Henry Fonda again from McKinney

The Omaha Community Playhouse is only a year old when Fonda joins, but in its genome are decades of history, theory, aspiration. It grows out of the Progressive Era, a period of political reform and social experiment lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. A group of Omaha benefactors joins in the Little Theatre movement—what Dorothy Chan-sky terms a concerted effort by "writers, various kinds of activists, uni-versity professors and other educators, clubwomen, settlement workers, artists, and social elites" to bolster local playhouses against the onslaught of Hollywood, whose growing popularity is transforming many stage theaters into movie houses. The Community Playhouse is founded in 1924, and its first president, Omaha architect Alan McDonald, avows its purpose: "To raise the drama from a purely amusement enterprise into an educational, cultural force." Little Theatre was a middle-class phenomenon with progressive in-tentions and a conservative agenda. "Like other reform activities in the era," Chansky writes, it "had contradictory strains; it included forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia, sometimes within the same production company or publication." Certainly the movement took for granted the cultural supremacy of those who drove and financed it: "Most Little Theatre workers assumed that their middle-class, Protestant heritage was a standard by which all culture could be measured." But in the context of middle-class, suburban Omaha in the 1920s, the Community Playhouse does not do badly. Under Foley, it cops to light Broadway fare but also stages naturalism, futurism, high farce—Shaw, Wilde, Molnar, O'Neill, Capek. Audiences are kept alive to past classics and modern currents, and the ideological limitations of Little Theatre are perhaps pushed out a few inches. The contradictions noted by Chansky provide the ideal opening into acting for a young man whose exteriors and values are conventional but whose ambitions and perceptions are extraordinary.

and

There's another thing to be pointed out about Hollywood and Henry Fonda, the same thing that accounts for Ronald Reagan's entry into film: the sound of the voice. By 1935, the movies had talked for eight years, and it was accepted that voice as much as body defined the actor, that one could not become a star without distinctive tones. There is not an icon of the Hollywood 1930s whose voice is not central to his or her legend: Tracy's gruffness, Hepburn's clenched jaw, Grant's suave cadence, Cagney's bullet phrasing. Fonda and his contemporaries moved into the space left by the stars whose mystique was built solely on movement and expression, and who now found they were unable to seduce an audience with its ears wide open. David Thomson notes the paradox that the coming of sound placed an unprecedented emphasis on silence—that is, on the trade-off between a voice and the silence that might precede or follow it, or the silence sounded in the timbre of the voice itself. He writes of how "a generation of favorites slipped away because they did not have access to that emotional quietness, and the allure that attaches to any mystery or reticence in a medium that seems to be giving you all the visual evidence." Fonda has that access, that allure. It's partly the voice that leaves people at a loss for how to describe him. Here is a young man of uncom-mon reserve, so much of whom is implied in silence, lack of show. He seems smarter than Cooper, more virtuous than Gable, more melancholy than McCrea, more elusive than Tracy. Viewers who haven't seen any-thing quite like him before, who lack better words to describe it, call it "modest," "honest," "simple." But how do we describe simplicity in a way that does justice to its complexity? How do we prove the existence of the invisible, or translate a message in vanishing ink? Words like sim-ple fall short when applied to Fonda, because they are asked to describe something not at all obvious—something that is there to be felt, yet is not there to be seen.

and regarding the gruesome suicide of Frances:

Men commit actions, women commit gestures... Phyllis Chesler

and on her replacement:

Susan wants what most wives want- sustained intimacy- and Fonda has failed her as many husbands fail their wives.

and on Lee Strasberg's instruction of Jane:
He introduces her for instance to the idea of the counter-need, a secret desire contradicting each conscious motivation.