Trade a Husband in Dubuque

I recently read Rachel Crothers‘ 1931 play As Husbands Go, a whimsical, romantic comedy set “in the country 10 miles from Dubuque.” The play was “given great reception on Broadway” in the early 1930s, and was made into a movie in 1934 by Fox Film Corporation.

Unluckily, the movie, which was “mostly filmed on location in Iowa,” does not appear to be available on VHS or DVD. I had to borrow the script from University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City via interlibrary loan.

As Husbands Go is about “a lady who wants to trade a husband in Dubuque for a poet in Paris.” Burns Mantle, special New York correspondent to the Chicago Daily Tribune, described Crothers’ play as “a nice little study of a middle aged wife who finds romance again in Paris and tries to bring it home with her to Dubuque, Ia., and the thoroughly sweet, safe, and loyal small town banker husband who gets in her way” (March 15, 1931, p. G1).

The photo at the upper left is of Gloria Holden, the “calm, poetic beauty” who played the wife in the stage version of As Husbands Go (Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1932, p. E9).

Although As Husbands Go contains no direct physical description of Dubuque, real or imagined, the play relies heavily on the myth or mystique of Dubuque as being simple, comfortable, and humdrum (yet simultaneously self conscious, strained, and raw), especially in comparison to the sophistication of Paris and New York.

One character, an English poet visiting Dubuque, makes the following observation: “Everything seems a little more real — more honest — over here. Less glamour. Things seem to me somehow to be just exactly as they are, if you know what I mean” (p. 125).

Of course, nothing is as it seems in As Husbands Go. By the end of the play, even Dubuque assumes an air of sophistication, in its own peculiar way.