And Now For Something DIfferent

I finally got around to reading Something Different, a Carl Reiner play presented on Broadway in 1967.

What first got me intrigued was William Goldman's description of how weird and funny it was in his book The Season (where Goldman spent a year looking at Broadway). Later I read Reiner's recollection of the trouble they had behind the scenes.

Something Different was a play Reiner started as a lark. The premise is a guy who's written one hit play and hasn't been able to do anything since. He tries to recreate the original setting where and when he wrote it, down to the cockroaches. He also tries to hire a woman who will be a stand-in for his mother when his wife doesn't take to the role.

If you want to have a hit play, or movie, the ending is what counts most. The audience will forgive a lot if you have a socko finale. Unfotunately, it's the hardest part. It's easy to set things up (people think exposition is hard, but here's your chance to show off your characters and a fresh situation--Shaw said if you can't write a good first act, get out of the business). It's not that hard to increase the complications. It's the payoff that's so tricky.

In his memoir Act One, Moss Hart describes the daunting problems he and George S. Kaufman had creating the team's first Broadway hit, Once In A Lifetime. They rewrote endlessly,but though the first two acts were fine, the third act wasn't working--it simply wasn't going where the audience wanted it to go. If not for a last-second brainstorm from Hart (or so he says), the play would have flopped. (BTW, Moss Hart wrote, solo, an interesting if not entirely successful play entitled Light Up The Sky--a behind-the-scenes look at a troubled Broadway production, a small bit like Reiner's plot, not to mention Hart's life.)

In Neil Simon's Rewrites, he tells the story of The Odd Couple. On the first reading, acts one and two were hilarious but the laughs died in the third. Simon (prodded by director Mike Nichols) came up with one new version after another, driving the actors crazy, but not fixing the problem. Then someone suggested he bring back the Pigeon sisters from the second act, and that started an avalanche in his brain that ended in a hit.

Reiner had the same problem. The set-up, where the playwright is trying to get in the mood to write, works. But the third act, where we see the play he actually wrote, doesn't work.

By the way, there is no third act. I know what happened in it because of Goldman and Reiner. Moss Hart and Neil Simon both had two good acts followed by a flop of a third. They rethought and rewrote until they had something. Reiner had a different idea--let's just cut the third act. If I've got two acts that are working, isn't that enough? He took a few things from the third act, put them in the second, made sure it had an ending, and voila!

A weird, if ingenious, solution. Unfortunately, the play was not a hit.

How is it? I'll give Reiner credit, it's different. But it's just one silly thing on top of another, not adding up to much. When the jokes work, the play works, but they don't always work (though I suspect it may act better than it reads). Maybe there was no way to make a good third act (showing the play-within-a-play leads to all sorts of problems), but if you don't show it, it seems like the play is going nowhere. Cutting the third act just gets you nowhere faster.

PS One of the running gags is the characters like to quote Rochefoucauld. When I put down the play and turned on the TV, there was a character in Diamonds Are Forever quoting Rochefoucauld.