82 Years Ago:
Abie’s Irish Rose 
Edward T. O'Donnell * The Irish Echo * May 19, 2004

 Eighty-two years ago this week, on May 23, 1922, the curtain went up on “Abie’s Irish Rose” at the Fulton Theater.  A whimsical play about the unlikely romance between a Jewish man and an Irish woman, it earned nothing but scorn from the leading theater critics.  But the public loved it and “Abie’s Irish Rose” went on to become the longest running production in Broadway history. 

 “Abie’s Irish Rose” was the creation of playwright Anne Nichols.  She was born in Dales Mill, Georgia in 1891 into a strict Baptist family of mixed ethnic heritage that included Irish and Russian.  At age sixteen she ran away to Philadelphia where she found work as a singer and writer for the theater.  In 1915 she married Henry Duffey, an Irish Catholic actor and producer (Nichols later converted to Catholicism). 

 By the early 1920s Nichols had written several successful plays and vaudeville sketches.  “Abie’s Irish Rose,” she later recalled, took her a mere three hours to write.  It first opened in San Francisco and Los Angeles and proved immensely popular.  Eager to bring the show east to New York, Nichols could not find a producer willing to back the play.  They did not believe there was an audience for so far-fetched a concept as an Irish-Jewish romance. 

 Undaunted, Nichols filed suit against her producer in California, moved to New York, mortgaged her house to raise $5,000, and set about producing the play herself.  She also took the role of director – unprecedented for a woman in that era.  The production opened at the Fulton Theater on West 46th Street in the heart of the Broadway theater scene. 

 “Abie’s Irish Rose” represented classic vaudeville ethnic humor taken to a new level to reflect second and third generation concerns and aspirations of Irish and Jewish America.  Abraham Levy (Abie) met Rosemary Murphy in a hospital in France during World War I.  She was working at a field hospital as a nurse when he was admitted with wounds suffered while serving as a pilot in the Army Air Corps.  Despite their religious differences, they fall in love and get married (by a Baptist minister). 

 When Abie brings Rosemary home to meet his father Solomon, a very traditional Jew eager to see his son marry within his faith, he introduces her as a “friend” named Rosemary Murpheski.  The ruse does not last very long and Solomon eventually discovers the truth.  To placate his father (a widower), Abie agrees to have a second wedding ceremony performed by a rabbi.  Just as the ceremony is about to take place, Rosemary’s father (also a widower) arrives with Catholic priest (Fr. Whalen) in tow. 

 In an earlier era (i.e., a Harrigan & Hart play of the 1880s), a scene so fraught with tension and stock ethnic characters would have quickly disintegrated into a melee.  But this was the 1920s and Anne Nichols was aiming her play at a middle-class American audience (Irish, Jewish, or otherwise) that frowned on such things.  Broadway, in other words, was a long way from the Bowery and the scene is resolved amicably as the rabbi and priest recognize each other from their service in World War I.  American patriotism and tolerance wins the day as they recount ministering to soldiers of all faiths.  “Shure they all had the same God above them,” observed Fr. Whalen.  “And what with the shells bursting, and the shrapnel flying, with no one knowing just what moment death would come, Catholics, Hebrews and Protestants alike all forgot their prejudice and came to realize that all faiths and creeds have about the same destination after all.” 

  Even though Fr. Whalen performs a third wedding ceremony to make matters right in the eyes of the Catholic church, Abie and Rosemary remain at odds with their fathers until a Christmas dinner (with Kosher food for the Levys) at which the couple present their newborn twins – a girl named Rebecca (for Abie’s mother) and a boy named Patrick (for Rosemary’s father). 

 Critics in general greeted the play with mixed reviews.  But two of Broadway’s powerful critics savaged the production as corny, trite, improbable, and insulting.  Heywood Broun called it a “synthetic farce” while Robert Benchley dismissed it as “among the Season’s worst” plays.  Benchley was so offended by the play, he rarely let a week go by without trashing it – a fact that may have contributed to its popularity. 

 To the critic’s horror and astonishment, “Abie’s Irish Rose” not only became the smash hit of Broadway for 1922, it ran uninterrupted for five years and 2,327 performances, a record that lasted 14 years.  It was revived in 1937 and 1954 and turned into two films (1928 and 1946), and a weekly radio show (1942).  Anne Nichols earned millions and a lasting place in Broadway history. 

 When asked to account for the play’s popularity, Nichols always said that it was the “spirit of tolerance” that ran throughout the work.  In much of America the 1920s was a reactionary era  in which anything that seemed un-American – be it booze (Prohibition), radicalism (Sacco and Vanzetti), evolution (the Scopes Trial), or ethnicity (immigration restriction) – was sharply condemned.  The KKK for example, saw its membership boom to five million by mid-decade.  But urban America (half the nation by 1920) was so multicultural that tolerance was not so much a lofty ideal as a practical necessity  (tolerance had its limits, of course, as African Americans remained a segregated and oppressed group).  Americans of different backgrounds simply had to find a way to get along.  “Abie’s Irish Rose” offered no explicit formula but did emphatically assert that it could be done – if people were willing to compromise. 

 Nichols’ decision to depict an Irish-Jewish romance to convey this idea made sense in this regard precisely because it seemed so improbable.  The Irish and Jews in the 1920s were still viewed as strong, unmeltable ethnic groups.  Her play, therefore, was not merely a celebration of tolerance, but a declaration that tolerance was a fundamentally American value.  Nichols’ emphasis on the patriotism of Irish and Jewish Americans (Abie, Rosemary, the priest and rabbi all served in the Great War) is intended to underscore this point.  The reality of Irish-Jewish relations in the 1920s and 1930s (i.e., Fr. Coughlin), to be sure, made clear that tolerance was a work in progress, but a worthy one. 

 “Abie’s Irish Rose” spawned more than a dozen knock-offs, including “Kosher Kitty Kelly (1925) and “The Cohens and the Kellys (1926).  The latter was also a huge hit on stage and became a movie in 1929.  Nichols sued Universal Studios, claiming the storyline was stolen from her, but the court rejected the claim, arguing that Irish-Jewish romance plays and films had become so numerous it was impossible to claim ownership of the idea. 

 Anne Nichols lost most of her fortune in the Great Depression and faded from the Broadway scene, unable to get out from under the shadow of her biggest hit.  She died in 1966 at the age of 75 while working on her autobiography. 

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

May 19, 1863: Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher resigns in disgust as head of the Fighting 69th Regiment when his request that his tattered force be allowed to withdraw and rebuild is rejected. 

May 24, 1798: Uprising of the United Irishmen begins.

May 25, 1895: Playwright Oscar Wilde is sentenced to two years in prison for homosexual activities. 

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES:

May 22, 1859: Writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is born (to parents born in Ireland) in Edinburgh, Scotland.

May 22, 1901: Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin is born in Boston.

May 23, 1928: Singer Rosemary Clooney is born in Maysville, KY.

(c) Edward T. O'Donnell, 2004