Part 9
Color has as subtle an influence. I have seen the people in a play fairly melt into the background of a yellow setting, causing their action to seem vague and illy-defined. Augustus Thomas' "The Harvest Moon" had a scene in which the same subject matter was repeated successively in different settings. Unless you had witnessed this performance, you would hardly believe how wholly unlike were the impressions produced. Costumes and music have an equal portence, and both call for the exercise of nice discretion.
The personality of the stage director, and his manner at rehearsal, are vital considerations. In acting, more than in any other art, the feeling of the artist reaches through his work. Everyone who has watched rehearsals has come to the conclusion, at one time or another, that actors are something less than human. As a matter of fact they are simply children, calling for the patience, the forbearance, and the flexibility of view-point necessary in a nursery. Wholly self-centered, having little contact with the outside world, their standards, their emotions, their false valuations make constant difficulties for the man who has to play upon them as upon a piano.
The dramatic instinct and the egregious ego form a provoking blend. I have known an actress, at a dress rehearsal, the night before the public performance of a play, to go into violent hysterics, apparently reduced to a nervous wreck by the strain of her work. "Great heavens!" I have said to the director; "she won't be able to appear tomorrow." "Acting, my boy", that gentleman would reply. "Acting for our benefit and her own. She'll be all right in ten minutes." And in ten minutes this same woman, done with her scene, would be advancing most logical reasons why she should have somebody's dressing room and why somebody else should have been given hers. I don't know exactly what temperament is, but most actors think they have it.
Player folk are full of superstitions, and many of these relate to rehearsal. Few actors will speak the "tag", or last line, of a play until its premiere. If that line were spoken the play would fail. Managers are not exempt from similar ideas, a mixture of ignorance and experience. A good final rehearsal is supposed to forecast a bad first performance, and this notion is not without reason, since the people, made sure of themselves, are pretty certain to lose the tension of nervousness. When the actors like a play at rehearsal the manager grows fearful. An actor usually likes best the play in which he has the best part, and that is not invariably the best play.
Small, indeed, is the share of glory that goes to "the power behind the throne." His name adorns no bill-boards, and, on the program, you will find it most frequently among the announcements that the shoes came from Hammersmith's or that the wigs are by Stepner. The manager knows the stage director, though, and respects him, reputation of this kind being more profitable than reputation with the great, careless public.
Some few managers, like David Belasco and Collin Kemper, attend to the staging of their own productions, and, indeed, are most noted for their skill in this work. Many authors, among the number Augustus Thomas, James Forbes and Charles Klein, "put on" their own plays. Then there are "General Stage Directors", like William Seymour or J. C. Huffman, employed at so much per annum by big firms like those of Charles Frohman or the Shuberts. There are also detached directors, who contract to stage a play here or there at sums varying from five hundred to a thousand dollars for each piece. Julian Mitchell, R. H. Burnside and George Marion head the list of men who make a specialty of producing musical comedy, which is a field in itself. A broad distinction exists between the stage director and the stage manager, the province of the latter being only to carry out the plans of the former.
A dramatic composition is rehearsed from two to four weeks, the rehearsals usually lasting from ten o'clock in the morning until five in the evening, with an hour for luncheon. The play being finished and accepted, the manager turns the manuscript over to the stage director. This gentleman reads it carefully, realizing possibilities and devising "business." I have known authors to write, and directors to read, with a miniature stage beside them. On this stage, pins would take the place of people, being moved here and there as one situation followed another. The exact location of the characters at every speech was then marked on the manuscript, so that little or no experimenting was necessary at rehearsal.
After he has read the play, the director consults with the author and the manager and the scene painter. He helps the manager decide what actors had best be engaged, and the four determine every detail of the settings to be built and painted. Miniatures of these settings are afterward prepared by the artist and officially O. K.'d. The manager interviews such people as he thinks he may utilize, and comes to terms with them. Actors are not paid for time spent in rehearsal, and, if they prove unsatisfactory before the initial performance, may be dismissed without notice and without recompense.
It is an old custom, now in the way of being revived, to begin operations by reading the play to the company. The first rehearsals may take place in a hall, but, whenever it is possible, a stage is brought into requisition. In the centre of the stage, directly back of the footlights, is the prompt table, at which sit the author, the director, and the stage manager. The players, when they are not at work, lounge in remote corners, leaving the greater portion of the floor space cleared for action. There is no scenery, no furniture, no "properties." Two stools, with a space between them, may stand for Juliet's balcony, for the Rialto Bridge, or merely for a window in a modern apartment house. The casual observer may be puzzled at hearing some Thespian harranguing to four vacant chairs, until it is explained that these four chairs mark the corners of a jury box in which twelve good men and true--same being "supers" yet to be employed--are to try the hero for his life.
In the beginning the actors read lines from their parts. A "part" contains the speeches and "business" of the actor for whom it is intended, with "cues", or the last few words of each speech preceding his, so that he may know when to speak. An extract from the "part" of the Queen in "Hamlet" (Act III; Scene I) would look something like this:
(You enter L.3.E.) Did he receive you well? ----free in his reply. Did you assay him to any pastime? ----he suffers for. I shall obey you. Etc.
