According to Hollywood folklore, the day after the celebrated star John Barrymore died in May 1942, actors Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre went joyriding with the dead body. The two were supposedly joined in their caper by Paul Henreid, who had just finished shooting the film “Now Voyager” opposite Bette Davis. A new play called “Something Truly Monstrous,” at the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, fantasizes about what might have gone down during that prank.
Playwright Jeff Tabnick said he learned of the story when he came across it in a rumor book about Hollywood, then found it again in Henreid’s autobiography. “I just thought it was really interesting that, here were these actors, and they were acting like their movie star personas. And I thought, ‘There’s a story there,’ ” Tabnick said.
“I don’t think, actually, [that] it happened,” he added. “Henreid wrote that autobiography some 30 years later. There’s another rumor that some friends of Errol Flynn’s, in their circle, had stolen the body, and I think that, if anything happened, that to me sounds like a more realistic version of what maybe happened. That’s as close as I can get to it.”
As Tabnick’s play begins, Bogart (Jason Paul Field) is trying to talk Lorre (Amir Levi) out of signing a seven-year contract with studio chief Jack Warner. He warns Lorre that Warner will continue typecasting him as a deranged killer, a stereotype Lorre longs to escape. The actor believes Warner’s promise that he will get to play more meaningful roles, until he gets a script titled “The Beast with Five Fingers,” in which he is once again slated to play a mad murderer.
Lorre has not yet signed the contract, so he concocts a plan to place Barrymore’s corpse in Warner’s house, with a drink in one hand and the unsigned contract in the other. He expects Warner to react by making sure Lorre never works in motion pictures again. Thus, Lorre, who was a morphine addict, knows he will be prevented from succumbing to the temptations of Hollywood and will be free to pursue genuinely artistic projects in the theater. He just needs Bogart’s help with the heavy lifting.
With Barrymore’s body in the back seat of Lorre’s car, the two stop at Romanoff’s restaurant to pick up Paul Henreid (Jilon VanOver), telling him they are going to a party at Warner’s house. Then Bogart insists that the three make a side trip to the house of Flynn, who was Barrymore’s best friend. Flynn is not at home, but it is there that, after a series of wildly comedic interactions, a huge compromise is achieved.
Tabnick described the work as both a comedy and a drama. “Sometimes I think of it as a drama in a comedy’s body.”
In one particularly serious section, Lorre contrasts his art with typical Hollywood fare, designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. “We’re made to look at people that are richer and better-looking,” Tabnick remarked, “and then there’s this other kind of art that has a political agenda and a more poetic sensibility.”
While the play is a fiction, with its three characters satirically drawn, Tabnick believes each of the three is grounded in truth. “Humphrey Bogart wants to be famous and rich,” Tabnick said. In the play, Bogart is really reluctant to participate in Lorre’s scheme because he is afraid of Jack Warner. He also wants to stop playing heavies and complains about the movie he is currently making, saying, “Now I’m in this ‘Casablanca,’ this piece of pig s–t — albeit, I am a romantic lead for the first time.”
Lorre and Henreid also are in that film. Both were Europeans who escaped the Nazis, and the experience of being an immigrant under those particular circumstances took its toll. Lorre had been a serious, respected star of stage and screen in Germany, but he was Jewish and fled in 1933. “He had a great career out there, and to try to regain that in America was impossible,” Tabnick said
As for Henreid, who was not Jewish, the playwright depicts him, hilariously, as full of his own importance and insistent on being an American leading man. Unfortunately, he is hampered by his distinct Austrian accent. But underneath his self-aggrandizing exterior is a genuine terror of being rounded up as an enemy alien, as he saw happening to others after he and his wife, who was part Jewish, escaped to England. Hence being viewed as an American is crucial to him.
Tabnick said that, at its core, this play is about identity. “Obviously I want people to laugh, because it’s funny, but I also want people to come away thinking about issues of identity and where we get our identity from, and how we conduct ourselves in the world. I would like people to have had a good time, but I would like it to be a thoughtful experience for the audience, too. I want them to both laugh and feel like they’ve had a full dramatic meal.”
“Something Truly Monstrous” is playing at The Blank Theatre until Nov. 8.
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