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Shaw s Caesar and Cleopatra, among other productions, gave him even greater
exposure.
Although Berg had also done live television, her theater credentials
were minimal; her play, Me and Molly (1948), in which she also starred, was
unsuccessful, suggesting that, unlike the Lomans, the Goldbergs were not
meant for Broadway. Molly Goldberg was the exception, but only if her
218 MOTHER MAME
Bronx homemaker problem solver persona was replaced by one that was
less stereotypical, such as a Brooklyn widow courted by a Japanese industri-
alist. Such was the premise of A Majority of One, which opened in the right sea-
son. In February 1959, theatergoers had already seen The World of Suzy Wong;
the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Flower Drum Song, was playing
across the street at the St. James; a block away at the Music Box was Fay
Kanin and Michael Kanin s dramatization of a classic Japanese film, Akira
Kurosawa s Rashomon. Plays with Asian settings or, in the case of The Flower
Drum Song, with Asian characters were no longer exotic or intimidating.
Fortunately, for the Theatre Guild and Dore Shary, audiences were
willing to take a chance on a play that posed a question similar to the one
that opened the popular 1940s radio soap, Our Gal Sunday: Can a girl from
a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled
Englishman? Majority raised a question that had not only cultural but also
religious and racial implications: Can Bertha Jacoby (Berg), a Jewish widow
from Brooklyn, who holds Japan responsible for her son s death in World
War II, become romantically involved with Koichi Asano (Hardwicke), a
Japanese manufacturer and widower, who has also lost a son in the war (but
who does not bear a grudge against America)?
The answer is a qualified yes, but only if the playwright can come up
with a plausible way for two such dissimilar types to meet, so that their rela-
tionship can develop to a point where matrimony is a possibility. Spiegelgass
had been a successful screenwriter (All through the Night [1942], The Perfect
Marriage [1946], So Evil My Love [1948], I Was a Male War Bride [1949], etc.),
with occasional forays into television drama, before he tackled the theater.
Because he had written a play that was easily convertible to film, Majority
made such a smooth transition to the screen that the movie version was
completed a year after the play ended its New York run on 25 June 1960.
Since Spiegelgass adapted his own play, he had already solved the
problem of how a Jew and a Zen Buddhist were able to meet without requir-
ing a suspension of disbelief. Bertha is a widow with a son, who happens to
be a foreign service hotshot and has no intention of leaving his mother in
MOTHER MAME 219
Brooklyn while he and his equally solicitous wife are stationed in Tokyo.
Traveling by sea from San Francisco to Yokohama (a mode of travel that con-
veniently allows a relationship to develop), Bertha encounters Mr. Asano
(Hardwicke), and what ordinarily would have been a meet cute becomes
a meet rude. Bertha has still not forgotten December 7. Eventually, she
thaws, then warms, and a November-December romance blossoms but does
not exactly burgeon.
On stage, neither Berg nor Hardwicke was much of a revelation: She
alternated shtick with pathos; he slanted his eyes, bowed respectfully, and
delivered his lines as if he were a spokesperson for Bartlett s Book of Quotations.
What the film version needed and received were two character actors:
Rosalind and Alec Guinness. Although Hardwicke brought the right amount
of gravitas to Asano, it came across as aloofness. Then there was the matter
of the makeup. When a Western actor plays an Asian, the makeup calls
attention to itself, unless the actor can convince the audience to move
beyond the externals into the character himself. Unlike Hardwicke, who
never lost himself in the role, Guinness made his appearance such a part of
Asano that his makeup was as natural as Rosalind s Yiddish inflections.
Neither had an easy time; Guinness had to internalize the emotions of a man
whose culture does not allow him to express them directly, causing him to
suppress what a Westerner might reveal without regard for propriety. For
Asano, propriety is all; it is up to a Westerner, like Bertha or her insensitive
son, to translate facial expressions, gestures, and, above all, posture into
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