“In Russia money means nothing” - Sasha Smirnoff, Waiter at the White Way Hotel, Room Service
Would-be theatrical producer Gordon Miller has found what could be The Great American Play. He and his company have been holed up for weeks at the White Way Hotel in Times Square while they rehearse the wonderful play-with-a-message and while the producer hunts desperately for financial backers for the production. Miller hasn’t been able to make any payments on his company’s hotel bill since they started work on their show. At the beginning of the story you’re about to see, this bill comes to a total of $1,200. This may not sound like a lot in 2024, but Room Service premiered in 1937, the midst of the Great Depression. In its own era that $1,200 represents the bottom-line total for ten double-occupancy hotel rooms in Manhattan, for over two weeks, plus three meals a day, every day, for twenty-five people. It is reasonable to think of the running tab as being somewhere around $100,000 in our world. That’s what Miller is on the hook for when Room Service begins.
But the producer has no worries about this bill because he believes so deeply in the power of Godspeed, the show he is producing. It’s a pageant of American history as seen through the eyes of an ignorant immigrant coal miner. This play is going to bring a revolution, change the world, and be a huge success at the same time. Miller is certain of it. He believes similarly in the talents of Christine Marlowe, a promising young actress with whom he is romantically involved, who plays one of the key roles in Godspeed. And besides . . . Miller has a financial “understanding” with the hotel’s manager, who happens to be his brother-in-law. Things will work out.
Real trouble arrives, though, when an accountant from the hotel’s board of directors turns up unexpectedly to inspect the hotel’s books. When the executive finds the unpaid $100,000 bill it is certain that heads will roll and that the producer and his entire company will be evicted. Eviction wouldn’t actually be an irreparable catastrophe . . . except . . . on this particular day Miller finally has a guaranteed backer coming to meet him at the hotel to deliver a check for (the 1937 equivalent of) over a million dollars. All Miller’s problems are solved. Indeed, the whole nation’s economic problems will be solved! But the backer is coming tomorrow -- and the hotel executive is determined to get these show people out of his building right. this. damn. minute. Farce ensues as a desperate Miller and company deploy endlessly renewed deceptions -- including phony measles, bogus tapeworm, and counterfeit suicide -- to hang on to their hotel room for long enough to meet their backer and receive the check.
When staging Room Service today, in 2024, the real challenge is to find some way to recapture the truly subversive vitality of the 1937 original. In that year Room Service was a runaway success -- yet it was one in which the play’s Communist co-authors had deliberately embedded pro-Labor, pro-Russian, and anti-government motifs to be considered by a nation struggling through the hard days and economic failures of the Great Depression. The work is an example of how political and social themes are sometimes hidden in plain sight for American audiences. Or, at least they were in plain sight for audiences of 1937, who were much more attuned to clues in the lingo, dress codes, and gestures of their own era that we are, nearly ninety years later.
To make the play’s subversive undertones more legible for contemporary 2024 audiences, this UTA production has cast women as the play’s three producers. In the 1937 world of Room Service, though, these women must disguise themselves as men to be taken seriously in business, politics, and public life. In other words: to get anything done in their world they must change their gender, becoming Gordon Miller, Harry Binion, and Faker Englund. (In historical fact, many American women of the early 20th century spent the majority of their lives passing as men for precisely these reasons.)
The most dominant theme in Room Service is the idea that “influence in the world comes only from total commitment to the cause.” No step is too far; no behavior is too exaggerated; no sacrifice is too great for the good of the Greater Good. Godspeed, the socially-conscious play that Miller, Binion, and Englund are producing, is going to change the world. It will surely launch the long-awaited General Strike. Soon after, the American working class will achieve control of the means of production, thereby coming to receive reasonable remuneration for their labor. But most important of all: the New World Order that Godspeed creates will be a liberation for all womankind.
Sources
McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Murray, John and Allen Boretz. Room Service: A Comedy in three Acts. New York: Random House, 1937.
Segrave, Kerry. Masquerading in Male Attire: Women Passing as Men in America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018.
