Part 13

The organization of the theater in England under Elizabeth and in France under Louis the Fourteenth was not approved by many of the subjects of these monarchs; and the better we know it, the less it approves itself to us, since it imposed harsh restriction upon actors and authors alike. The organization of the French theater under Louis the Sixteenth was bitterly attacked by Beaumarchais; and every reader of the ‘Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber’ will recall his diatribes against the conditions which obtained in England in his time. So every reader of Joseph Jefferson’s ‘Autobiography’ will recall his account of the squalid life led by the wandering companies of actors here in the United States in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Within the past few years Henry Arthur Jones and William Poel have declaimed against the organization of the theater in England at the present time; and the latter has gone so far as to demand drastic legislation to remedy a situation which he deems intolerable.

This being the state of affairs in other lands and in other centuries, we need not be surprised by the vehement protests against the existing organization of the theater here in America. Nor need we assume that these present protests have as little foundation as had many of those which were raised in the past.

II

The first thing we find when we undertake investigation is that the organization of the theater here and now is unlike any other which has ever existed anywhere else. In Greece the annual performances were in the hands of the state. In Rome performances were given gratuitously, more often than not, the cost being borne by an aspiring politician wishing to win the suffrages of the mob. In the Middle Ages the performances were at first in the churches under the complete control of the priests; and later they were out-of-doors on church festivals, and in charge of the gilds. In Shakspere’s time and in Molière’s a number of the more important actors associated themselves together, arranged for a theater, hired the subordinate performers, and divided the takings at the door, share and share alike. In these companies one of the actors undertook the function of manager, representing his comrades and more or less guiding their fortunes. But these managers had only so much authority as might be delegated to them by their fellow-sharers; they were not autocrats, engaging and discharging the members of the company according to their own caprice; their risk or their profit was not larger than that of their associates.

In the company at the Globe theater, Burbage seems to have been the dominant personality; yet from all we have been able to gather, we may venture a guess that Shakspere, with his gift for friendship, his solidity of character and his shrewdness in business, was probably the second in command, so to speak. In the company at the Palais Royal Molière was the honored chief, to whom his fellow-players were loyally devoted; but the associated actors managed their affairs in town-meeting and as an actor Molière shared equally with the others, altho he received extra allowances from time to time to reward his special service as the stock-playwright of the theater. This type of organization is still seen now and again in the United States, when a company, deserted by its manager, continues its existence as a commonwealth; and it is the type which has been preserved by the Comédie-Française in Paris ever since this company was established by Molière.

The French government provides the theater and also an annual subvention, in return for which it designates a manager, who has a stated salary, and also his equal share of the profits. But this appointed manager is not supreme; he can make no important decision without the advice and consent of the committee chosen by the associated actors. He is in fact an executive only; and his relations with the company depend on his tact, his ability and his powers of persuasion. If he has these qualifications, and if he is successful in rolling up the profits which are annually divided by the associated actors (and which are in addition to their modest salaries) he may be allowed more or less to have his own way. If, on the other hand, he is fussy and feeble, and especially if the receipts fall off, then the associated actors make his life a burden and the last state of that manager is worse than the first.

Altho this type of organization has many evident advantages, and altho it was once almost universal in France, in England, and in Italy, it has been generally abandoned in favor of a simpler type, whereby the power and the profit are concentrated in the hands of a manager who is solely responsible for the recruiting of the company, for the choice of the plays and for the debts of the concern. The change seems to have taken place slowly; and Colley Cibber was one of three actors who directed the destiny of the theater to which he was attached. Yet at that very time the rival theater was most autocratically managed by an illiterate speculator named Rich.

The reason for the change is not far to seek. The management of a theater is, after all, a complicated business enterprize, exceedingly difficult to conduct successfully; and a business enterprize is always one man’s job. A commonwealth is impossible unless there is the cordiality which makes for co-operation; and actors are often super-abundantly endowed with the artistic temperament which makes them kittle cattle to drive. Even in Paris, it would probably be impossible to start a rival company to the Comédie-Française, organized on the same basis. Indeed, the Comédie-Française itself has more than once been on the edge of shipwreck; its most popular actors and actresses have deserted it from time to time, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Coquelin and Lebargy; and its continued existence is due to the cohesive force of its inherited traditions, some of which go back to Molière, while others are codified in the famous decree signed at Moscow by Napoleon.

