Fortune & Men’s Eyes

Modern Canadian Drama, Volume One


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Herbert's experiences in jail (he was beaten and raped in a gym storeroom at the Guelph Reformatory) provided him with the raw material for his drama Fortune and Men's Eyes which he began writing in 1963.Prisoners at the Mimico Reformatory were required to work out of doors in all kinds of weather, breaking stone into smaller pieces with picks and shovels in "The Brickyard." Herbert became ill with a fever and told a guard he was too ill to work. For a prisoner to refuse work was a serious offence. Herbert was locked into an iron whipping machine with hip and ankle clamps and beaten on the buttocks by a guard wielding a piece of cowhide strap until he fainted and the jail doctor supervising the punishment ordered the beating to stop. Herbert was thrown into a solitary confinement cell with no light and only a hole in the floor for urinating and defecating. He developed pneumonia and nearly died.

But Herbert's experiences in jail only liberated his spirit completely. He made up his cheeks and lips with smuggled-in lipstick, made eye mascara from a mixture of cold cream and soot from the window sill of his cell, and set his hair in curlers made of toilet paper, achieving fantastic hair styles until his head was shaved bald by prison guards. Herbert was living the character of the rebellious "Queenie" prison inmate he would create 16 years later in Fortune and Men's Eyes and its 1970-71 film adaptation. For the Guelph Reformatory's annual Christmas show in 1947, he secretly prepared a dramatic black evening dress and a piece of black satin twisted around his head like a Parisian headdress to cover his shaven head. As later dramatized in Fortune, he became a frightening goddess of freedom, singing a Marlene Dietrich-like parody about love in a penal reform institution to the wildly cheering inmates and the outraged prison authorities.

Written and revised during 1963-66, Fortune and Men's Eyes is set in a Canadian prison for youth and deals with society's injustice towards Gay people, the facts of brutality and homosexuality within prisons, the corruption of police and guards, the education in crime for first offenders, and the painful need of friendship, affection and love between prisoners.

As Herbert himself has stated about the play's plea for the acceptance of human diversity, "I do not believe that any community can learn to live with the many societies of the world unless it first learns to live with the many factions within itself. "Following rejections by George Luscombe, artistic director of Toronto Workshop Productions, and Canadian director George McCowan, Herbert submitted an early version of Fortune to Douglas Campbell at the Stratford Festival. Campbell accepted the play for the Festival's 1965 young actors' workshop and assigned Bruno Gerussi to direct the play. Richard Monette, the current Stratford artistic director, was cast as the androgynous "Mona" and Ken Pogue as the Guard. But because of the play's homosexual subject matter, the Stratford Board of Directors forbade the single planned public performance of Fortune so that the play was only performed in private for the Stratford actors. Herbert also sent a copy of the play to Nathan Cohen who felt that no theatre in Canada would stage a public performance.

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In 1966, Cohen recommended Fortune to New York producer David Rothenberg who had just produced Megan Terry's internationally acclaimed anti-Vietnam War play Viet Rock. Rothenberg loved the play and passed it on to Dustin Hoffman who had made his New York acting debut in 1965 and won several acting awards in 1966. Hoffman, a member of the famous New York Actors Studio (home of the naturalistic "Method" style of acting) was interested in the part of "Rocky" in Fortune and - along with Jon Voight as "Smitty" - was among the first actors involved in the 1966 Actors Studio workshop of the play. Workshop discussions were led by the Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg. Three years before the 1969 Stonewall Riots and two years before the production of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, Strasberg believed the theatre hadn't dealt with homosexuality and prison life in an honest, non-caricatured manner. He thought Fortune and Men's Eyes was a unique play that would open doors to a previously taboo subject and made Herbert a life member of the Actors Studio. Produced by David Rothenberg, Fortune premiered off-Broadway at the Actors Playhouse on February 23, 1967 and ran until January of 1968, attracting other Gay playwrights such as Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward to performances.

The play toured to Chicago and San Francisco, was the first production to play the converted old stock exchange building in Montreal (the current Centaur Theatre) and ran for 15 weeks at the Central Library Theatre in Toronto. Sal Mineo remounted the play in Los Angeles in 1969, transferring the production to New York where it ran another nine months. New productions were mounted in Sweden, Turkey, Israel, South Africa and London where Charles Marowitz launched his avant-garde Open Space Company with a nine-month run of Fortune in 1968.In France, only a few years after the student riots of 1968, the French-language production of Fortune at the Theatre Athenee 1971-72 became a cause célèbre protesting government censorship of the stage. At the play's opening night, the audience included luminaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Melina Mercuri, Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau. Right-wing governments tried to close productions in Turkey, Argentina and South Africa where Fortune was mounted with a racially mixed cast.

To this day, the play continues to affect audiences in countries where prison reform and discrimination against gay people are still strong public issues. In 1999 Fortune ran for five months in Mexico City, produced by the Mexican Authors Society. The play also continues to fight for prison reform through the Fortune Society, founded by David Rothenberg in 1967.To demonstrate the authenticity of the drama to the Actors Playhouse audiences, Rothenberg invited young ex-cons to talk about prison conditions after performances on Tuesday nights. This proved very popular with audiences and attracted the support of actors such as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Candice Bergen, and others. Run by ex-cons and with a number of branches across the U.S., the Fortune Society fought to end the censorship of mail in prisons, lobbied members of the U.S. Congress about prison conditions, and continues to assist people coming out of jail to get jobs and to get off drugs. Three decades after its premiere, Fortune and Men's Eyes has become a metaphor for John Herbert's own life: the struggle for self-acceptance (both in one's physical body and gender identity), taking ethical and political stands for what one believes in, and persevering in the face of adversity while fighting for human understanding.

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