The Sound of Murder: a Night Out at a Vintage, Broadway Failure

I discovered Theatre40 yesterday, tucked inside Beverly Hills High School.  The play was The Sound of Murder. It played Broadway in 1959. It was not a hit. That is why I went to see it.

I wanted to learn what was thought to be Broadway worthy  60 years ago. What themes resonated with an audience that had yet to see a hippie, the march on Washington, the moonshot or The Brady Brunch? What the heck were people thinking about in the year before I was born?

The play is a whodunnit- a tasty bit of cat and mouse between a wife who wants to leave a marriage and a boorish, author husband who knows she is having an affair but refuses to grant a divorce. He also refuses to have children. The lovers’ plan to kill the husband is overheard by his devoted secretary. Trouble ensues.

In the theatre dark, I tried my best to be a 1959  version of myself. I appreciated the long skirts, tiny watches, and a two story home with a single first floor phone. The murder planning is accidentally recorded on a reel to reel tape machine that the man uses to dictate his novels. On the day when we learned that Amazon’s Alexis is listening in on  homes this was my first link back to 1959: the unintended consequences of convenient tech. On a cultural level, it was easy to recognize the trope and trials of the unmarried,  professional woman so typically illustrated as an unattractive secretary. But it was much harder to determine the impact of these things: the affair, the husband’s  hatred of children, the need for your spouse to grant you a divorce,  domestic abuse, limited opportunities for women, and the heartbreaking schism between commerciality and artistry. (The husband writes children’s books but cheerfully despises children.)

Eventually, the lovers have to make a second, more determined and angry attempt to kill the husband. In the last scene we see them on the way to do the deed, climbing the stairs, hand in hand, with heroic purpose and lighting.

So what to conclude? By 1959, Tennessee Williams had written Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Ibsen had written A Doll’s House and Tolstoy had written Anna Karenina. We can add Tess Derby and Emma Bovary to a long parade of desperate wives and near- wives. It seems that in 1959 society was still wrestling with the known problems resulting from the repressed lives of women.

This play champions the concept that modern people should take the situation in their own hands, to do a wrong to make a right. In that way it whispered the decade to come, where civil, and if necessary, not so civil, disobedience was righteousness.

I’ve always sensed 1960, my birth year, was an incendiary crux in time, where what came before was entirely different than what came after. The Sound of Murder was not a popular play. But to be popular you have to be not only accepted but broadly understood. My 1959 self probably would not have seen what was coming. But now I think I know what I may have been thinking about.