Biography: The Pearl Theatre Company, April 13, 2007

The New Yorker, May 7, 2007

Portrait of the Artist

By JOHN LAHR

A sense of comic satisfaction is what the audience takes away from the splendid revival of S. N. Behrman’s 1932 hit “Biography” (well cast and well directed by J. R. Sullivan at the Pearl). These days Behrman is remembered as a screenwriter (“Queen Christina,” with Greta Garbo), a musical librettist (“Fanny”), and a biographer (“Duveen”); but, in his time, he was best known for his urbane and erudite light touch on the Broadway stage. The revival of “Biography” makes a good case for his reinstatement to the theatrical pantheon.

Here, Behrman pits the audacious and well-named magazine editor Richard Kurt (the excellent Sean McNall)—“he has the intensity of the fanatic and the carelessness of the vagabond,” the stage directions read—against the hectic, emollient charm of the portrait painter Marion Froude (the expert Carolyn McCormick). Froude is a model of big-hearted bohemianism. She can turn a phrase and an eye; she teases, but she’s not bitchy. She is, as she says, a “laissez-faire girl,” and she provided, in 1932, an early sighting on the Broadway stage of a fully furbished and independent American female mind. Froude is known for her portraits of the power brokers of her day. “You’d be surprised how accessible some of the inaccessible people are,” she says. She knows languages, countries, men, and herself. Welcome is her defining gesture; in one way or another, she embraces everything she encounters. As Behrman has imagined her, Froude is a sort of early Katharine Hepburn, with instinctive wisdom in place of defensive wisecracks. The comedy revolves around the legend of Froude’s full life. Kurt arrives with a check and an offer to serialize her story. “You may be disappointed,” Froude says, before accepting. “You probably see headlines. . . . The Last of the Great Adventuresses, The Magda Who Wouldn’t Go Home, The Woman of a Thousand—I beg your pardon—a Hundred Affairs.”

Berhman’s style was clearly influenced by the sophisticated, high-stepping comedies of Noël Coward, who was the self-proclaimed “big celebrated cookie” of Behrman’s theatrical heyday. But where “the Master” used flippancy as a subversive, high-camp attack on normality, Berhman abdicates brittle impudence for wry tolerance. In effect, this difference in tone and emotion is the same as the one between Froude and the arch Kurt. Kurt mistakes Froude’s humanity for frivolity. “You’re superficial and casual and irresponsible,” he tells her. “You take life, which is a tragic thing, as though it were a trivial bedroom farce.” Froude dismisses Kurt’s simplification as “a defect of the radical and the young.” He says, “You don’t recognize seriousness when you see it.” “It’s the serious people who are funny,” she replies. If “Biography” doesn’t have the ingenious plotting of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s “Front Page,” it has a series of literate, well-observed cameos—the Hollywood star, the European composer, the aspiring senator, the macho mogul, the aggrieved fiancé—all of whom stir the pot and allow Froude to display her cunning and her compassion.

In Marion Froude, Berhman created a wonderful heroine, whose defining quality is not her narcissism but her receptivity. She lives in the world, not in herself. And this well-wrought comedy manages to catch the openness of heart that makes both her courage and her vulnerability irresistible. “I’ve always lived in such a rush—a kind of interminable scherzo,” she says at one point. She pauses. “ ‘Interminable scherzo’? How do you spell it?”

Biography: The Pearl Theatre Company, April 13, 2007