Birthday

On the December day in 1933 when Repeal killed the 18th Amendment, Manhattan theatre critics made an almost unanimous critical suggestion. They suggested that Tobacco Road be relegated to Cain's warehouse, morgue of plays that die aborning. Reviewers wrote off the play's characters as scum, the play itself as "clumsy, rudderless, callow, repulsive."

In its first five weeks, the play lost $3,800. Then audiences' word-of-mouth advertising suddenly began to change all that. Tobacco Road began to pay. Soon Anthony Brown, who had come from balmy Hollywood to direct the play, had saved enough to buy an overcoat. Henry Hull, then playing the part of filthy Jeeter Lester, found he could begin to pay the expenses of his Old Lyme, Conn, estate. After the first year's run, profits were $84,000. When Tobacco Road's second birthday rolled around, Producers Sam Grisman, Jack Kirkland and Anthony Brown threw caution to the winds, blew in $10.50 for new costumes for all the players.

Last week the cast, which now includes only three of its charter members, gave its 1,716th performance, then celebrated at a dinner the end of Tobacco Road's fourth year. It had already run longer than any other play in Broadway's history except Abie's Irish Rose (2,532 performances); its net profits were over half a million.

Whatever Tobacco Road has, it is something other than the sentimentality of Abie's Irish Rose, or of Lightnin' (1,291 performances). It is physically and verbally as dirty as any play U. S. playgoers have seen. In 13 cities, from Albuquerque, N. Mex. to Boston, Mass., its producers have had to pay lawyers to fight local censorship. In Chicago, where a brief filed in the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals called the play "a garbage pail of indecent dialogue and degenerate exhibitionism," legal defense cost nearly $75,000. As advertising it was cheap.

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