In the eighteenth century the two rival theaters in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, were managed for long periods by George Colman the elder and by David Garrick; they had secured as members of their respective companies almost every actor and actress in Great Britain who had achieved eminence; and the companies they collected remained almost unchanged from year to year, new recruits being drafted from the provinces only as the veterans ceased to lag superfluous on the stage. As the result of this continuity of association the tragedians and the comedians knew each other intimately and they were accustomed to the team-play which is essential to an effective performance.

In the nineteenth century, Montigny made the Gymnase the most attractive playhouse in Paris, excepting only the Théâtre Français. Madame Vestris gave a temporary vogue to Covent Garden; and Buckstone held the reins for a longer period at the Haymarket. In New York there were stock-companies of a similar permanence, altho of a less even excellence, first at the Park Theater, next at Burton’s and finally at Wallack’s and at Daly’s. In Boston, R. M. Field at the Museum was able to keep together, for a term of years, in fact, for more than a quarter of a century, a strong and coherent company of comedians headed by William Warren; and in San Francisco for a briefer period John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett surrounded themselves with actors and actresses of undeniable ability.

It was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that this type of theatrical organization slowly disappeared. When the Bancrofts had firmly established themselves in London in the little Prince of Wales’s Theater, they began to engage actors not for the whole of a single theatrical season, but only for the run of the piece. It is true that half-a-dozen of the more important performers remained with them and were provided with parts in play after play; but there was no longer any permanence in the membership of the company. The example of the Bancrofts was followed by the Kendals, by Wyndham and by Hare, and even by Henry Irving. These managers all engaged special performers to suit the characters of the successive plays that they produced; and they were thus relieved of the increasing expense of maintaining a stock-company capable of presenting any kind of play, comedy or tragedy or melodrama. As England is only a comparatively small island and as the multiplying railroads made it easily accessible from all parts of the kingdom, people from the provinces flocked to the capital and the plays presented in London ran for constantly increasing periods, from a hundred to even a thousand nights. And during these runs the manager was not paying salaries to actors whose names were absent from the program. So it came about that the stock-companies ceased to be and that the leading performers became part-time workers, appearing now in one playhouse and now in another, and yet fairly familiar with the methods of the other performers likely to be engaged with them for any new play or for any revival of an old play.

III

The abandonment of the permanent stock-companies and the practice of engagements only for the run of the piece, was brought about in Great Britain by economic pressure due in part to geographic conditions. And it was brought about in the United States almost simultaneously by a similar economic pressure due to widely different geographic conditions. The organization of the American theater prior to 1870 was very much what the organization of the British theater had been a century earlier. In every town of any importance there was at least one theater, occasionally owned by the manager but more generally leased by him. It was his private enterprize; he engaged the actors and the actresses, who were likely to remain with him season after season; he accumulated his own scenery, his own costumes and his own properties; he stood ready always and at forty-eight hours’ notice to put up ‘Hamlet’ or the ‘School for Scandal,’ the ‘Lady of Lyons’ or ‘Camille,’ ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ or ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room,’ ‘Mazeppa’ or the ‘Naiad Queen,’ without invoking any outside assistance.

If wandering stars came along, Forrest or Booth, “Jim Crow” Rice or Lotta, they were supported by his company clothed from his wardrobe, with properties from his own storehouse and with the primitive stock-scenery which had been seen in a hundred other plays. The manners and customs of those distant days are preserved for us in the autobiographies of Anna Cora Mowatt, of Joseph Jefferson, and of Clara Morris. More often than not, the manager was himself an actor, Burton or Wallack appearing now and again on his own stage; and his wife was not infrequently the leading lady. Sometimes the manager was a playwright, William Dunlap or Augustin Daly; and then he found his profit in presenting his own pieces. Sometimes he had been recruited from some other calling, R. M. Field or A. M. Palmer; but always was he devoted to the drama, thoroughly familiar with the traditions of the stage, and thoroughly enjoying his association with the theater. He was a local institution; and sometimes, Caldwell in New Orleans or Rice in Chicago, he was one of the leading citizens of the town.

