Part 10

"Robert Loraine isn't a good actor," William A. Brady said to me once, "but he's sure to be a popular star, because of the vigor, the virility, the fresh young manhood, the breath of outdoors that he sends over the footlights." Consider the lilies in the cheeks of Billie Burke, and then, if you can tear yourself away from that floricultural exhibition, consider the box-office value of the youth that spills itself from the lips of Wallace Eddinger and Douglas Fairbanks. All the genius of Mrs. Fiske couldn't make an audience believe in her motherhood in "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch"--"I wouldn't trust her with a baby of mine," whispered a woman in the first-night audience at the Manhattan--but how we felt the maternalism of Jennie Eustace in "The Witching Hour," and, in another way, of Jessie Millward in "The Hypocrites." Hedwig Reicher is a capital actress, but she is also a self-reliant woman, and her skill couldn't win sympathy for her supposed helplessness in "The Next of Kin."

Two years ago I was trying terribly to make prospective audiences sense the pitiful plight of poor little Anna Victoria in "Such a Little Queen." I wrote a dozen lines as to the discomfort of starvation, the inconvenience of being put into the street. They were things that I thought, and then I remembered that, when I came to New York with nothing but my "cheek" a woman might say under the circumstances, I and two dollars in money, I used to look out of the windows--the window--of my top-story room and think: "In all this great city there isn't a human being who cares whether I live or die." These very words I put into the mouth of Anna Victoria, and, of all my fine speeches, that was the only one that really "got over."

It "got over" because it was true, and because, whatever else truth may be--has any one ever satisfactorily answered Pontius Pilate?--it is the best bullet one can shoot across the footlights. Vicarious experience sometimes does the trick, but only for persons of highly developed mimetic faculty. I remember a woman in a play who was supposed to receive her death blow with an "Oh, my God!" She was particularly requested not to scream it, or to groan it, or to do anything else conventional with it. It was to be a helpless "Oh, my God!", a hopeless "Oh, my God!", an "Oh, my God!" that sounded like the thud of a hammer at the heart. One night she got the tone. "How?" we asked. "I heard a woman say it in the street. An ambulance surgeon had told her her baby was dead."

The first principle of "getting it over," then, is being, feeling, believing. It is a principle that draws interest. Believing is very important. Do you think John Mason could have held his audience through the episode under the electrolier in "The Witching Hour" if he hadn't believed in it? I don't. Perriton Carlyle, in "The Little Gray Lady," made a mistake. It was a bad mistake, composed chiefly of a hundred dollars that didn't belong to him. I never knew any one in my life who hadn't stolen something sometime, and many of my friends are pretty respectable now. I believed that Carlyle's foot had slipped, and that, in spite of the accident, he might walk straight the rest of his days. I couldn't get an actor to believe it. Edgar Selwyn didn't, and Eugene Ormonde didn't, and, while they played the part, nobody did. John Albaugh, Jr., an actor inferior to both of them, felt sure of the inherent goodness of Carlyle, and so made possible the success of a piece that could not have succeeded without universal sympathy for its hero.

Well, we've ridden a long way astride of a hobby. Let's get back, and admit that we like sugar on our strawberries, which is to say art with our nature. For, after all, a generous admixture of skill is required in the expression of instinct, just as the peach-bloomiest complexion, displayed in the high light of the theater, must have rouge upon it to seem what it really is. Every stage manager knows the genuine society girl who is engaged to lend verisimilitude to a drawing-room drama, and who, at rehearsals, regards her teacup as though it were some strange and savage animal.

Edwin Booth's Othello was the triumph of an artist. He made audiences forget that his embodiment of the Moor was a thin-chested, undersized student of sensitive face and dreamy eyes. Charles Kean's first appearance in London was as Macbeth, and his Lady Macbeth, a great woman in both senses of the word, refused to play opposite a leading man who "looked like a half-grown boy." Afterwards, she swore that he grew during the performance. Salvini drawing tears from an audience ignorant of his tongue by counting from one to an hundred; Bernhardt scolding an actor in the death tones of Camille; Margaret Anglin repeating "Poor little ice-cream soda" until her hearers broke down sobbing--these are examples of pure artistry, of "getting over" impressions without even a thought behind them. No one who knows the first thing about the theater can underrate, be it never so slightly, the value of training, of experience; the effectiveness of carefully-thought-out "business", of inflection, of nuance, of pitch, of rhythm, of all the things that require years of study, labor, and perseverance.

