Why Actresses Are in Love With ‘Babbitt’

Bimbettes, somebody’s love interest, maybe an occasional murderess. . . .

There just aren’t that many terrific roles for women.

“Do there have to be good parts for women?” asked Ed Begley Jr. “There’s always makeup and props. . . .”

“There’s also the possibility that tomorrow morning’s newspaper could read, ‘Begley Found Dead,’ ” threatened actress Georgia Brown.

It was one of the regular Thursday night meetings of an 18-month-old all-star radio troupe called Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works. Its members were toasting each other for wrapping up Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt,” which does have a healthy roster of women’s roles. Almost half of the 34 members of the troupe are women. “Babbitt” gets its public premiere Thanksgiving Day in a 14 1/2-hour broadcast over KCRW-FM (89.9).

Beginning at 8 a.m., KCRW will air Lewis’ entire 319-page portrait of George F. Babbitt. Except for station identifications and a 1 1/2-hour break at 5 p.m. for the National Public Radio newsmagazine “All Things Considered,” the Santa Monica City College radio station will do nothing but recount the tale of the conniving 1920s middle-class real estate developer from the fictitious Midwestern town of Zenith.

But when discussion turned to the next two productions the troupe will be dramatizing for the British Broadcasting Corp. in March and April, talk drifted back to the Female Roles Problem.

Brown took another drag off her Marlboro Light and suggested they do “The Crucible.” There are several meaty women’s roles there.

JoBeth Williams tugged her denim miniskirt down to mid-thigh and suggested a reading of “Lysistrata” or “The Trojan Women.” Maybe an all-female Japanese play.

“They have those transvestite productions, you know?” she said.

Ed Asner, who played the title role in “Babbitt,” pointed out the obvious about the play that the majority of the troupe most wanted to do as a “Babbitt” encore, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.” There are no women.

The Eric Bentley play about the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ investigation of Hollywood has a single cameo role for playwright Lillian Hellman. All the rest of the roles are for men.

“But it would be perfect for radio,” said Michael York.

“It has to be all men?” asked Begley.

“Can’t some of the women be investigators?” asked Ally Sheedy.

No, went the round-table discussion. Not if the integrity of the play is to be preserved.

So what about Shakespeare?

“There is no Shakespeare play with more than six women’s roles, except for ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ ” said JoBeth Williams.

And “Macbeth”?

“If we do that, 64,000 women will show up to audition for the role (of Lady Macbeth),” said Georgia Brown.

Laughter.

They’ll show up hours early, said Begley.

Laughter.

In Winnebagos with full entourage, said David Selby.

Laughter.

And agents, negotiating for the role.

More laughter.

“And Asner’ll wind up getting the part,” said Brown.

“Lady McBabbitt”? said Selby.

No laughter.

There has always been a tug of war over women’s roles and minorities’ roles, roles for older actors and roles (other than simplistic ingenue parts) for young actors. The ugly truth in the acting biz is that all the very best roles seem to have been written by white adult males for white adult males.

But the sheer glut of actors trying to break into show biz has always made Hollywood a buyer’s market, so the niceties of too few or too many roles for women or children or senior citizens rarely come up at cattle calls.

Actors don’t cooperate. They compete. Even if they have an agent, a personal manager and a Winnebago on the set.

“Pulling people like this together who are really at the top of their profession is really a tricky business,” said Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works producer Susan Loewenberg. “There’s expectation, anticipation and fear.”

Loewenberg said that taping “Babbitt” took 15 months. Some of the actors had projects and were off on location. Individual roles were recorded when a member of the troupe could come in for a session. A computer was used to keep track of the tapes and to help edit it all together.

Normally, democracy among actors in Hollywood is as unlikely as table manners among vampires. That Loewenberg’s experiment in radio repertory has survived for 18 months and two major productions, she says with some pride, is nothing less than a minor miracle.

