director knew that Laurents and the actors playing the murderous couple, Farley Granger (Laurents’s housemate and lover at the time), and John Dall, were homosexual. Hitchcock’s direction emphasizes the closeness of the murderers by keeping them together in the same frame through most of the film. Unfortunately, James Stewart is woefully miscast as the older friend who solves the case.
In Laurents’s screenplay Brandon and Philip started a relationship in prep school and have stayed in contact even though Brandon went off to Harvard and Philip trained to be a concert pianist. Now they share an apartment in New York. The murder of their friend David seems to be a way to maintain a strained relationship. Brandon is the more dominant personality. Philip says at one point, ‘You scare me. You always have – from the very first day in prep school. Part of your charm, I suppose.’19 For Brandon the most exciting part of their crime is the dinner party they hold in the same room as the corpse. Their perverse guest list includes Janet, the victim’s fiancée; Ken, her ex-boyfriend; and Janet’s father. This gathering is for Brandon a delicious bit of theatre but Philip gets progressively drunk, frightened, and hostile. Laurents, living within Hollywood’s policing of the closet and still deeply conflicted about his sexual orientation and his relationship with Granger, was the perfect writer to create an American version of Hamilton’s dysfunctional gay couple.
Rope was not a box office success although film scholars and critics have over the years found much to praise in Hitchcock’s direction and Laurents’s screenplay. After Rope, Hitchcock repeatedly asked Laurents to adapt various properties for him but Laurents never found any of them congenial.
Caught
When Laurents was assigned to write the screenplay for Caught (1949), he understood that his job was to revise an adaptation of Libbie Block’s novel, Wild Calendar. Director Max Ophüls had other ideas. Bristling from mistreatment at the hands of RKO Pictures owner Howard Hughes, Ophüls wanted to make a film that presented a negative portrayal of the eccentric mogul. He told Laurents, ‘Make him an idiot! An egomaniac! Terrible to women! Also to men! Make him a fool! Make him die! Kill him off!’20 Laurents used some elements of Block’s novel about an unhappy marriage between a plain seventeen-year-old who marries her millionaire cousin but created an original story adding anecdotes he had heard about Hughes as well as common knowledge. In the novel, the woman, Maud, treats her older husband miserably. In the film, the husband is gratuitously cruel to his justifiably unhappy wife. Ironically, Robert Ryan, who would play the nasty character based on Hughes, and leading actress Barbara Bel Geddes were under contract to RKO, Hughes’s studio. Hughes would not release them to be in the film unless some revisions were made in the script and he was allowed to see the daily footage.21
The film focuses on Leona Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes), a poor girl who wants a better life for herself. She scrapes some money together for a six-week course at a charm school and gets a job modeling clothes at a department store. A sleazy crypto-gay assistant to millionaire Smith Ohrig invites her to a party on a yacht where she will meet rich men. Before she ever gets to the party, Ohrig takes her for drinks, then makes a pass at her which she refuses. The next scene, a pivotal one, is at the office of Smith’s psychiatrist. As he did in Home of the Brave, Laurents makes a psychiatrist his voice of wisdom. Smith has once again experienced the symptoms of a mild heart attack. His doctor knows that he only has these attacks when he doesn’t get what he wants, in this case sex with Leona. When the doctor tells Smith that he shouldn’t think of marrying her – he’ll only destroy her – Smith perversely resolves to marry her and fires the doctor who tells him that he is only marrying ‘to prove that no one has authority over you.’22
The doctor is right. The marriage is a disaster. Smith despises Leona from the outset and is seldom home. Leona leaves him, moves into a shabby Manhattan flat and gets a job as a receptionist in the lower East Side office of Larry Quinada (James Mason), an idealistic doctor who treats poor children. Larry came from a wealthy family that lost most of its fortune (thus explaining Mason’s posh accent), and is now dedicated to healing poor children. Of course, Leona and the doctor fall in love. Even when he discovers that she is married and pregnant, he tries to save her from her hateful husband who says he will only divorce her if she will give him the child. Smith hates her but tries to hold on to her because he cannot lose: ‘Only nice people lose.’
