In troubled times, people turn to farce. When Athens was destroying itself in a disastrous war with Sparta, Aristophanes produced Lysistrata, the most amusing and most effective anti-war play ever written. When the United States was enduring the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economy had collapsed, playwrights wrote manic, optimistic farces about illusory schemes for survival.

Farce, like melodrama, is about ideas. Room Service (1937), by John Murray and Allen Boretz, focuses on the conflict between two opposing hierarchies: art and business. Art is represented by the theater; Gordon Miller is a producer struggling to stage Godspeed, a new play. Business is represented by the insolvent hotel, managed by Miller’s brother-in-law, where Miller and his cast are living and rehearsing.

Miller’s theater hierarchy includes his director, Harry Binion; his General Assistant, Faker Englund; the author of the play, Leo Davis, and Christine Marlowe and Sasha Smirnoff, two of the many actors. Miller searches for the indispensable backer and finds one in Simon Jenkins, the agent of Zachary Fiske, a “very wealthy man” acquainted with a “young lady” who wants to act. Miller and Davis agree to write in a part for her.

Art encounters business through Miller’s brother-in-law, Joseph Gribble, who manages the White Way Hotel and has been conned into becoming Miller’s partner. Gribble’s hierarchy includes Sasha Smirnoff, a waiter, and Hilda Manney, his secretary. Above him in rank are Gregory Wagner, the Supervising Director, and Senator Blake, President of the hotel chain.

The exuberant pace and recurring confrontations of Room Service occur within these two competing systems. The frenzied action is heightened by being enclosed within a fixed, unchanging space, Miller’s hotel room, which has four doors. How many people can live in one hotel room? How many exits and entrances can occur through four doors?

What was once called the “love interest” also spans the two worlds. Christine Marlowe, the actress who loves Miller and is to play the lead in Godspeed, is the secretary of Fremont, a man who has made a successful business of producing plays. Her position enables her to assist Miller. Hilda Manney, who falls in love with the playwright, is the secretary of Gribble and assists the company covertly from that position in the hotel.

Room Service, a play that describes the turmoil of staging a play, presents a recurring theme in art. Creative forms are often selfdescriptive, self-referential. Viewers may be invited through the frame of a painting showing a painter painting a painting… readers pick up a poem about a poet writing a poem about a poet… Playwrights may similarly focus on the process of staging a new play in which the characters assume that if they can only get through opening night they will attain serene consummation—a completed work of art and SRO into the foreseeable future.

Murray and Boretz, the authors of Room Service, knew what they were writing about. Murray worked as a lyricist, composer and playwright; he wrote songs and sketches for musical reviews and also wrote for radio and television. Boretz was a songwriter, playwright and screenwriter. In the 1950’s he was blacklisted by the House Un- American Activities Committee.

The opinions of the authors are perhaps reflected in a passage in Act III when Senator Blake suggests that the name of the hero of Godspeed, the play within the play, be changed from Konrad, which “sounds too much like comrade.” At the beginning of Act II, Miller tells the hungry Binion and Davis that going without eating is good for them: “President Hoover says it’s good for your stomach.” Oddly, some copies of the play substitute “Macfaddan” (the health and hair guru Benarr Macfaddan, who wrote Fasting for Health) for Hoover.

Godspeed stages “American history seen through the eyes of an ignorant Polish miner.” Binion calls it, “The Green Pastures of history”; Miller calls it, “The Cavalcade of America.” In 2006, a play describing the American dream of an uneducated immigrant, laboring in a dangerous, underpaid job, remains as topical, and subject to as much political debate, as it would have been in 1937.

The experience of Murray and Boretz is evident in the extraordinary effectiveness of Room Service. Its sharply constructed scenes, clever, concise and efficient, may seem effortless, but they are the result of expert, precisely calculated writing. The play is a textbook model of farce.

Running through the frantic escalations of the plot are a series of recurring gags and plays on words. Oswego, the home of the playwright, receives extravagant attention. Putting on all one’s clothes in order to escape from a hotel room one cannot check out of—and then taking them off again— provides visual diversion. The collector from the We Never Sleep Collection Agency becomes a running gag: Miller greets him, “It’s a pleasure to meet a man who never sleeps,” and Binion adds, “You must come up and take a nap sometime.”

The specificity of the setting is reinforced by many topical references. The Morris Plan was a banking system set up to provide credit for people who had previously depended upon loan sharks or pawn shops. The out-of-work Russian actor is compared to Gregory Ratoff and Akim Tamiroff. Ernest Lubitch and Billy Rose of the theater and Canfield of the bridge table are mentioned. The Martha Washington was a women’s hotel. The Luxor Baths flourished on West 46th Street.

In 1937 Room Service was an immediate success, running for five hundred performances. In 1938 it became a Marx Brothers film, the only one not written specifically for them and deemed their least successful; Leslie Halliwell commented: “the Marx Brothers were constrained by having to play characters with a passing resemblance to human beings.” In 1944 Frank Sinatra played the lead in Step Lively, a film musical version. In 1986 Alan Arkin directed a revival for the Roundabout with Mark Hamill, inspired “by the spirit of Broadway con-artistry,” as Miller. In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich commented on the “slapstick sequences” which are “meticulously timed,” and on the “knockout curtain lines.”

The popularity of the play remains unsurpassed in what used to be called the hinterlands. In recent years it has been presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Cleveland Playhouse, and the Kansas City Repertory Theatre. Other productions were staged in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Louisville, and Hartford, as well as in numerous colleges and high schools. It remains not only a very funny play but also a persuasive study of New York theater in the 1930s.

--William M. Peterson