Tully Marshall, whose Hannock in "The City" was the finest, and seemed the most inspired, acting of last season, tells me that he worked out, almost mechanically, every thrill in his big scene at the end of Act III. Mr. Marshall made so convincing the degeneracy, the besottedness of the character that I have heard laymen insist he must be a drug fiend. Yet this actor knows exactly how he produced his effects. Ethel Barrymore, on the other hand, knew only that she had striven for years, and had never quite felt herself "go smashing past the footlights and into the brains of her auditors."

Then, on the first night in New York of John Galsworthy's "The Silver Box," when, as Mrs. Jones, charwoman, she stepped down from the witness stand, silent, but thinking with all the force that was in her of the wretched, squalid home to which she was returning alone, and the curtain fell between her and the vast stillness of the awed audience, she knew that at last she had "got it over."

"And, oh!" says Ethel Barrymore, "I found the knowledge sweet."

_SOMETHING ABOUT "FIRST NIGHTS"_

Wherein is shown that the opening of a new play is more hazardous than the opening of a jackpot, and that theatrical production is a game of chance in comparison with which roulette and rouge-et-noir are as tiddledewinks or old maid.

While the curtain was rising and falling after the third act of "Seven Days", then being given its initial performance in New York at the Astor Theater, a woman behind me remarked: "I'll bet Hopwood is the happiest man in town at this moment!"

The person to whom she alluded was Avery Hopwood, collaborative author of the play in question, and almost any auditor in the house would have declined to take the other side of the wager. "Seven Days" was an obvious success, an unexpected success, and a success that had arrived something after schedule time. Mr. Hopwood had shared with your humble servant the credit for his first work, "Clothes", and his second and third works, "The Powers That Be" and "This Woman and This Man", had not called the fire department to the Hudson River. Those watchful gentlemen, the managers, who measure a dramatist by the line in front of his box office, were beginning to wonder whether "Hopwood really can write a play." Here was a vociferous answer to the question--an answer destined to be repeated, with greater emphasis, a year later in "Nobody's Widow." "Certainly", I thought, "Hopwood _is_ the happiest man in town at this moment!"

Subsequently, on my way out of the Astor, I came within an ace of running into "the happiest man." He was standing on the curb, half a block north of the theater, and he didn't "look the part" with which he had been invested. His face was white and set, his brow puckered into deep wrinkles, and his chief occupation seemed to be the nice one of nibbling the skin from his knuckles without actually lacerating them. "Well", he inquired, with agonized anxiety, "how did it go?"

"A knockout!" I replied, in the vernacular.

"On the level?" he asked. "You're not trying to jolly me?"

There was no suggestion of insincerity in the query. It was evident that Diogenes, if he had returned to look for the happiest, instead of for an honest man, must needs have gone farther than the author of "Seven Days."

From contact with other victims and from personal experience, I feel qualified to say that the most terrible ordeal known since the days of the inquisition is a theatrical "first night." Dramatist, manager, actors and even stage hands are tortured by it, and their sufferings are not to be gauged by the number of times they have undergone the horror. The "first night", moreover, is a thing unique in art. A painting may hang for weeks before the painter learns whether he has succeeded or not; a book may be on the market nearly a year without its author knowing the result of his effort. In either case, criticisms are many and varying. The verdict on a play, however, is given with the suddenness and force of a blow, and sometimes it is equally conclusive. Failure in any other field leaves something in the way of assets; theatrical failure sweeps away everything. Realize this, put yourself in the place of those most concerned, and you will understand the effect of a "first night." Suppose that all your possessions, representing the labor of a life-time, were tied together and suspended by a string over a bottomless abyss. The feeling with which you would watch that string as it stretched to the breaking point would be akin to the feeling with which the dramatist watches the audience come to pass judgment on his work.

Of course, it is not always, or often, true that a single production either makes or breaks those concerned in it, but even a single production is so large an element in this making or breaking that it becomes of vital importance. Sometimes, too, "first night" gatherings are wrong, and performances which they condemn afterward prove great artistic and financial hits. This, however, is rare; the say of the initial audience, made up of professional reviewers and experienced theater-goers, is likely to be conclusive. Henrietta Crosman, then an unknown actress from the West, came to New York with "Mistress Nell" on October 9, 1900, and opened to receipts under two hundred dollars. A single day later the sums being paid into the box office were limited only by the seating capacity of the house. Helen Ware, after years of unrecognized good work in small parts, achieved stellar honors within the three hours of her first metropolitan appearance as Annie Jeffries in "The Third Degree." No chronicle short of a six-volume book could begin to give an account of the playwrights and players whose stock has soared a hundred points during the course of a single evening on Broadway.