Laurents had one major problem in writing a logical screenplay out of this situation – divorce was not allowed in Hollywood films. The alternative in many films of the period involved murdering the husband. Laurents’s somewhat bizarre ending dispatched the baby who dies after a premature birth thus robbing Smith of his hold on Leona. If Rope expressed Laurents’s conflicted view of his homosexuality at the time, Caught allowed him to express his views of unbridled materialism. The film reflects Laurents’s sympathy with the views of his left-wing Hollywood friends. Leona is torn between her desire for wealth and security, for which a high personal price must be paid, and the ideals of the good doctor who tells her: ‘Money alone isn’t security.’ He tells her that she must decide how important money is to her as she chooses between a terrible marriage and him. At the end it is clear that she will be with the idealistic doctor. Caught earned less than a million dollars at the box office. While critics were not impressed at the time of the film’s premiere, it has since been positively reappraised by admirers of Max Ophüls’s work.
East Side Story
1949, the year Caught was filmed, was also the year the eight-year on and off gestation process of West Side Story began. Actor Montgomery Clift, Jerome Robbins’s lover at the time, asked the choreographer to help him prepare to play Romeo. This led Robbins to think about the possibility of a modern-day interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic. His 1949 ballet, The Guests, created for the New York City Ballet, was loosely based on the idea of star-crossed lovers from warring factions.23 Robbins approached Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein with the idea for East Side Story, a musical version of Romeo and Juliet with the Jews and Catholics as the warring factions. Bernstein first saw the story as worthy of grand opera treatment, but Laurents resisted: ‘I want to make one thing clear before we go any further and that is that I’m not writing any fucking libretto for any goddamned Bernstein opera!’24 Laurents also worried that the idea was too close to that of Abie’s Irish Rose by Anne Nichols, which opened in 1922 and played for a record-breaking 2,327 performances as well as a record-breaking long-running national tour, movie (1928), and radio show (1942–1944). ‘“East Side Story” was Abie’s Irish Rose set to music. I bowed out.’25
Back to Broadway: The Bird Cage
Between work on films, Laurents was writing his next Broadway play, The Bird Cage, which ran for only twenty-one performances in 1950. Like Caught, the play is a critique of capitalism and men who abuse power. The central character has no redeeming virtues to win an audience’s sympathy or keep its interest. Wally Williams, emcee and half owner of a sleazy New York nightclub, only knows money, power and control. He has a long list of people he despises: his wife because the money that was supposed to come with the marriage never materialized; any girl who will not have sex with him; and his teenaged son because he isn’t manly enough to have sex with the girl Wally provided for him. When his only supporter, the club pianist, talks back to him, Wally slams the lid of the piano keyboard on his hands. At the end, when Wally has lost control of the club and everyone has walked away, he sets fire to his tawdry little kingdom. Laurents has deftly captured the working-class patois of his characters but the play was too melodramatic to be successful.
The Time of the Cuckoo
In 1950, the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act, was passed by Congress over President Harry Truman’s veto. One of its edicts was that anyone deemed subversive would be denied a passport. Throughout the 1940s, both in New York and Hollywood, Laurents socialized with left-wing friends and even thought of himself as left-wing (he used this part of his past in his screenplay for his most famous film, The Way We Were [1973]). He shouldn’t have been surprised to find that an anti-communist publication, Red Channels, listed him as one of 150 subversives in show business. Laurents’s response was to get a passport as fast as he could and go to Europe on an extended sightseeing trip with Farley Granger and some leftist friends. Eventually to clear his name and be able to continue traveling freely, Laurents wrote a letter explaining his political views. The powers that be found his political philosophy so eccentric that they decided he couldn’t possibly be a threat to national security.
Among the stops on his first Grand Tour with Farley Granger and friends was Venice, the inspiration and setting for Laurents’s next play, The Time of the Cuckoo, which brought him together again with Shirley Booth, who had just had great success with William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba on stage and on film. The Time of the Cuckoo presents a favourite topic of American authors from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to the present, the clash of Old World and New World sensibilities. The setting is a Venice pensione run by free-spirited Madame Fioria. One of her tenants is a 40ish ‘fancy secretary’ from New York, Leona Samish. Leona is socially outgoing but deeply lonely. Her parents died when she was sixteen, leaving her to support and care for her younger siblings. Now she is deeply conscious of being a single in a couples’ world. She would love to have a romance, ‘a wonderful mystical magical miracle,’26 in Venice. Through a series of coincidences, Leona meets a Venetian shopkeeper, Renato Di Rossi, who takes an interest in her. While Renato is charming and offers the romantic adventure Leona wishes for, she cannot trust his motivation. Moreover, her American puritanism makes it difficult for her to be with a married man, even if his marriage is not a happy one. As Madame Fioria tells her, ‘In Italy, there is not divorce, there is only discretion.’27 Eventually, Leona’s suspicions and her American materialism destroy any hope of a romance.
