End of the Road

Broadway last week reached the end of Tobacco Road. After seven and a half years, the 3,180th and last performance of history's longest continuously running drama was signalized by no valedictory speeches or mortuary effects. But in the third row sat slight, beaming Francis De Valiant, who was seeing the play for the 34th time and is, symbolically enough, advertising director of Fairchild Sons, Inc., New York undertakers.

During its 390-week run, Tobacco Road was advertised as "closing" 389 times, lost money during 70 weeks, just about broke even during 42 weeks. It netted its backers (chiefly Playwright Jack Kirkland, who adapted the play from Erskine Caldwell's novel, and his lawyer, Harry L. Oshrin) $565,000 from the Broadway production and a total of $1,800,000 including road-company profits and the sale of cinema rights for $200,000 to 20th Century-Fox.

Its road companies have played 300 towns and cities, with return engagements in 150. On Broadway five actors have appeared in the leading role of bearded, slounging, Georgia backwoods Farmer Jeeter Lester: Henry Hull (233 times), James Barton (1,899), James Bell (305), Eddie Garr (120), Will Geer (623).

Last week Tobacco Road had become a national phenomenon known to millions. Only one pressing question remained about it: just why this drama of degenerate, underprivileged lusts and humors, dramatically sound but hardly startling, indecent but not outrageously so, should have run as long as it did--853 times more than Abie's Irish Rose.

Devotees of theatrical realism could at least take satisfaction from the fact that the record-breaking play was about as far from a drama of escape as it is possible to imagine. And enemies of Broadway's dramacritics could enjoy remembering that almost every one of them, with the exception of the late, wise Percy Hammond, had damned the play and said it had no chance. Last week Playwright Kirkland announced that he would give several of Tobacco Road's props--a wagon wheel, a tree branch, a well, a shack--to the Smithsonian Institution.

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