Failures determined with equal promptitude have been so numerous during the past few seasons that it seems idle to recapitulate. One night proved a sufficiently long time in which to guess accurately at the future of "Septimus", "Drifting", "A Skylark", "Mr. Buttles", "Miss Patsy", "The Heights", "The Upstart", "The Scandal", "The Young Turk", "The Foolish Virgin", "The Next of Kin", "The Fires of Fate", "Children of Destiny", "Welcome to Our City", and "A Little Brother of the Rich." Two or three of these had been great triumphs in London and Paris, half a dozen were by famous Englishmen and Americans, nearly all represented extravagant expenditure on the part of experienced managers, but neither precedent nor prominence disturbed the "first night" jury in New York. Augustus Thomas' "The Ranger" was voted impossible a few years ago at Wallack's with as little hesitation as though it had been written by John Jones instead of by the author of "Arizona." Frank McKee cancelled the bookings of Hoyt's "A Dog in the Manger" while the second act was in progress at Washington, and "The Narrow Path", offered for a run at the Hackett, never had another performance there--or anywhere else.

With such possibilities as these before his eyes, with "Mrs. Dane's Defence" at one end of the pendulum's reach and "The Evangelist" at the other, do you wonder that the playwright is nervous on a "first night"?

Unfortunately, it is not alone the behavior of the "death watch" in front of the footlights that gives cause for anxiety. Actors and actresses are uncertain creatures, while inanimate objects seem to have a perfect genius for going wrong at critical times. No amount of rehearsing can be depended upon to prevent a moon wobbling as it rises at an initial performance, or to make the crash of thunder sound unlike Bridget taking it out of the pots and pans after dinner. A laugh at a serious moment may decide the fate of a play, the fate of a play may make a difference of several hundred thousand dollars to its manager, and, this being true, what the manager says to the property man or the electrician after a _faux pas_ like either of those mentioned is a problem you can solve in half the time you once devoted to discovering the age of Ann.

I remember vividly the primal performance at Hartford of Paul Arthur's melodrama, "Lost River." One of the mechanical effects in this piece was a bicycle race, during which the contestants pedaled wildly on stationary machines. The effect of passing landscape was given by a panorama and a fence that moved rapidly in the opposite direction. At least, they were supposed to move in the opposite direction, but on the occasion of which I speak they didn't. The race became one between the bicyclists and the surrounding country, and the surrounding country was far in the lead when an irate stage manager rang down the curtain. This accident never happened again, but, had the "first night" been in New York instead of on the road, once would have been enough.

The late A. M. Palmer used to tell a story illustrative of the fact that players, under stress of "first night" excitement, often share "the wickedness of inanimate things." Mr. Palmer produced "Trilby" when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, and upon the consequences of the performance depended his immediate future. Paul Potter's dramatization opened in Boston, and gave no cause for worry except in the matter of its extreme length. Half the population of Boston is also the population of suburban towns, and Sarah Bernhardt, George Cohan and a Yale lock couldn't keep 'em from leaving a theater at train time. Consequently, when eleven o'clock came and the last act of "Trilby" had just begun, a frown settled on the classic brow of the ordinarily imperturbable Mr. Palmer.

Virginia Harned, neither as experienced nor as clever then as now, was playing Trilby, and she felt that her portrayal had been more or less overshadowed by the Svengali of Wilton Lackaye. There is no better part in the drama than that of the hypnotist, while the opportunities of the name role are limited. Miss Harned's first chance to make her talent conspicuous came with the death of the model in the last act. "Trilby began to die at 11:10", declared Mr. Palmer. "The audience had already commenced looking at its watches, and a photograph of my thoughts would have developed into a blue print. Miss Harned, on the contrary, approached the scene with joy, too wrought up to take into consideration the fact that the people in front had begun to be more interested in Newton than in the affairs of Little Billee. Trilby died in every way known to medical science and the art of acting. She died of heart disease and consumption and cerebral spinal meningitis. She died a la Bernhardt and Marlowe and Clara Morris. She died on the sofa and the piano stool and two of the rugs, and, just when I thought she had breathed her last against the door R. I. E., she found strength to take a few steps and do it all over again in the center of the stage. Little Billee was waiting in the wings, but, as you will understand if you remember the play, no one could come on until Trilby had shuffled off her mortal coil. And Trilby, on this occasion, simply would not shuffle. It was nearly 11:30 when she finally gave up the ghost on a davenport L. C., in the presence of that portion of the audience sufficiently Yankee to be determined upon missing nothing it had paid to see. That death scene, abridged and expurgated, afterward became a most powerful and effective bit of acting, but I confess that on the evening in question the quality of it was somewhat obscured by the quantity."

Dramatic authors, likely to be the victims of incidents of this sort, cannot be blamed for manifesting marked peculiarities as regards "first nights." When my best and least successful play, "The Secret Orchard", was given its premiere at the Lyric, I trotted off to see "A Knight for a Day" at Wallack's. James Forbes spends his evening behind the scenes. After the opening of "The Commuters", which ran six months at the Criterion, he locked himself in a dressing room, convinced that the piece was a dismal failure, and refused to come out, even when implored to do so in order that the leading woman might get into her street clothes. Throughout the performance of his maiden effort, "Her Husband's Wife", "Al" Thomas walked up and down the block in front of the Garrick. Few men are able even to assume the insouciance of Harry B. Smith, who, at the primal presentation of his "The Bachellor Belles", smoked a cigar in the lobby throughout the first act and went home in the middle of the second.

Until constant ridicule broke up the practice, most authors needed little urging to induce them to address their audiences on "first nights." As recently as the Fall of 1909, during the performance of "On the Eve", Martha Morton, its adapter, made a speech from her box at the Hudson. The man behind the pen has so little chance to get into the limelight--poor fellow!--that to speak or not to speak will always be a mooted question with him. Either course is likely to be mistaken by the critics, who put down the unfortunate scribe as a vainglorious person if he appears and as a poseur if he does not. Personally, I feel that the average author is much more favorably represented by what he writes than by what he says, and that neither he nor the player has any real justification for mixing his own personality with those of the puppets he creates. It is disillusioning, after having spent some time in witnessing stirring deeds and hearing high-sounding words, to be confronted with a little, stoop-shouldered man, his face white in the glare of the footlights and his hands anxiously seeking a refuge in his ill-fiting and pocketless dress trousers, and to realize that this grotesque figure is that of the inventor of all the splendid beings you have seen.

New York audiences are almost the only ones in the country that ever manifest any particular desire to gaze upon the dramatist. I heard a man cry "Author!" once at a "first night" in Chicago, and the ushers were about to eject him when the manager explained to them that the enthusiast was acting with perfect propriety.

I have told you, in another part of this book, of the oratorical talent of Augustus Thomas, who is the most impressive of before-the-curtain monologists. He makes a fine appearance on the stage, self-possessed and well-dressed, and his little talks invariably are brief and witty and well-rounded. So, too, are those of Eugene Presbrey. Paul Armstrong's undiplomatic words have been known to prove a "last straw" on the graves of his failures, and Edith Wharton and Charlotte Thompson, clever women both but not prepossessing, almost turned into burlesque the "first night" of "The Awakening of Helena Richie." Charles Klein is not big enough physically to fill the eye, and David Belasco, with his trick of being pushed violently to the front and of fingering his forelock, creates an impression of insincerity and preparedness. William Gillette has all an actor's skill in appealing to an audience, and, I am told, saved the day--or, rather, the night--for his "Sherlock Holmes" in London. George Ade and Sydney Rosenfeld are amusing on "the apron", but other brilliant men, like Edwin Milton Royle and Richard Harding Davis, are not at their best when obliged to say "thank you." Mr. Davis figured in a neat bit of good humor in New Haven, where, after the third act of Mr. Thomas' adaptation of his "Soldiers of Fortune", Mr. Thomas assumed his identity and he pretended to be Mr. Thomas.

English playwrights are much more at ease than are American. Henry Arthur Jones, A. W. Pinero, Henry V. Esmond, and even young Hubert Henry Davies look well and talk well when they have occasion to "speak out in meeting." George Bernard Shaw's witticism when somebody in the gallery hissed while he was making a curtain speech has become famous. The Irish Voltaire had just referred to the play of the evening, the third act of which had been concluded, when this sound of disapprobation cleft the circumambient atmosphere. "Ah!" said Mr. Shaw to the disturber, "you and I are quite agreed, but we seem in the minority."

I cannot pass by the subject of "first night" addresses without relating to what extent Washington is indebted to me for a chatty five minutes with Mr. Thomas on the occasion of the production of "The Hoosier Doctor." At that time, I was dramatic critic of The Washington Post. I was riding horseback, and, at five in the afternoon, found myself six or eight miles from town, and in the presence of Mr. Thomas. He had been bicycling and his machine had broken down. "Lend me your horse, like a good fellow", he begged, when we came together. "I want to get back for the performance of 'The Hoosier Doctor.'"

"Can't!" I replied. "I've got to write a review of that same play."

"Well", returned the author, smiling in the midst of his perplexity, "my claim is the stronger. 'The Hoosier Doctor' can be performed whether your criticism is written or not, but your criticism cannot be written unless 'The Hoosier Doctor' is performed."

In the end, the public was obliged to forego neither play nor review, since Mr. Thomas galloped to the city on my horse and I was picked up soon after by a farmer in a wagon.