Gilroy recalls ‘Roses’

The play won Gilroy a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize forty years ago, and, unlike many plays reflecting those wartime and postwar days, it has taken on an active ongoing life, being the subject of fairly frequent revivals.
In a telephone interview last week, Gilroy remembered a few pertinent details about the play’s initial Broadway production, which starred Jack Albertson as John Cleary, Irene Dailey as Nettie, and Martin Sheen as Timmy.
“Early in the play,” he recalled, “John Cleary makes a couple of anti-Semitic remarks, mainly to annoy Timmy, whom he knew did not share those feelings.”
There were apparently a number of complaints, which hurt the first production’s director, Ulu Grosbard, a Belgian Jew, and embarrassed Gilroy.
“They weren’t my feelings,” he said. “They came from John Cleary, and he revealed them mainly to needle his son, with whom he had begun to argue.”
Gilroy left the comments in the text, and after a while there were, to the playwright’s satisfaction, no further comments, nor have there been any in respect to subsequent productions.
The original cast was eventually replaced by Maureen O’Sullivan, Chester Morris and Walter McGinn, a gifted young actor whose life was cut short by a vehicular accident.
“The second cast hadn’t had very much rehearsal,” Gilroy recalled, “and there was a particular Wednesday matinee when very few tickets had been sold, and we decided to give them what’s called a ‘break-in’ performance.”
Someone whom Gilroy remembers being a rabbi had written a flattering newspaper article about his fondness for actress O’Sullivan, and appeared a day or so before the new cast’s initial performance.
“Suddenly,” Gilroy said, “a lot of tickets were sold, resulting in a fairly large audience. The actors were terribly nervous, understandably enough. During one of Maureen’s quieter speeches, a man in the balcony called out ‘Louder, please!'”
The actors apparently froze, and then the actress looked up in the direction from which the voice had come, and asked, very sweetly, “How far back do you want us to go?”
“After a moment,” Gilroy remembers, “Chester Morris threw her a cue and they started the scene over again.”
Ten years ago, the playwright wrote a kind of “prequel” to “The Subject Was Roses.” Titled “Any Given Day,” its characters include, in addition to the Cleary family, Nettie’s mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, and the couple’s crippled son, Willard.
At the end of “Any Given Day,” Timmy Cleary leaves for the Army, which makes the two plays the theatrical equivalent of a pair of sturdy bookends.
“Any Given Day” lasted only a few performances on Broadway, but Gilroy hasn’t totally given up on it. It’s the only one of his plays to which he’d like to return for a bit of rewriting, and he knows exactly what he’d do.
“Timmy comes into that play very late,” he said. “If and when I do some rewrites, I think I’ll have him come on at the very first scene, when the family is gathered together at the dining table, and have him address the audience before anybody else says anything. He’d tell the audience who he is, and that he’d be back, later on in the play.”
If Frank D. Gilroy does eventually do another version of “Any Given Day,” a valid but little known and neglected American play may be given a new life. In addition, those “bookends,” “The Subject Was Roses” and “Any Given Day,” might ideally performed in repertory, perhaps in alternating performances, just the sort of thing regional theaters seem to love doing and which t they do, generally, very well.
Gilroy would do well to devote some further time and effort to “Any Given Day,” and to the Cleary family.