His Girl
Friday

His Girl Friday
adapted by John Guare from “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and the Columbia Pictures film

They’re newspaper men. They can’t help themselves. The Lord made them that way.

It’s August 1939 and in the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building, reporters can hear the sound of the gallows being tested. Earl Holub’s a poor dope who lost his job, went berserk and shot a cop. The hard-bitten reporters are betting on how many steps he’ll take up to the noose before he trips. Seems the Mayor wants to hang this guy so no one will notice the high unemployment or count up the price tag for a new sewer system. He and the Sherriff are calling Holub a terrorist since they found pamphlets blasting Hitler in his apartment; and the cop he shot was German, in a town where the pro-German vote carries a lot of sway. In the middle of all this, former reporter Hildy Johnson stops by to say farewell to the gang. She’s said good-bye to this life and she’s off to move to Albany and marry a square named Bruce. Walter Burns, her former editor (and ex-husband) just can’t let his gal go and through the wise-cracks and tough talk, he tries to lure her back with the breaking story of the year.

His Girl Friday started life as the play The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1920s comedy about Chicago newsmen (produced at The Shaw in 1994). It was then adapted by film director Howard Hawks in 1940 as His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, in one of the great screwball film comedies of all time. The movie was originally supposed to be a straightforward adaptation of The Front Page, with both the editor and reporter being men. But during auditions, Howard Hawks’s secretary read reporter Hildy Johnson’s lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, and the script was rewritten to make Hildy a woman and the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns.

In his adaptation, playwright John Guare has taken the best of both the play The Front Page and the movie His Girl Friday and added his own twist. The movie was shot in the summer of 1939; Guare has set his adaptation during that same summer, precisely on August 31st, the day before Hitler invaded Poland. So along with the screwball zaniness and satire of the newspaper business is the threat of war. How do these tabloid reporters, and the country, react to the fear in their city, in the country, and in their own lives?

John Guare is the celebrated playwright of Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves and most recently, A Free Man of Color. This adaptation was commissioned by London’s National Theatre in 2003 and was produced at the Guthrie Theatre (Minnesota) in 2005 and at Trinity Repertory Company (Rhode Island) in 2011. Theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard said of the London production: “I was deluged with wave upon wave of comic pleasure last night. My laughter scarcely abated during this dark comedic, light farcical, deadly satirical romance about the lower depths of the American newspaper business in Chicago, with lashings and dashings of corruption, bribery and justice denied. His Girl Friday is a luscious theatrical cocktail, a three-star smasher.” Our production, directed by Jim Mezon, features Nicole Underhay as Hildy Johnson and Benedict Campbell as Walter Burns.