From time to time established film and TV actors who want to be taken “seriously” will form or join a repertory group, but they never seem to last. Most usually fall apart before they have staged a single production--victims of the actors’ movie commitments or TV commercials or backstage ego battles. Sometimes the harsh reality of lavish staging costs and too little money kills a show before it gets to dress rehearsal.

So Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works and KCRW teamed up to try a different, albeit, offbeat, approach. Loewenberg and Judith Auberjonois, who co-founded the Classic Theatre Works as an offshoot of Loewenberg’s well-established Los Angeles Theatre Works, didn’t try to stage anything in the beginning. They followed the example of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater troupe.

“Radio is cheap and it allows for the pure essence of acting,” Loewenberg said.

Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works isn’t ready to film “Citizen Kane” yet, but something like that may come in time. Lewis’ classic satire of middle-America, “Babbitt,” is not a bad start, according to Loewenberg. In much the same way that the Mercury Theater of the Air launched itself 49 years ago with the radio dramatization of H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” the actors’ “collective” that Loewenberg and Auberjonois have assembled is starting out slowly and inexpensively on the radio before moving on to more ambitious projects.

There aren’t many who believe that the kind of drama that faded from the old Philco generations ago is making a comeback. Naysayers liken the “Babbitt” experiment to Charlie Chaplin’s attempt to resurrect the little tramp in a silent “Modern Times” 15 years after the advent of talkies.

“We know there’s an audience for it,” said KCRW General Manager Ruth Hirschman, who scrounged up $25,000 in grants and listener contributions to produce the “Babbitt” marathon.

For several years, her station has broadcast at least two hours of drama and comedy every week day. Two years ago, KCRW devoted all of New Year’s Day to a 24-hour broadcast of the Irish National Radio production of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”--a broadcast that Hirschman insists was so well-received by the small but ardent lovers of radio drama that it inspired the Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works troupe to find its own classic novel to hone into a radio dramatization.

Led by Asner and Nan Martin as George and Myra Babbitt, this classic reading is the fledgling troupe’s second--and easily its most ambitious--production.

According to Loewenberg, it won’t be the last. The BBC just committed itself to underwrite at least two more productions next year. For the first time in its neophyte history, the Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works actors will get paid for their work, she said, even though it will only be American Federation of Television and Radio Artists scale.

The two plays, which the troupe is trying to select in its Thursday evening readings, will premiere simultaneously in April in the United Kingdom--where radio is still regarded on a par with television--and over KCRW.

In addition to the radio projects, the troupe hopes to go on stage without a radio backup as early as next June. Loewenberg said she is negotiating for a medium-size venue to stage Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera.”

The Thanksgiving “Babbitt” is not meant to be heard straight through. KCRW’s Hirschman, who developed the project with Loewenberg and Auberjonois, says the marathon production is designed to allow listeners to sample “Babbitt.”

If they like it, they can tune in a chapter at a time. Beginning Nov. 30, the entire novel will be broadcast, chapter by chapter, in 30-minute segments each weekday at 3 p.m. The chapters will be repeated each evening, beginning Dec. 1 at 7.

“We went through several novels before we settled on ‘Babbitt’ ” said Loewenberg. “ ‘McTeague’ . . . ‘Rabbit Run’ . . . ‘Main Street.’ The criterion was that it had to be an American novel that had speakable parts, superb prose, lots of dialogue, lots of characters.”

The novel, which was finally suggested by Asner, was perfect because it had all those elements plus it had the theme of cynical small-town boosterism--a theme peculiarly contemporary even though the book was first published in 1922.

“It is a portrait of America in Ronald Reagan’s boyhood,” said Auberjonois. “Its framework is that of small-town American values that have found their way into urban America.”

It isn’t the first attempt to adapt the novel to the theater. Two months ago, a stage version, “Babbitt: A Marriage,” was offered to local audiences at the Mark Taper Forum. That adaptation, written by Irish playwright Ron Hutchinson, did not capture the irony or comic angst of the novel, according to Loewenberg.

