The Distaff Side
I recently learned that my great grandmother, Elizabeth C. Crunden (aka, Mrs. Frank P Crunden), made her St. Louis acting debut at the age of 72, and apparently stole the show. Her participation was the result of a dream long deferred - her first stage appearance had been in a local production in Keokuk, Iowa when she was 15 years old. In the intervening 57 years, she married and raised six children, and she and her husband were active in the social and arts scene in St. Louis, including consistent support for local theater.
“Such a hit she made in the part of "Mrs. Venables" in “The Distaff Side,” playing the Artists’ Guild Theater on Union Boulevard for two weeks (closing next Wednesday night) they think they have in her what in theatrical parlance is called ‘a find.’
… Mrs. Crunden dominated every scene in which she appeared by the sheer majesty of her presence and carried off most of the applause…”
The St. Louis Dispatch article, written by Marguerite Martin, published May 3, 1937, focuses on “Mrs. F. P. Crunden’, and quotes her extensively. Apparently my great-grandmother was fearless and full of opinions.
"Nonsense" protested Mrs. Crunden when interviewed in her dressing room. "I couldn't possibly have done the part if the whole company, every member of the cast, hadn't turned in and learned all my lines, so if I faltered or forgot, they were there to pick up and fill in the gaps. It isn't easy, when you are 72 to memorize lines. Your brain gets a kind of crusted over it, which is hard to penetrate. And none of us could have done so well if we had not had the clever Van Druten play as a vehicle.”
I have not yet had a chance to read the play, but a quick online search tells me that it’s “a comedy of three women” that explores the relationship between love and marriage. John Van Druten was a well known playwright in the 1930s and 1940s - one of his plays, I Am a Camera is the basis of the movie “Cabaret.” He was famous for his wit and subversive insights on society.
One of the best parts of the article is that many in the audience had seen the original version of the play during its 102-performance run at the Apollo Theater in London:
“She has given her interpretation of "Mrs. Venables" a subtlety that was missed by the original creator of the part, those who saw the company brought over from England to say. In that production the part was played by a woman 24 years old who preferred to make the 75-year-old matriarch a sharp tongued old virago. "Too obvious I thought” said Mrs. Crunden. "I have known too many elegantly cruel mean women, so elegant they create sympathy for themselves while they attain their selfish egocentric ends through a refinement of cruelty."
I know I’ve encountered my fair share of “elegantly cruel” women who focus solely on how they can “attain their selfish egocentric ends” no matter the cost to others. I can’t fathom what playing such a character on stage must have been like for her.
The one question the interviewer never asks is “why”? Why did great-grandma decide she needed to be in this play? Reading between the lines, it sounds like she was offered the role, and then ran with it.
"it has been a pleasant interval,” she observed. "The seven weeks of preparation of the play in the monotony of a winter in the country. .. With few responsibilities and little to do but gaze out of window you get the feeling, all the world is like your own backyard. This has been another window. It is the same but one gets a different outlook. I recommend such diversions to other old women.
In other words, dear reader, get outside your comfort zone and you will get a new perspective on life, have a good time, and may even bring to life a talent you have long ignored.
I’ll leave you with the final paragraph of the article. One does not improve upon a mic drop such as this.
“Possibly I would not have been accepted if I had offered myself at the tryouts she amended. At the first reading of our little play with Strickland, interpreting each shade of meaning in each line, I said to him "I never suspected you of so much intelligence." He came back at me afterwards, saying “I never suspected you of so much intelligence.”