Heaven on Earth

(See front cover)

When Marc Connelly, under the influence of Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam An' His Chillun, had finished The Green Pastures, he took it to Producer Jed Harris. Producer Harris was busy with Uncle Vanya (TIME, April 21, 1930). Producer Crosby Gaige also turned down the Connelly piece and the Theatre Guild would have none of it. But the play interested Rowland Stebbins, an inactive Wall Streeter who was having a fling at Broadway under the name of "Laurence Rivers." The character of "de Lawd" in Connelly's Negro miracle play pleasantly reminded music-loving Mr. Stebbins of Wagner's "Wotan." There was some difficulty about getting a theatre. The premiere at the last minute was postponed four days. But on Feb. 26, 1930, The Green Pastures was finally presented in Manhattan.

"Simply and briefly one of the finest things that the theatre of our generation has seen," said the World's critic.

"It somehow fails to click. . . ." complained John Mason Brown in the Post. His critical box score was top that year.

"The divine comedy of the modern theatre," exulted Brooks Atkinson in the Times.

Variety chirped in the theatre's argot: "Artistic success that gives little promise of attaining commercial prosperity for its producer and author. Latter probably will be praised more than he will be paid. . . . A 10-week stay at the Mansfield should be sufficient. . . . Delightful moments are numerous--but pretty arty for a mugg and dreadfully lacking in box-office ability."

For once Variety's prognostication was wholly wrong. For producer and author The Green Pastures proved not only an artistic but a financial Heaven on earth. Marc Connelly had put a little bit of everything dramatically good into his white man's idea of a black man's idea of the Bible stories. Audiences split their sides laughing at the play's account of Genesis, in which "de Lawd," wanting to provide "firmament" for the custard at a celestial fish fry, makes too much, has to create the Earth as a place to "dreen it off." Spectators were thrilled at the Battle of Jericho, titillated by the sins of Babylon, touched by the implicit faith of Moses. The excellent Hall Johnson spirituals drew long volleys of applause. But far surpassing the lay reaction was that of Churchmen. Many a preacher made headlines by declaring the show to be a symbol of nothing less than a Revival of the Faith. Parishioners were urged from the pulpit to attend. They did, in mighty droves.

The show ran 18 months in New York, won a Pulitzer Prize, and after 1,652 performances in 203 towns in 39 States and one Canadian province which grossed approximately $3,000,000, returns to Manhattan this week to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its premiere. Chu Chin Chow, which opened in London in 1916 and closed three years after the Armistice, ran long enough (2,238 performances) for practically every soldier in the Allied armies to have seen it. Abie's Irish Rose, which got to be a national habit, played 2,532 performances in New York alone, while nine companies took it on the road. But The Green Pastures had by this week become a quasireligious, semi-public U. S. institution. It had been acted the length & breadth of the land by only one company, virtually the same 75 Negroes who opened in it five years ago. And what had happened since the premiere made an extraordinary chapter in U. S. theatrical history.

On the Road. In September 1931, an eight-car special train carried the all-black company and its scenery to Chicago for a 19-week engagement, the longest outside New York. Then The Green Pastures looped about through the Midwest, swung out across the prairies and over the Rockies to Seattle, down the West Coast through San Francisco and Los Angeles, wound up its first touring season in Denver in July 1932 (see map). Next season the tour began in Boston, Mass., hopped from town to town in the Middle Atlantic States and closed in Easton, Pa. Producer Stebbins, worried lest Southern audiences might resent a Negro's impersonation of the Deity, invited a group of Southern editors, led by Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution, to review the play in Washington. They went home singing the praises of The Green Pastures so loudly that in October 1933 it began a grand tour of the South, which was continued, chiefly in one-day stands, last year. Only section of the nation unvisited by The Green Pastures is the Southwest. Reasons: too few Negroes, too few whites who know anything about Negroes. But elsewhere in the U. S., 2,000,000 people have seen the show.

