Marcus Connelly: "Gangway for de Lawd" (February 1970 | Volume: 21, Issue: 2)

Marcus Connelly: "Gangway for de Lawd"

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Authors: John L. Phillips

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February 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 2

Just forty years ago this month—on the evening of February 26, 1930—at Broadway’s old Mansfield Theatre, there was uttered for the first time the most awesome entrance cue in all of theatrical history. “Gangway!” shouted the angel Gabriel. “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!”

The context of that line was a play of eighteen Biblical scenes in which the Lord, sometimes walking the earth and sometimes watching it from aloft, was shown to he both guide and follower of mankind along its uncertain way. The play was utterly unaffected. It was also radical: it was conceived as if seen through the eyes of blacks; the Lord was, logically, black too. There were no white roles.

The play was The Green Pastures. It became, on the spot, part of America’s dramatic canon; it would win a Pulitzer prize for its author-director, Marc Connelly.

Transported, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times called the play “the divine comedy of the modern theatre.” Alexander Woollcott commented that it, was “the finest achievement of the American theatre in the hundred years during which there has been one worth considering.” He added pensively, “Perhaps those, whom it most readily moves to tears are people who are crying in the dark and cold, weeping for something their world has lost.”

Marcus Cook Connelly, hale and honed at seventy-nine, is scrubbed, pink, deceptively cherubic, and at ease with his considerable girth. He looks for the best in people and circumstances. He speaks easily of himself both as the son of a McKeesport, Pennsylvania, hotelkeeper and as the author of The Green Pastures . He still seems gently amused by all the fuss. Recently lie recalled the genesis of the fuss:

 

Actually, I think it was a case of having at least an elbow-rubbing’acquaintance with—well, I talked to the actors who came to niy lather’s hotel in McKeesport. He knew a hell of a lot of them. Instead of staying in hotels in Pittsburgh when they were playing there, they’ll often come out to stay with us. That was about fourteen miles, and they’ll commute back in by train. Now all this is a very belated inference, but 1 think that was probably the start of things with me.

I can remember peope like, oh, Blanche Bates and Chauncey Olcott, Buffalo Bill and Chester de Vaughn and some of the other stars who used to come through. I used to stare at Kellar the Great [a magician of no small repute] when he’d go through the lobby, and God Almighty, I didn’t know what to make of it. It was amorphous; it was just, well, Kellar. A child enjoys, I think, the intangibility of admiration.

You drink in wonder at that age. It has almost the same pleasing effect on you as lemonade, you know. His secondary schooling completed, young Connelly spent the next jew years in Pittsburgh as a reporter and build-up drama critic for the Gazette Times. He