When a popular minstrel-company wanted the theater for a week or two, the manager was sometimes obliging enough to send his company to play in a smaller city if its “opera-house” chanced to be unoccupied. He did this more willingly when a glittering spectacle, the ‘Black Crook’ or the ‘Twelve Temptations’ asked him to turn out; but this complaisance hastened his downfall, since his well-worn scenery had a pallid look after the effulgent splendor of the interloper. Then, after a while, one and another of the more prominent stars (Joseph Jefferson, first of all, as he confesses in his autobiography), dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the mounting of their plays and disgusted by the carelessness and incompetence with which they were only too often supported by the stock-actors, began to engage companies of their own, with all the performers specially chosen for the characters they were to impersonate; they arranged to carry with them the special scenery required by the plays they intended to present that season. Soon there were so many of these, that at least one theater in each of the larger cities gave up its own company and relied exclusively upon these combinations, as the travelling companies were then called.

For a few years the managers of the stock-company houses made a valiant fight; but in the end they had to retire from the field, defeated. It had been a severe blow to them, when they were deprived of the potent attraction of the stars. Without these stars, and in fact in opposition to them, the performances given by the stock-companies were found to be inferior. The local scenery, the local costumes and the local properties were discovered to be mere make-shifts, unworthy at their best, and often worse than unworthy, especially when they were compared with the stricter propriety of the scenic equipment provided for the elaborate productions sent out from New York. The local offerings appeared to be provincial, whereas those which were brought from afar had on them the stamp of metropolitan approval.

So it was that sooner or later the managers of stock-companies had to withdraw from a lost battle. Some of them kept their theaters and sank to the humble position of janitors. Some moved to New York and became producers on their own account and managers of travelling companies. Some retired to obscurity; and some died in time to escape bankruptcy. Whether the vanquishing of the local stock-companies by the travelling companies was advantageous or not, it was inevitable since it was the result of inexorable economic conditions, in conjunction with equally inexorable geographic conditions. It was a swift and startling change in the methods of conducting the business of the theater, a change brought about by forces wholly beyond the control of those engaged in that business.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the organization of the theater in the United States became what it is now. In New York, in all the larger cities and in most of the smaller, the playhouses are controlled by one or the other of the two rival syndicates. The resident managers of these playhouses are scarcely more than caretakers, since they can exercise little or no choice as to the attractions which play engagements in their theaters. The producing managers choose plays, engage actors and are responsible for all the accessories. Most of these producing managers are in partnership with one or the other of the syndicates, because these syndicates control all the important theaters in all the important towns. Thus it is that the artistic guidance of the drama is in the hands of the producing managers, and the financial government is in the hands of the syndicates.

Many of the producing managers are akin in type to the managers of the resident stock-companies, that is to say, they are sometimes actors, sometimes playwrights and sometimes men drawn from other callings by the lure of the theater. Most of the members of the syndicates are men of affairs, who have gone into the theater-business as they would go into any other business, mainly for their own profit; and their interest in the drama as an art is intermittent, whereas their interest in the theater as a business is incessant. Their attitude and their actions have called for sharply hostile criticism, summed up in the accusation that they have commercialized the theater. Now, all students of stage-history know that there has always been a commercial side to the theater, excepting in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when the drama was more or less religious in its associations. In modern times we have ascertained that the drama cannot flourish as an art unless the theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to it; and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can never be independent of the takings at the door. Even in the few subsidized theaters of Europe, national or municipal, the grant in aid made by the government is never enough to support the enterprize.

IV

Commercialism in the theater is often bitterly denounced by young persons who conceive of art as ethereally detached from all financial considerations. The real question is not whether the theater is commercial, but whether it is unduly commercial, whether it has money-making for its chief aim, whether it is willing to sacrifice its artistic aspirations to the single purpose of making money. The theater was commercial, to a certain extent, in the time of Shakspere and Molière, of Sheridan and Beaumarchais; but it was not then unduly commercial. Is it unduly commercial now and here, to-day in the United States? Is its organization exclusively in the control of men who are thinking only of the profits to be made, and who know nothing and care less about the drama as an art?

Here again it is necessary to distinguish and to point out the yawning gulf between the playhouses which are truly homes of the drama and the playhouses which have been surrendered outright to mere spectacles. There are in our theaters to-day a heterogeny of so-called musical comedies, summer song-shows, Follies and Passing Shows, sometimes beautifully mounted but often empty of anything but glitter and violent movement, far-fetched fun, and unnecessary noise. These exhibitions occupy the stages of theaters where we might hope to see something better; they are money-making speculations, no more and no less; they supply nothing but vacuous entertainment for those who go to a show warranted to demand no mental effort from the spectators; they are examples of naked commercialism. As far as the drama is concerned, they are utterly negligible, as negligible as is the circus which now invades the theater only at very rare intervals.