Through a young couple who also are staying in the pensione – Eddie, a young American artist and his wife, June – Laurents explores the dynamics of monogamous marriage and women who have no life outside of their marriage. Eddie is capable of having a life apart from his wife – his art, sex with Madame Fioria – and still love June. June endangers their marriage by wanting too much from a spouse, ‘I have to be everything to someone I love.’28 It is not clear at the end of the play how their marriage will survive. To the Italians, the Americans are children who prevent their own happiness as a result of their puritanism and materialism. At a crucial moment in the play, Leona says, ‘It would be great if you could come here from America with nothing but a suitcase. But – you don’t come over that way.’29
The Time of the Cuckoo had a respectable run of 263 performances. Laurents later confessed that the play ‘was a moderate success that gave me moderate standing in the theatre.’30 Shirley Booth understood the basic weakness in the play: ‘In The Time of the Cuckoo, I played a woman who is very sorry for herself. It was one of my most difficult roles. I kept telling the author that the minute a character is sorry for herself, the audience won’t be.’31 The play was adapted by other writers into the film Summertime (1955), with Katherine Hepburn. Laurents had nothing good to say about the film adaptation after his screenplay was weakened by director David Lean and his star actress. It was also adapted into the ill-fated 1964 musical, Do I Hear a Waltz?, with book by Laurents, music by Richard Rodgers, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
West Side Story Begins
While Laurents was in Hollywood working on Summertime, Leonard Bernstein was preparing for concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Jerome Robbins was working on the film version of The King and I (he had choreographed the Broadway musical). Laurents and Bernstein had a poolside discussion about the Latino gang problem in Los Angeles, which quickly led them to think about turning East Side Story into West Side Story about gang warfare between whites and Puerto Ricans. Robbins was equally excited about the idea. However, all three had other projects. Laurents had some other screen assignments (Anastasia, based on the play by Marcel Maurette and an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel, Bonjour Tristesse), and was working on his next Broadway play, A Clearing in the Woods. Bernstein was working on Candide and Robbins was involved with the musical Bells Are Ringing, which he was slated to direct and choreograph (with Bob Fosse). Bernstein quickly realized that he couldn’t write both music and lyrics, so Laurents arranged for his young friend Stephen Sondheim to meet with Bernstein. The rest is history.
Psychoanalysis and A Clearing in the Woods
In the process of his therapy with psychiatrist Judd Marmor, Laurents came to understand why he had been frightened of Farley Granger moving in with him: ‘I was afraid that if he lived with me, he would know me.’32 This expression of self-loathing echoes throughout A Clearing in the Woods, which opened in January 1957. Overcoming his own self-hatred, particularly because of his homosexuality, allowed Laurents to enjoy a relationship with Tom Hatcher begun in 1954, which lasted until Hatcher’s death in 2006.33
In A Clearing in the Woods, Laurents attempted to ‘soar above the confines of naturalistic theatre.’34 The clearing that is the setting for the play is not a realistic location. Rather it is a psychological landscape where Virginia, the central character, comes to terms with her past and with herself. Virginia is a woman in her thirties who is in the throes of depression. Like Leona Samish, she is an executive secretary, about as far as a woman could then go in the corporate world. Virginia has been a failure in her relationships with men because she demands that they have the professional success she is not allowed. She has never fully expressed herself to the men in her life because if people truly knew her, they would not like her. In the clearing, Virginia has to confront those men. More important, she has to interact with versions of herself at different stages in her life: as a child, as a teenager, and as a young woman. Like Peter Coen in Home of the Brave, Virginia has to accept that she is not as different or special as she wanted to be. At the end, she tells her younger selves, ‘Accepting you as you are means I can never be what I dreamed.’ Their response is, ‘An end to dreams isn’t an end to hope.’35
A Clearing in the Woods was not successful because Laurents was too prosaic a writer to successfully create a poetic drama. He explains too much, repeats explanations too often. Laurents felt that Kim Stanley, an actress, he believed, ‘whose brilliant acting talent was almost matched by her talent for self-extinction,’36 never was able to communicate any of the humor necessary to make the audience sympathize with the character.37 It isn’t clear that another actress would have made much difference. As New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson accurately observed, ‘Virginia is not an interesting woman.’38 The play ran for only thirty-six performances.
