Free All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden Page A

humor of recognition. Glenn Hunter himself made the silent, for Paramount in 1924, and the talkie Mertons were Stuart Erwin and Red Skelton. Oddly, Merton seems not to have gone musical, though surely somebody in the BMI workshop gave it a whirl. A singing Merton would fulfill the destiny of Wilson’s creation, for the essential quality of our music theatre is that the main characters want something badly. And nobody wants more than Merton does.
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    Sifting through the categories, we find one all-important genre missing: the straight play that avoids melodrama’s upheavals and Belasco’s self-serving naturalistic études, something that doesn’t need “society” in order to be literate or a European source for imaginative color. Something, too, without cosmetic novelty. What we’re looking for is something basic, a piece about life. Just a play . There were a few, more and more as the 1920s wore on, and I hope you’re sitting down because the one I want to discuss is Rain (1922). You know this one, about the prostitute and the reverend, with the crash-and-burn star who didn’t live out the decade and two generations of references throughout the culture. If I told you that Bette Davis once headed a musical revue and that the first-act-finale burlesque spot centered on a famous tart, wouldn’t your first guess be “Sadie Thompson”?
    W. Somerset Maugham’s short story of 1921 called “Miss Thompson” (later retitled “Rain”) is really more about the reverend than about the prostitute. The setting is Pago Pago, where the missionaries Reverend and Mrs. Davidson and Dr. and Mrs. Macphail, representing the starchy propriety of civilization, come into contact with Sadie, the avatar of hedonism. Though an American, she has adopted the lifestyle of monsoon Asia, living for the sheer pleasure of it. Reverend Davidson lives “to instil into the natives a sense of sin,” and he does this by taking away all their pleasure, using his power and influence to destroy any who thwart his will. He is that singular piece of evil, the control freak using God as a front. Yet we recall the White Cargo theme: when Western man ventures too far East, his buttons open. The rain that ceaselessly pounds away symbolizes nature’s assault on order, just as Sadie’s irritating gramophone symbolizes her spirited independence. Davidson plans to make Sadie his great conversion—but it is nature itself, human nature, that proves to be the reverend’s ultimate challenge.
    He is as colossally inflexible as John Brown, but he fails his own test, and interrupts his personal-trainer prayer vigil with Sadie for carnal exercise with her. Maugham’s story cleverly withholds this all-important twist till its final two lines. At first, all we learn is that the reverend’s body has been found with its throat cut. When Dr. Macphail tries to silence Sadie’s gramophone out of respect, Sadie—who knows nothing of the reverend’s suicide—simply shouts at him. “You men!” she cries. “You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you! Pigs! Pigs!” The doctor lets out a gasp of realization. Says Maugham concisely, “He understood.”
    The play lingers past this moment, to tell Sadie what happened to Davidson and confront her with his widow, who is too shattered to do anything in the old-fashioned melodramatic style. Five years before this, there might have been fireworks, but Rain is at the least a transitional work, looking forward to the naturalistic writing of the 1930s. As the marine sergeant who is more or less Sadie’s romantic opposite stands by her side, Sadie expresses hope for a better life in her next port of call, but the words catch in her throat as she utters them. In naturalism, there are no endings; and the curtain falls.
    “Missionaries won’t like this play” was the merry observation of the Times ’ John Corbin. He thought Rain a piece of “extraordinary grip and significance,” and I need to