“ ‘Babbitt’ represents the real roots of conservative Republicanism and the feeling that the good old boys are running the country,” she said. “It’s about real conformist values and the inability to tolerate individualism. George Babbitt is the other-directed man. He is defined by externals. After Puritanism, that is probably the greatest single mind-set of this country. That’s why we picked ‘Babbitt.’ ”

The fact that it has no less than 14 parts for women was also something of a factor.

While “Babbitt” is its first novel for radio, it is not the troupe’s first radio production.

KCRW aired the first Classic Theatre Works presentation July 26: a live performance of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart classic spoof of Hollywood in the ‘20s, “Once in a Lifetime.” The play, which is about mindless movie decision-making dictated by money, moguls and box-office second-guessing, was a perfect project for a group of Hollywood actors trying to take control of their own stage fates.

“That set the tone of what we’re about,” said Loewenberg. “We were very mindful of this being a play within a play within a play.”

The live production was performed before an invited audience on a sound stage inside the Culver Studios, across the street from the old Culver City warehouse that serves as the troupe’s headquarters.

“It was theater from the moment people drove into the studio in their mogul cars and had them parked by valet parking,” Auberjonois said. “The play actually began there, before they even went into the sound stage.”

The play was expensive.

“It cost $10,000 for the seats we used for the audience on the sound stage for one night,” Loewenberg said.

Most of the costs were underwritten or donated. Culver Studios lent the use of the sound stage for the evening. None of the actors was paid. And, still, even the minimal costs of a performance before an audience--costumes, props, etc.--ran up a far higher bill than that of rehearsing, taping and broadcasting “Babbitt.”

“Our stated mission is to do live theater,” said Loewenberg.

“In theory, it’s what we all want,” Auberjonois said. “But it’s very expensive.”

The troupe pays its own way. Each of the 34 members has been required to pay $3,000 a year in dues for the first two years of operation. The troupe will expand to at least 39 members by next year and the group will begin to start looking for outside funding, such as the BBC grants, to keep it going.

“The task now is to raise $3 million over the next three years from the private sector,” said Loewenberg. “We haven’t started any official campaign yet, but we have a lot of possibilities . . . foundations, corporations . . . that we will call upon.”

For now, the day-to-day operations are overseen by an arts council, made up of the two producers and a rotating slate of seven repertory company members. The troupe remains uniquely a representative democracy in a profession that tends to operate as a benevolent producers’ dictatorship at best.

The council pays the bills. The council sets the theater company’s agenda. The council keeps the refrigerator inside the warehouse headquarters stocked with cheese, quiche and chilled cheap wine from Trader Joe’s.

Hector Elizondo sipped at his glass of Trader Joe red, but passed on the quiche.

“It certainly has to be a contender,” he said, holding up his copy of “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.”

“It’s so relevant,” said Michael York.

After some further discussion, it turned out that one of the members who hadn’t shown up for the reading--William Devane--had once directed “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.”

“Bill has not shown himself for some time,” said Loewenberg. “Maybe this could be his big commitment.”

But the problem of women’s roles kept coming back.

“It’s a real problem,” Loewenberg said with a sigh. “ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ had such a nice balance of men’s and women’s roles. ‘Babbitt’ has a nice balance. ‘Threepenny’ has a nice balance. You’ve got your four principals (women’s roles) and you’ve got your four whores. Even though the roles of the four whores are much smaller, they’re interesting and the women (in the troupe) can switch back and forth. One night, they’re a principal. The next night, a whore.”

Still, the two-hour drama about the redbaiting ruination of such actors as Paul Robeson, Lionel Stander, Jose Ferrer and Larry Parks touched everyone--men and women--in the Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works.

“We’re a bunch of actors, just like they were,” said Georgia Brown.

A bunch of liberal, progressive actors, offered someone else.

“Ten years from now, we could be in the same boat,” said JoBeth Williams.

Women’s roles or no, it was agreed the troupe will probably do the play sooner or later. James Whitmore, one of the few in the room who actually lived through the blacklisting days, puffed thoughtfully at his pipe and smiled.

“Well, we’re all good union members here,” he said.