Education: Divine Comedian

When The Green Pastures opened on Broadway in 1930, Variety thought it was “dreadfully lacking in box-office ability,” predicted that “a ten-week stay … should be sufficient.” Variety was dreadfully wrong. Alexander Woollcott, guessing better in the New Yorker, said it was “the highest peak in the range of the American theater.” Brooks Atkinson, in the Times, called it “the divine comedy of the modern theater.” The Green Pastures (based on Roark Bradford’s stories) won a Pulitzer Prize, ran for five years, played 1,779 performances in 203 cities to nearly two million people, grossed $3,000,000, was turned into a movie, and attained the status of an American folk-legend.

It also earned a tidy sum and an abiding reputation as playwright and director for Marcus Cook Connelly. He has never risen to such heights since—he has spent his time writing or directing a couple of minor successes and a couple of major turkeys, acting a bit, devising Hollywood dialogue and “heading too many committees.”

This week, at 56, Marc Connelly took on a new job: associate professor of playwriting in Yale’s graduate School of Fine Arts, succeeding 68-year-old Walter Prichard Eaton. Connelly, who never went to college himself, will teach “Drama 47,” a “professional” course started and made famous (at Harvard, then at Yale) by the late Professor George P. Baker. He will help 15 students dissect each others’ plays; Yale will produce the best ones.

Connelly, bald, portly and more solemn with the years, is very serious about what he considers an exciting chance to develop the “theater as a social force” at Yale. Says he: “I hope my students won’t be just writing for Broadway. I hope they’ll be writing for the world.”