As the troupe went rolling year after year from one successful engagement to another, The Green Pastures grew into an enormous legend which somehow suggested the vogue of Uncle Tom's Cabin half a century ago. It played in churches, colleges, prisons, clubs, fraternal lodges as well as on legitimate stages. Biggest house played was the Shriners Auditorium (4,000 seats) in Des Moines in 1932, where also the biggest day's receipts ($11,000) were taken in. Smallest day's business ($600) was at Big Spring, Tex. Smallest theatre encountered (900 seats) was in La Crosse, Wis. But plenty of stages were so tiny that the stage hands had to stand behind the flats to hold them up. The only time the show did not actually go on in all its five years was at Memphis. A mighty Act of God, the Mississippi flood two months ago washed out the railroad, canceled one matinee of the pious spectacle.

Religious intolerance the troupe met nowhere. Jim Crowism popped up in odd places. In the North and West the cast usually put up in Negro hotels, Y. M. C. A.'s and Y. W. C. A.'s. But in Madison, Wis. no lodging was to be had anywhere and the players sat up all night in the railroad station, the women and children whimpering in the cold dark. Only one town, Lubbock, Tex., banned the show because its actors were colored. And with the exceptions of Washington, where Negro intellectuals picketed the theatre and threatened to kidnap "de Lawd" when audience segregation was announced, and Lynchburg, Va., where blackamoors agitated against being shunted to a special entrance, The Green Pastures created no racial animosity. In the South the cast boarded in the private homes of well-to-do Negroes and complained loudly of being gouged. They could not carp at the loyalty of colored audiences, however. For Negroes the advent of the show was, if possible, even more of a social event than it was for whites. In the production's wake were left such anecdotes as that of the bewildered but enthusiastic Roanoke, Va. field hand who asked his boss "fo' foh bits to see de Cow Pastures." In Atlanta a black mammy was told at the ticket window that the performance was sold out, that tickets were to be had only on mail order. She waited around the theatre lobby all day, finally reappearing at the wicket to demand: "When is de womenfolks gonna git their chance?"

Bound together by the exigencies of 40,000 mi. of common travel, the 75 actors and actresses were cemented into a big family. Whenever the home town of a member of the cast was reached, the others would escort him off the train chanting: "So-&-so, red-hot rhythm!" Birthdays and anniversaries were scrupulously observed with feasts and small presents. And dusky romance blossomed backstage.

Noah (Morris McKinney) married Eve (Geraldine Gooding). Cain (Thomas Russell) fell under the spell of Gertrude DeVerney, one of the angel choristers, Old King Pharaoh's Head Magician (Arthur Porter) took a wife outside the cast.

Some of the actors outgrew their parts. Only five of the 15 original cherubim remained small enough to take part in this week's jubilee performance. And Death, too, visited the troupe. The first Gabriel, Wesley Hill, was run over by a taxicab while the show was still in New York. The second, Samuel Davis, died of a heart attack at Indianapolis. But the Gabriel of the next four years, Doe Doe Green, onetime vaudeville sharpshooter, refused to believe the part was jinxed. This week, however, he will become an understudy and Gabriel will be played by Oscar Polk (Face the Music; Both Your Houses). Also lost along the road were a Moses, a Noah, an Arch Deacon, A Slender Angel.

But "de Lawd" played on.

De Lawd. Richard Berry Harrison, the venerable old Negro with the Prince Albert coat, the white string tie and the flowing white hair who plays "de Lawd God Jehovah" in The Green Pastures, has never missed a cue or a curtain call in all the play's 1,652 performances. His understudy is still solely employed teaching the children of the cast.

In making the spiritual point which recommends his play so strongly, Marc Connelly has God leave Heaven four times ("I'll be back Saddy") in an effort to make Man do right, finally substituting Mercy for Might when He suffers with his Son on Calvary. Prior to one of his unsuccessful visits to Earth, "de Lawd" confides to Gabriel, his Pullman porter-like secretary: "De whole thing rests on my shoulders. I declare, I guess dat's why I feel so solemn and serious. . . . You know dis thing's turned into quite a proposition."

On Sept. 28, in Norfolk, at the conclusion of the 1495th performance. Producer Stebbins and Playwright Connelly officially recognized the extent to which The Green Pastures rests on Actor Harrison's aging shoulders. It was his 70th birthday. So they raised his salary and for the first time billed him as the star of the show he had carried so long and so well.

