Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance) | 
| Author: Milly S. Barranger
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1931072
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0472113909
Dewey Decimal Number: 792.0233092
EAN: 9780472113903
ASIN: 0472113909
Publication Date: April 7, 2004
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it."
-Marian Seldes
"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."
-Oscar Brockett
Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72).
This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women.
Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.
Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noel Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Definitely Worth Reading, But With Reservations April 24, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I give this book three and half stars, actually. I'm very pleased to see a full-length biography of Margaret Webster; she's an important force in American theatre history who has gotten too little attention from theatre historians. Milly Barranger, a knowledgeable Webster scholar, has done a thorough, interesting job with this study; she offers perceptive insights into Webster's philosophy of directing, her significant contributions to Broadway, regional, and repertory theatre, and her professional strengths / weaknesses.
At times, though, I felt as if I were reading a rehash of other secondary sources, particularly of Webster's own writings. Overall, I would have liked more analysis, both cultural and biographical. Unlike many biographers, Barranger is careful not to offer too much speculation with too little evidence, which is good. But especially in the first third of the book, Webster the person seems distant and elusive. Instead of bringing her alive, the description of her early career in England occasionally bogs down into little more than a summary of productions and lists of cast and crew.
Barranger generally writes fluidly, although she has two stylistic quirks that I wish an editor had caught. First, she seems to have an aversion to pronouns/synonyms, so that sentences often contain flat repetitions of earlier words. (One typical example: "Although several universities asked to receive their papers, they decided to donate their papers to the Library of Congress" [306]. Other unedited repetitions occur fairly frequently, such as Webster being called "the astonished Peggy" twice in one anecdote [17-18].)
The second quirk involves material that is introduced on one page and then re-introduced a page or two later as if the first reference never occurred. (One example: We're told that when Webster left NY after her first Broadway triumph, "Eddie Dowling handed her a script to consider. . ." Two paragraphs later, we're told anew, "One of the new scripts that had been pressed upon her in NY belonged to Eddie Dowling. . .[72-3]).
And as often happens in detail-filled books, errors creep in: Webster's father Ben is said to be 73 in 1937 and also to be 73 at his death in 1947 (75; 171); Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film "The Ten Commandments" is time-warped to the 1970s (97), and so on. The editors should have been more alert.
They especially should have been more alert in checking sources. The aforementioned errors and verbal tics are minor. More problematic, however, is Barranger's tendency to borrow the wording of her source material. As examples, I cite some comparisons between Barranger's work and Helen Sheehy's 1996 biography of Eva Le Gallienne (Webster's long-time lover and artistic partner):
On the publication party for Webster's autobiography --
SHEEHY: "At the party, Peggy appeared well and full of high spirits, but Le Gallienne knew that she suffered constant, agonizing pain, which the Percodan she took could not relieve" (404).
BARRANGER: "At the party Peggy appeared well and full of high spirits, but she suffered constant pain that medication no longer relieved" (303).
On Webster's fatal cancer --
SHEEHY: "Her life was now measured in weeks. 'Nothing can be done,' Peggy said" (403).
BARRANGER: "Her life was now measured in weeks. 'Nothing can be done,' Peggy told her" (302).
On W's and Le G's work together in 1965--
SHEEHY: "Peggy and Le Gallienne were tentative and awkward with one another" (379).
BARRANGER: "At first, the women were tentative and awkward with one another" (285).
Such echoes can easily occur during early drafts, but they should be caught before a book goes to print. Readers need to be able to trust that author and sources are independent.
 At Last A Life Of Webster June 4, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Margaret Webster, a so-so actress but one of the world's leading directors of Shakespeare, and one of the first prominent female stage directors, now has her own biography. (She wrote two memoirs during her lifetime, both sadly out of print.) Historian Milly S. Barranger has written a magnificent biography of a woman whose very life seems to be slipping away from us year by year, as memories of her productions dim, and those who knew her vanish from the world stage. (Webster died in 1972 at age 67.)
She was the daughter of a British matinee idol, Ben Webster, and his wife, the celebrated May Whitty, who became a star late in life in Hollywood playing an elderly harridan in the Robert Montgomery starrer NIGHT MUST FALL. By that time Margaret Webster had established herself in New York, with a long-running collaboration with the actor Maurice Evans. The two of them mounted quite a few productions of Shakespeare, on Broadway, though in the 1950s his star had waned and the magic wasn't there and it became apparent he was no Olivier or Gielgud.
This book would be worth reading just to outline her work with Maurice Evans, but there is so much more! Each chapter is meaty enough to be its own volume, particularly the chapter about Webster's historic work with black superstar Paul Robeson in a Broadway Othello of 1943, with Uta Hagen and Jose Ferrer in support. Barranger guides us through this controversial production step by step, suggesting that Webster's British background perhaps allowed her to cast more color-blind than her USA counterparts, if "color-blind" is the proper word for casting Othello as a black man indeed. The inner ins and outs of the show, with Hagen and Robeson having an open affair with the complaisance of Ferrer, all of them eventually turning on Webster, is enough to stand your hair on end, but you'll have your hat off to them all. It is truly one of the great Broadway stories, on a par with the opening of THE CRADLE WILL ROCK.
So too is the story of Tennessee Williams' first Broadway production, with BATTLE OF ANGELS, an early version of ORPHEUS DESCENDING, for which the Theater Guild hired Webster to direct a temperamental Miriam Hopkins in the leading role. The play fell victim to tyrannical Boston censors and never made it to New York.
Margaret Webster also worked with, and loved, the tragic actress Mady Christians, and the imperious and more or less "out" diva Eva Le Gallienne. Perhaps her greatest love was the novelist Pamela Frankau, who made her middle years a joy. Sadly she lost Frankau to an invidious cancer.
Her lesbianism and her association with anti-racist and Leftist causes made her a natural victim of Joe McCarthy, and Barranger deftly sketches in the ways in which her career was badly damaged by right wing accusations that she was a Communist in RED CHANNELS. Crazy but true, the blacklist existed not only in Hollywood but to a certain degree on Broadway as well. Barranger is a graceful writer, though the book is marred by a number of bizarre typos which will detract from your enjoyment. In one, A critic wrote that Martita Hunt's Portia "shown" like a candle in a dark world. What's with "shown"? Or "Aaron Copeland"?
As a biographer, Milly Barranger's biggest mistake, perhaps, is her failure to read properly the novels of Pamela Frankau, Webster's great love, particularly the so-called "Weston trilogy" CLOTHES FOR A KING'S SON. As I read more and more about Margaret Webster, I realized that the outlines of her tempestuous life were ringing a bell in my head. Having read the Farbkau books years ago, I could see clearly that Webster must have confided in Frankau many, many details of her life unavailable elsewhere, and Frankau really mined her lover's past for her fiction. Reading SING FOR YOUR SUPPER, SLAVES OF THE LAMP, OVER THE MOUNTAINS, Barranger will discover how Webster really felt about her famous parents, about acting, about her sexual identity, about being a nomad in a spotty if glamorous profession. It's all there and it's all beautifully told. But this is only a minor cavil; MARGARET WEBSTER: A LIFE IN THE THEATER is a spellbinder.
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