"God will get you for that, Walter."
Nobody could do more with these words than Beatrice Arthur as Maude Findlay on the marital warpath. She could slingshot them in fury or release them in a chilling deadpan, but however she delivered them you could be sure they'd hit their mark with a prizefighter's pop.
All the tributes that will be lavished on Arthur, who died Saturday at 86, will extol her impeccable comic timing. Her ability to detonate a joke, to momentarily harness a punch line before releasing at full force, brought her Emmy-winning success in two groundbreaking sitcoms -- Norman Lear's 1970s classic "Maude" and "The Golden Girls," launched in 1985 and no doubt making somebody crack up in rerun land as you're reading this.
Television critics can pay appropriate homage to the place of these shows in small-screen history. But I can't help thinking about the stage origins of those unerring instincts for comedy, the hours upon hours of performing in theaters large and small that taught Arthur better than any videotape what worked and what didn't. Nor can I keep myself from mourning a death that in some respects marks the passing of an entertainment era.
John Lahr, the drama critic for the New Yorker, once described Elaine Stritch as "possessing an absolute radar in terms of audience reaction that the newer generation simply lacks the opportunity in the theater to develop." Arthur was granted that same glorious opportunity to develop her craft. Funny enough, Stritch and Arthur had the same early teacher, the German director Erwin Piscator, whose students at the New School for Social Research included Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis.
Piscator was a seminal influence on Bertolt Brecht, whose "The Threepenny Opera" with Kurt Weill occasioned Arthur's breakthrough, when she was cast as Lucy Brown in the heralded 1954 off-Broadway production with Lotte Lenya. Arthur, by this time, had already been performing regularly, thanks to a theater culture that knew a good bass-baritone voice and imposing build when it saw them.
"Let's face it," Arthur once quipped, "nobody ever asked me to play Juliet." But she didn't lack opportunities, and it wasn't long before Broadway would turn her into a star. In 1964, she played Yente the matchmaker in the original company of "Fiddler on the Roof." And shortly after that, Arthur scored her most popular stage success as the sloshed Vera Charles in the 1966 Broadway premiere of "Mame," directed by her then-husband, Gene Saks. That performance, played opposite Angela Lansbury, earned Arthur a Tony, and she later reprised the role in Saks' 1974 movie version, starring Lucille Ball.