Finally West Side Story
West Side Story went into production eight years after Laurents, Bernstein, and Robbins discussed the idea for East Side Story. Laurents and Bernstein were both smarting from the failures of A Clearing in the Woods and Candide and eager to create a new kind of Broadway musical.39 Their first producer, Cheryl Crawford, backed out after failing to find backers interested in a dark musical with a cast of unknowns: She told the creators, ‘We have had this whole school of ash can realism.’40 After Stephen Sondheim told his good friend, producer Harold Prince, about their problems getting West Side Story produced, Prince and his producing partner Robert Griffith took on the show, quickly found the funding, and set a September date for its opening at the Winter Garden Theatre.
According to Leonard Bernstein’s biographer Meryle Secrest, the collaborators would discuss the musical’s concept and overall shape:
Only after these discussions would he [Laurents] begin writing, ‘to stay ahead of them,’ he explained. ‘For instance, Steve [Sondheim] had to take diction and character from the playwright; then he and Lenny would work on the songs. As for Jerry Robbins, he is part of [choreographer] Antony Tudor’s literary tradition of choreography and would want to know what the dance was about, so I would write him a scenario.41
Laurents understood that, ‘My task … was to drive as eloquently and economically as possible to the musical moment, be it song, or dance, or both.’42 This may be why West Side Story has less spoken dialogue than most musicals. Sondheim has stated, ‘Of all the things I gleaned from working with Arthur, the most pointed was an awed respect for the book writer. … The book writer is the source from which the songwriter … takes character, diction, tone and style, and sometimes dialogue.’43 Actually, there is more dialogue than Laurents or his colleagues originally intended. Laurents wrote a speech for Maria after Tony has been killed that Bernstein and Sondheim were supposed to turn into a song. Bernstein admitted that he never could find an effective way to set Maria’s final lines: ‘Everything sounded wrong. I made a difficult, painful, surgical decision not to set it at all.’44 The musical ends with Laurents’s words, not Bernstein’s music.
West Side Story as Finale
While Laurents was justly proud of his work on West Side Story, he was not satisfied with the original production. He worked with Robbins directing the dialogue scenes but could not get the result he wanted with a cast of dancers who were not trained as actors. He thought, ‘The music was magnificent but it was poorly sung and the acting if anything was non-existent.’45 In 2009, at ninety-two years of age, Laurents took on the task of directing a revival of West Side Story. He was determined that ‘the acting was going to be on a par with the ability to dance and sing.’46 That production had a slightly longer run than the original production. At the end of his long career Laurents put his stamp on West Side Story as director as well as book writer. Nonetheless, although Jerome Robbins had been dead for eleven years, the posters and Playbill still contained the same box containing the statement ‘Entire Production Directed and Choreographed by Jerome Robbins’ that infuriated Laurents back in 1957.
Conclusion
Throughout his early career, Laurents the playwright was experimenting with new ways of structuring stage drama that reflected the free movement in time and space possible in radio drama and screenplays. This is evident in Home of the Brave, which moved back and forth from the present in a military hospital to the traumatic past on a Pacific island, to the symbolic setting and dreamlike quality of A Clearing in the Woods. One can see how Laurents could be drawn to musical theatre narratives, which move more freely in space and time than the typical one-set dramas of the period. Being a playwright drawn to formal experimentation, he was the perfect choice to create the book for what was certainly an experimental musical. Moreover, his years adapting novels and plays into film scripts gave him the experience necessary to translate Romeo and Juliet into a new medium. Laurents never had another play produced on Broadway. From West Side Story on, he would be primarily associated with musicals and screenplays.
