Cruising The Past Cruise News 
Life With Father ran for 3,224 performances over 401 weeks, becoming the longest-running non-musical play on Broadway, a record it still holds. The play toured the US for three years, was revived on Broadway, and enjoyed thousands of productions in stock, amature, university, and school productions. The play was adapted into a 1947 feature film and a television series.
Set against the pomposity of the Gilded Age in New York City, Father and his wife, Vinnie, their young sons, relatives, servants, and friends, are all involved in a struggle set against the backdrop of the father and mother trying to have the father properly baptized.
About a sexist patriarch, a submissive wife, and their family, “Life With Father” is a play by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, adapted from Clarence Day’s humorous autobiographical book of stories, compiled in 1935.
Life With Father premiered at the Empire Theatre in New York. November 1939 would have been a disastrous time for a London drama to have opened – its theatres would soon be blitzed and casts conscripted – but American entertainment, even after Pearl Harbor, was relatively unaffected by the Second World War, and Life With Father outlasted the conflict.
Yes, Life with Father contains satirical elements. Clarence Day’s original autobiographical work and subsequent adaptations, including the play and film, employ humor and exaggeration to comment on various aspects of late 19th-century American life.
Elements of satire in Life with Father
• Social Norms and Expectations: The work humorously showcases the expectations and assumptions placed upon individuals, particularly men and fathers, during the late 19th century. Father’s strict adherence to certain beliefs and customs and his struggles to control his boisterous household highlight the often unrealistic ideals of the era.
• Father’s Character: While loved by his family, Clarence Day Sr. is portrayed as a bombastic and domineering figure, exaggerated for comedic effect. His frequent outbursts, stubbornness, and self-assured belief in his infallibility are presented satirically, inviting audiences to laugh at his flaws rather than condemn them.
• Religious Observance: The story playfully pokes fun at the importance placed on religious rites and practices, particularly through the subplot of Father’s refusal to be baptized. The discussions surrounding his baptism are treated with a degree of irony, revealing the perceived rigidity of some religious doctrines.
• Traditional Gender Roles: The dynamic between Father and Mother, where Mother subtly and cleverly manages the household despite Father’s outward bluster and perceived authority, can be seen as a satirical commentary on the roles of men and women at the time.
In essence, Life with Father uses humor, irony, and lighthearted exaggeration to offer a critical yet affectionate perspective on family life and societal values in a specific historical period.
When the play finally closed on July 12, 1947, it had given 3,224 performances and remains the most successful straight play in Broadway history.
While Life With Father still holds the non-musical record for Broadway, it ranks only 17th among all types of shows: the 16 musicals above it – including Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, and the still?going Chicago – chart the way that US theatre went. Even so, almost alone among notable Broadway hits of the past, Life With Father has never had a significant revival and is now as unknown as most flops.
In one sense, the play was a hit before it opened. The wording on the dust-jacket of the yellowed 1940s Alfred A Knopf hardback edition runs: Clarence Day’s “Life With Father Made Into a Play by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse”.
Clarence Shepard Day Jr was a stockbroker who became a New Yorker columnist and cartoonist. Life With Father was a series of humorous domestic sketches that appeared in book form in 1935, although by that time the writer, who had been semi-invalided by arthritis for much of his life, had already died. Accordingly, Day shares with Jonathan Larson, whose posthumously produced musical Rent is ninth in the Broadway hit lists, the melancholy distinction of having spawned a lucrative theatrical sensation that he never saw. The Broadway script was written by Lindsay and Crouse, who are most remembered for their work on the book of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes.
Life With Father is set in the late 19th century in the Madison Avenue home of bigoted, short-tempered stockbroker Clarence (Father), his saintly wife Vinnie (Mother), and their four children. One reason for the size of the cast is that the family has four maids and a cook, as well as visits from cousins and the Episcopal Priest, Reverend Dr. Lloyd.
The latter is required because, to a surprising extent, the play is a satirical comedy. The second scene begins with a child being tested on his “catechism” (the theological Q&A taught to the young in Roman Catholic, Anglican and Episcopal churches) and the play’s main plot engine is Father’s confession that he was never baptised, which not only bars him from Heaven (a place as solidly real in the dialogue as Manhattan), but also means that his marriage is unsanctified and its issue illegitimate.
The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review, “Sooner or later everyone will have to see Life with Father, which opened at the Empire last evening. For the late Clarence Day’s vastly amusing sketches of his despotic parent have now been translated into a perfect comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and must be reckoned an authentic port [sic] of our American folklore.” When Life with Father surpassed Tobacco Road as the longest-running Broadway play, Elliot Norton of the Boston Post celebrated the play as “warmly human and heartily comical and completely inoffensive,” thus restoring his faith in the theatre-going public. Contemporary scholar Jordan Schildcrout describes Life with Father as “a comedy in which characters challenge and ultimately win over a figure of authority,” which allows the play to appeal to nostalgia for more conservative times, while also finding pleasure in gentle subversion and anti-authoritarianism
Adaptations
Leon Ames and Lurene Tuttle in the television version, 1954
Life with Father was adapted for the November 6, 1938, broadcast of CBS Radio’s The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The cast included Orson Welles (Father), Mildred Natwick (Mother), Mary Wickes (Employment Office Manager), Alice Frost (Margaret), and Arthur Anderson (young Clarence Day).
The theatrical adaptation of Life With Father was adapted into a film in 1947, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring William Powell and Irene Dunne as Clarence and his wife, with support from Elizabeth Taylor, Edmund Gwenn, ZaSu Pitts, Jimmy Lyndon, and Martin Milner. Six years later, the film was adapted into a television series, starring Leon Ames and Lurene Tuttle, which ran from November 1953 until July 1955 on the CBS Television network.[16] The series was the first live color program for network TV to originate in Hollywood.[17] The film (not the series) and its audio entered the public domain in 1975.
