The Theatre: Three-Minute Man

In Minneapolis, moon-faced Merle Potter, dramatic critic of the Times-Tribune, went to review Tobacco Road, came away fuming. Next morning he blasted Actor John Barton across the Mississippi for turning dirty, hungry Jeeter Lester into an “obscene clown,” the theatre into a bawditorium.

Actor Barton then spat right back in Potter’s eye: “If you think you’re so good and know just how this role of Jeeter should be played, why don’t you come up and play it yourself? Try just three minutes of it if you don’t want to go to the trouble of learning the entire part.”

No yellow-belly, Potter accepted—on one condition: Barton must turn critic and review the performance.

There the feud ended and the fun (and publicity) began. From New York City hurriedly flew Jack Kirkland, author of Tobacco Road, to be in at the kill. In Minneapolis crowds stormed the box office, rushed the theatre, packed its seats, clogged its aisles. While the audience waited, happy as clams at high tide, for the curtain to rise, Potter got more and more Jeetery backstage, needed the whole company to drape his rags about him, suffered trying to chaw plug-tobacco behind stage whiskers.

Then the curtain went up, and the audience broke into a roar while for three minutes Potter sprawled on a porch and leaned against a pillar, mumbling any spare cusswords he remembered to cover up any regulation dialogue he forgot. After that, Barton took over the part.

Next morning Critic Barton complimented Actor Potter on a “fine, if fragmentary, job,” expressed the desire to “see more of his work.” But for Potter there wasn’t going to be any more. “The place for the critic,” he announced with emphasis, “is behind the typewriter.”