DON'T PUT YOUR DAUGHTER ON THE STAGE

by Margaret Webster ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1972

More of Margaret Webster's The Same Only Different (1969) which picks up the threads of her dedicated life in 1937 at the time when her mother, Dame May Whitty, was making Night Must Fall in Hollywood and the three members (her father too) of this famous theater family were on this side of the ocean. Margaret too tried Hollywood where, like any other woman director, she failed ""to make the grade."" But there were her many years of directing Shakespeare, Chekhov, and on to the financial failure of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory and her own road (via truck and bus) company. ""Theater isn't good business; it is low, very low in the lists of 'cultural necessities.'"" The fabulous invalid's increasing invalidism undercuts most of this (cf. the title, disavowed at the close) and Miss Webster's lifelong attempt to keep it alive as well as herself -- she managed better than most. Then there are the very distracting years she spent with the Met before it was taken down (a ""vandalism""), on lecture tours, and in the '50's, her own victimization at the hands of the Un-American vigilantes. Names, perhaps less than in the earlier volume, appear just as casually here -- Maurice Evans, Helen Hayes, Judith Anderson who was helped by a hypnotist to sleepwalk as Lady Macbeth, Noel Coward, etc. And also as in the first book, she is instructive in the best sense on direction, staging and acting, with her emphasis on the simpler virtues as well as her temperate criticism of the medium she has served so well. . . . A distinguished encore by that enlightening first lady.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION