The Wild Party On the Stage
It started off a great idea: take a racy, luscious poem that begins with clowns and vaudeville dancers and ends with orgies and murder and put it on a New York stage for all to enjoy. Poetry on stage is not unheard of: Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology began as a book of poems and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf as a “choreo-poem,” and both went on to lengthy and successful theatrical runs in New York City. With spoken word poetry making a permanent home in the mainstream, the timing could not be more perfect.
Queenie was a blond, and her age stood still,Of this, Joseph Moncure March, The Public Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club and I can all agree. But after that, we all part ways. March and I stuck to the book, while the Public Theater and The Manhattan Theatre Club obviously went to the devil and asked him personally for the least entertaining way to butcher the beautiful text of March's novel-length poem, The Wild Party. But I am getting ahead of myself.
And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.
The background story behind the poem is worthy of a play, itself. Right before the summer of 1926, twenty-six-year-old March abandoned his job as the first managing editor of a upstart little magazine called The New Yorker, and decided he wanted to be a poet. Luckily, his wealthy father indulged him, and so for the entire summer of 1926, March improvised an epic poem, a moral tale perfect for the time that he lived in, Prohibition. It was from these lines that The Wild Party was born.
The Wild Party told the story of Queenie, a beautiful vaudevillian dancer, Burrs, her abusive boyfriend, and the out-of-control party they threw to drive one another mad. However, what started as a cautionary tale, became quite the opposite: everyone wanted to be invited to this party! The finished book became so hot that it couldn't be published until 1928, and even then it was a limited edition of only 750 copies. Word spread quickly, and soon everyone was reading. It even got so popular that it was banned in Boston. Needless to say, March became the talk of the literary world. Soon after he released another novel-length poem called The Set-Up, about a boxer, and then left for Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Unfortunately, over time, both books fell into obscurity and were forgotten.
That is, until Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman found a glorious old edition of The Wild Party in a bookstore and fell in love with it. Wanting to work with the text, Spiegelman attained the rights to the poem and re-released The Wild Party, complete with over 100 new Spiegelman illustrations, to rave reviews in 1994. It was probably this revival of the poem that started the two theatre companies on their ill-fated creative journeys.
On to Manhattan Theatre Club's version of The Wild Party. . . .