There remain to be considered the large proportion of our theaters the stage-doors of which remain open to the drama in all its various manifestations, tragedy, comedy, farce, problem-play, or what not. Now, nobody familiar with the facts can deny or doubt that the theater here and now is hospitable to the drama. No really noteworthy European play, no matter where it was originally brought out, fails to be presented sooner or later in New York. It may be gay, the latest Parisian farce, for example; and then its chance comes sooner. It may be somber or even gloomy, the ‘Weavers’ of Hauptmann, for instance, the ‘John Ferguson’ of St. John Ervine or the ‘Jest’ of Sem Benelli; and then its chance may be late in coming. And side by side with these more or less important importations there are a host of native pieces of every degree of merit, reflecting almost every aspect of American life and character, from the ‘Salvation Nell’ of Edward Sheldon to the ‘Why Marry?’ of Jesse Lynch Williams, from the ‘Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots’ of Augustus Thomas to the ‘Get Rich Quick Wallingford’ of George M. Cohan.

Nor is the drama of the past without its opportunity also. Sothern and Marlowe draw audiences limited only to the capacity of the houses in which they appear; Robert Mantell carries with him a varied repertory; and Walter Hampden is enabled to present ‘Hamlet’ for an unexpected series of performances. It must be confessed that Shakspere is more fortunate than Sheridan and that we have not now the privilege of beholding the ‘Rivals’ or the ‘School for Scandal’ or any of the Old Comedies as frequently as we used to have it in the days when Burton and Wallack and Daly managed their own theaters and had permanent companies accustomed to present these specimens of a form of the drama now demoded.

It is a lamentable fact, the full significance of which is grasped only by a few, that New York, perhaps the most populous city in the world, is entirely dependent on road-shows. It has now no theater managed with an eye single to its appeal to the population of Manhattan. It has to rely absolutely upon travelling combinations. It is true, of course, that many of these combinations do not travel; they begin and end their careers here in New York; but they were all of them intended to travel, if they had first succeeded in New York. The stars open their season where it is most convenient and they come into New York when they can; but the immense majority of new plays, American and British and translated from foreign tongues, are produced in New York, altho some of them may have a trial week in Washington or Atlantic City, a week of dress-rehearsals before a relatively unimportant audience. If these new plays please Broadway, they stay as long as they can and then they pack up and begin their wanderings to other cities. Experience has shown that this is the only profitable way to conduct the theatrical business; and economic conditions are as inexorable in the theatrical as in any other business.

The geographic conditions reinforce the economic; and in the United States the geographic conditions differ widely from those in any other country, more especially from those in Great Britain. As London is an easily accessible capital of a small country, the heaviest receipts are to be expected from the performances there; the London companies are engaged for the run of the piece; and they do not go on the road, the provinces being visited only by inferior touring companies. As New York is a far longer distance from most of the other large cities of the United States and as there are many of these large cities, as well as many smaller towns, equally eager to welcome any play which has won metropolitan approval, the heaviest receipts are often not in New York itself but in the multitude of these other cities and towns. Therefore New York is, in the eyes of the producing managers, often only a starting point; and their ultimate goal lies in the vast territory which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The outside market, so to speak, is so wide and the demand so insatiable, that the producing managers are hard put to supply it. And when they happen to hit on an attractive piece their profits may be enormous.

One reason why the American theater seems to many to be unduly commercialized is that it has been at times amazingly profitable. Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the theatrical was the most precarious of businesses, extra-hazardous for the managers, the actors and the authors. When they died Shakspere and Molière were able to leave to their families only a modest competence. David Garrick is almost the only manager in all the long history of the theater in Great Britain and the United States who was able to retire with a fortune. Benefits had to be arranged for Lester Wallack and for A. M. Palmer. The playwrights were in no better case than the players or the managers; and in the nineteenth century more than one potential dramatist turned novelist simply because novel-writing was easier and more profitable than playwriting.

But in the final third of the last century the right of a foreign author to control his own work was internationally recognized, thus relieving the playwrights of our language from competition with pieces purloined from alien authors. The right of a British author to control his work in the United States was also established, relieving the American playwright from competition with pieces imported from England without payment. The far-flung British Commonwealth continued to expand; and the remoter regions of the United States became more densely populated. And the most successful pieces of British and American authorship were discovered to be exportable to France and Germany and Italy.

V