Honors had already been heaped on Actor Harrison. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gave him its Spingarn Medal as the outstanding Negro of 1930. Howard University made him a Master of Arts. From North Carolina State College of Agriculture & Engineering and Lincoln University he received Doctorates of Dramatic Literature. Boston University presented him its Sigma Key. He was asked to speak at Rotary Clubs, to colleges and congregations wherever the show went, and his most prized possession is the Bible from the Clergy Club of New York, with the names of all its members inscribed. Governors of States shook his hand as, like an ancient patriarch, Actor Harrison led his theatrical flock about the land. And the first thing he did after alighting from his train in Manhattan last week was to go and see Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. "Will I meet any politicians in Heaven, Lawd?" asked the head of the city with the world's largest Negro population (327,706). Actor Harrison graciously replied: "The question is, Mr. Mayor, will any politicians meet you there?"

Being "de Lawd" is no mere mimic part to Richard Harrison; it is a full-time job, onstage and off. For the members of the cast, he is just short of an actual deity. He arbitrates their squabbles and since they are mostly professional actors from Harlem, they periodically have to be lent money. Actor Harrison is known as "Two Dollar" Harrison to his colleagues because he is always available for a loan to that extent.

He achieves a state of grace before each performance by meditating alone for half an hour, and has never yet made an entrance to Gabriel's strident cue "Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah" without breaking into a cold sweat. "If you got to thinking about it too much and let it get hold of you offstage as well as on," says he, "I don't think your sanity would stand it. It's a hard part to play." He has had to put up with a good deal of hysterical adoration. A friend of 50 years, one Reverend Moses, came backstage after a performance, refused to shake hands, crying: "I just want to look at you. You are my conception of the Lord!"

Harrison himself is convinced that The Green Pastures is divinely inspired. With the deepest humility, he feels that God has selected him to spread the Word through the theatre. Piety prevented him from accepting the part at first. Later, he says, "when Mr. Connelly 'phoned me on that Monday night, I didn't answer, but something in my soul replied: 'I'll stick with you through thick and thin, Mr. Connelly!' "

For Richard Berry Harrison, life up to his 65th year was woefully thin. His parents were slaves who fled to freedom in Canada. He and five sisters and brothers were born in London, Ontario. Like their parents, his sisters and brothers never amounted to much. "And," says one Negro biographer, "de Lawd nearly missed out."

After a scant education in London's public schools, Richard Harrison began hopping bells in Detroit hotels. Stage struck, he went to a dramatic school for a short while, later made a precarious living by giving Shakespearean readings to Negro audiences in Canada. The next 40 years he spent as a dining car waiter on the Santa Fe running between Chicago and Los Angeles, as a police station handyman in Chicago, as a wanderer in the Deep South. At intervals he taught dramatics at North Carolina Agriculture & Engineering College, Branch Normal (Arkansas) and Flipper-Key College (Oklahoma). Mostly he made his headquarters around Haines Institute at Augusta, Ga. At commencement time he would put on plays. In return, Headmistress Lucy Laney literally kept him from starving during the rest of the year. She died the day that The Green Pastures came to Augusta in 1933.

Harrison was employed by the New York Federation of Churches directing Negro church festivals in Harlem when Destiny and Marc Connelly caught up with him in the autumn of 1929. On the road Actor Harrison lives with friends he made years ago while on Chautauqua tours, or in Y. M. C. A.'s. He has not squandered a liberal salary. A large part of it goes to the support of an invalid wife, whom he married 40 years ago with his friend, the late Negro Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, as best man. A son, who struggles with a jazz band, and a daughter, who has proved an indifferent performer in Negro musical shows, also require "de Lawd's'' financial assistance. Harrison lost money when the Binga State Bank of Chicago failed. But he has a solid investment in two Chicago Black Belt houses. He also has satisfied a lifelong vanity by buying a big diamond ring.

With a reputation in the Negro theatre equal to those of Paul Robeson, the late Charles Gilpin and Jules Bledsoe, Actor Harrison plans to open a dramatic school if and when The Green Pastures closes. "The Lord," humbly says "de Lawd," "has showered His mercies on me in my old age."

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