Part of the series: “By Nancy”
TPT Commentary: As a social worker trained in counseling and reintegrating returning veterans and their families, I found one scene especially telling and timeless despite its age: The wife, living alone and raising an infant, has learned to rewire a lamp. Her husband (and his wife) are almost disappointed that it actually works. Soldier’s Wife challenges audiences with an all-to-often retold and enacted parable of a soldier’s return to home only to find that the world moved on without him, and the wife who must decide to relinquish or share her new-found agency (and in this case, celebrity). Who should be celebrated, the humble soldier who enlisted, leaving a white collar well -paying job, to witness atrocities being repaid by an injury which prompts his discharge, or the overnight success and media darling who never asked for the attention? Soldier’s Wife by Rose Franken is a pleasant and straightforward play that perhaps moves too quickly in its conceits, but with delightfully modern dialogue and round characters. The play ends with a stereotypical acceptance of the status quo and a return to traditional gender roles but, this time, by choice.
Recommendation: Strong: All theatres, most especially those outside larger cities and in more conservative markets. This writer is aware that this play breaks two of his own guidelines: the play is 80 years old and is set in Manhattan. My recommendation supersedes these guidelines because the themes are too universal and the medium too inviting and effective to ignore.
Summary: An officer returns from the war to find his wife has become a self reliant, successful writer, turning their world topsy turvy.
Themes: self-reliance, women’s rights/place in society/gender expectations, horror of war, reunification, literary/media ethics
Cast: 3f, 2m
Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, includes 2 intermissions, 3 acts
Royalties (professional): Minimum Fee: $90 per performance
Sets: One set,pre-war NYC apartment living room with implied exits to the kitchen common hall, and at least one bedroom, and a window
Costumes: Approximately 15: Period 1944: Women: simply dresses, high fashion business dresses, overcoats, hats. Men: Suits: overcoats, hats
Props: Acquirable: fresh flowers in a variety of “freshness,” “antique/used” furniture for 1944, period baby items (pram, diapers), radiator, boxed long-stem roses (yellow), period cigarettes (possibly cases)
Provenance:
Playwright: Rose Dorothy Lewin Franken was a celebrated Broadway playwright and director, a Hollywood screenwriter and a popular novelist whose fiction touched a sympathetic chord in American women. Although influenced by the domestic dramas of Sidney Howard, she was essentially a self-taught playwright who learned dramatic construction from textbooks. Another Language, her third play, opened at the Booth Theatre, New York, on April 25, 1932, and ran for 453 performances. After her husband’s death from tuberculosis in 1932, the playwright relocated to Hollywood and began the second phase of her writing career as a sought-after screenwriter. While still in Hollywood, Franken began to publish the Claudia short stories. After an absence of nine years from the theater, Franken returned with Claudia, a dramatization of her fiction. Dissatisfied with the casting choices, Franken took over the direction. It opened in London at St. Martin’s Theatre, on September 17, 1942, and returned to the St. James Theatre, New York, on May 24, 1942. The film (1943) starred McGuire and Robert Young, who were paired again in Claudia and David, a 1946 movie sequel based upon another Franken novel.Although an assimilated Jew, Franken was sensitive toward discrimination.Outrageous Fortune, Franken’s most daring play, takes a hard look at antisemitism and homosexuality. Despite their considerable wealth and talent, many of the characters are hiding, living in conformity to the dominant culture. Rapid literary construction, a denial of any revisions—which is not borne out by her manuscripts— and an emphasis on her feather-brained helplessness and domesticity became characteristics of Franken’s public persona.
Play: Opening in October of 1944, with Martha Scott and Myron McCormick in the lead roles, with favorable notices and running a respectable 253 performances at the John Golden Theatre, Soldier’s Wife closed less than a week after V-E Day, and was included in that season’s Burns Mantle Best Plays annual.
Purchase: $9.95
Reviews:
Modern: New York, 2006
CurtainUp, TimeOut(harsh), Village Voice, Variety(not impressed), Time (must subscribe), NYTimes, Broadway World
Drinking: Scotch neat, up to 3 times
Smoking: none, but cigarettes are shared
Sex: implied relations between wife and husband, playful spanking (inappropriate by modern standards)
Language: bitch, bitches (up to 3 times)
Violence: playful spanking (inappropriate by modern standards)
Other possibly controversial subject matter: Implied horror of war and its lasting effects on the psyche of those affected by it; Divorce and remarriage
Rating: PG, for brief language
Format inspired by the sadly suspended operations of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre (then enhanced by TPT)
cover photo: collage of Mint Theater Company Production Photos,NYC Broadway Playbill John Golden Theatre January 1945
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