Well, friends, it’s been a minute since I wrote an entry in our Shows for Someday series, but here we are again! Thanks for reading. Today, we’ll be looking at Ira Levin’s Dr. Cook’s Garden, which is subtitled “A Melodrama” on the published script.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ira Levin occupies his own singular niche as a writer. Many writers are lucky if they have one monumental, genre-changing bestseller, but Levin arguably had three: Rosemary’s Baby (the grandaddy of the demon-possession story), The Stepford Wives (whose title has become a common American phrase), and The Boys from Brazil. His first huge bestseller was A Kiss for Dying in 1953, his last Son of Rosemary in 1997. That’s a good run!
People pay less attention to his impressive accomplishments as a playwright: a massive hit right out of the gate with his theatrical adaptation of No Time For Sergeants, which was a television play, then a Broadway show, then a film. It launched the career of Andy Griffith and first paired him with Don Knotts. His other theatre hits include Critic’s Choice (on Broadway with Henry Fonda, on film with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball) and 1978’s Deathtrap, a blockbuster play that still holds the record as the longest-running mystery-comedy on Broadway. Deathtrap and Sergeants in particular were worldwide successes that played everywhere in their day, from Broadway to community theatre. And even less successful Levin titles like Veronica’s Room are still occasionally done.
He had flops on Broadway too, but even one like the 1965 musical Drat! The Cat!, yielded a cultural contribution, the standard “He Touched Me”, for which Levin wrote the lyrics.
What, then, of the subject of this Shows for Someday entry: Levin’s 1967 thriller Dr. Cook’s Garden?
PRE-PRODUCTION
In the fall of 1967, luck hadn’t been with Levin’s recent Broadway outings. His big hit No Time For Sergeants had closed a full decade prior. He’d had a moderate hit (with a long stock and amateur afterlife) in Critic’s Choice, which ran for 5 months in 1962. But since Sergeants’ 1957 closing, Levin had flopped on Broadway with Interlock, a four-performance bomb in 1958 that starred Rosemary Harris, Celeste Holm, and Maximilian Schell; the large-cast 1962 play General Seeger, which ran for one preview and two performances, and starred George C. Scott, who also directed; and the aforementioned Drat! The Cat! in 1965, directed by Joe Layton and starring Elliot Gould and Lesley Ann Warren, which ran for eleven previews and eight performances. As for his career in fiction writing, Rosemary’s Baby had been released in March 1967 and would go on to sell 4,000,000 copies. The film version was already in pre-production when Dr. Cook’s Garden made its much-anticipated Broadway bow.
SYNOPSIS
In the fall of 1966 in the town of Greenfield Center, VT, much-loved Dr. Cook is a pillar of his community. It’s the kind of idyllic place where karma seems to catch up with wicked people. Ben Tennyson, a young physician who grew up with Cook as his family doctor, returns to the town to visit. Ben is delighted to see his mentor again, until a medical ethics issue arises: it seems the town attains its perfection in an unexpected and deadly way. And in the play’s climax, the two doctors, one young and one old, face off in a very suspenseful, dramatic scene.
In the next post we’ll talk about the backstage shenanigans, which were nearly as dramatic as those in the play!