The director shows the actor where he shall stand, and where go, at every speech, and the stage manager notes on the manuscript such "business" as is not already written in it. Also, he sets down memoranda for the raising and "dimming" of lights, the ringing of bells, and other things to be done "off stage."
After a couple of days' rehearsal the players may be told that they must have the lines of the first act committed to memory within a certain time. "Letter perfect on Thursday!" says the director. "Don't forget; I want to hear every 'if, 'and', and 'but' spoken on Thursday!"
So, act by act, the piece is learned, and, within a week, "parts" are put away, and the real work of rehearsal begins. By this time, the "roughing out" of the production has been done, positions have been taught, and the director begins devoting himself to details. Throughout the first fortnight he interrupts frequently; compels the people to go back a dozen times over this scene or that; halts, thinks out trifles, suggests and experiments. When the rehearsals are two-thirds done, however, he and the author break in less and less often. They sit, notebooks in hand, jotting down their observations, which are read aloud to the company at the end of each act.
Meanwhile, the director has attended to several important matters with which the cast has no immediate concern. He has made out a list of "properties", or small articles to be handled in the performance, and has given it to the manager. This list requires care. For example, if matches are needed in the play, it must be ascertained what kind of matches were used at that period, and sulphur, parlor, or "safety" matches must be specified. The manager must also be given lists of furniture and draperies. Later on, a table of "music cues" must be made out for the orchestra, and one of "light cues" for the electrician. The play must be timed, so that it may be known to a minute at what hour the curtain will rise and fall on every act. Generally, a page of typewritten manuscript will occupy a minute, but guess work on this point does not suffice for the director. The players begin to consult him about their costumes, too, and he must take into account the blending of colors, the fashions of the period, and the personal characteristics likely to manifest themselves in attire.
I wish I could make you see a theater during the progress of a rehearsal. The great auditorium is dark and vacant, but for two or three cleaners, who may be sweeping and dusting. White cloths cover the seats, and hang over the facades of the boxes. Through the center of the stage, just behind the footlights, a gas pipe rears itself to a height of five or six feet, and a single jet burns at the end of it. Close beside this pipe is the table I have mentioned, where, with their backs to the auditorium, sit three very busy, very attentive gentlemen. Farther on the stage, which is bare except for a couple of tables and a few chairs, stand two or three actors, attired in street dress, talking in a fashion utterly out of keeping with their every-day appearance. And on all sides are little groups of men and women, who pay no attention to the people in the scene and to whom the people in the scene pay no attention, who laugh and chat in subdued tones until some "cue" brings them into the action.
One day a notice appears on the call board. The company will leave from the Grand Central Station the next morning at 7:20 o'clock. The destination may be Syracuse, N. Y. The hotels in that city are so-and-so. The theater is the New Wieting. There will be a dress rehearsal there tomorrow night at 8. "Everybody will please be made up half an hour earlier."
The dress rehearsal is the crowning ordeal in the business of producing plays. It is the summing up of everything that has gone on before; the concentration into one evening of all the work and nervous strain of the past month. It is safe to say that in no other profession is so much labor and agony crowded into a single effort. Very often dress rehearsals last from eight o'clock at night until eight the next morning. Sometimes they last longer. The dress rehearsal of "The Burgomaster", at the Manhattan Theater, New York, began at noon on Sunday and continued, without intermission, until eleven o'clock Monday. Frequently, coffee and sandwiches are served in one of the dressing rooms, or on the stage, and the tired players snatch a bite or two between scenes.
The director has been in the theatre all the afternoon, superintending the setting of scenes and the "dressing" of the stage, which means the placing of furniture and the hanging of curtains. Half an hour before the rehearsal begins, the members of the company come from their rooms, one by one, for an inspection of costumes. This is the first time the director has seen them "made up", and he is likely to have many suggestions. This wig isn't gray enough, that beard is too straggling, the dress over there isn't in character. Back go the actors to remedy these defects, and after a time the rehearsal is started.
Dress rehearsals invariably are prefaced by the managerial announcement that there will be no interruptions, but I have never seen an uninterrupted dress rehearsal. The leading man stops in the middle of a love scene to inquire what he shall do with his bouquet, or the leading woman to complain that the property man hasn't placed a bundle of letters where it ought to be. I remember that, when we came to the final rehearsal of "The Little Gray Lady", the manager, Maurice Campbell, finished his remarks about interruptions, and called upon the orchestra to begin the overture. The orchestra promptly struck up "The Dead March from Saul", and the forbidden interruption came on the spot.
A dress rehearsal is supposed to be an ordinary performance without an audience. But it isn't. There is no excitement, no enthusiasm, no inspiration. Speeches fall flat, dialogue seems inordinately long and wearisome, bits of "business" that have appeared all right before look wholly different in changed surroundings. The actors, finding themselves for the first time in the setting to be used, are utterly lost. By-play with small articles, rehearsed twenty times, is blundered over when the player finds the "prop" actually in his hands. To observe the most experienced actor, and man of the world, handle a tea cup or a card case at a dress rehearsal you would swear that he had never seen such a thing before in his life.
And, O, the wickedness of inanimate things--doors that will not shut, matches that cannot be lit, table drawers that positively refuse to open! Whenever something of this sort goes wrong, the carpenter or the property man has to be called upon, and the scene stops, to be resumed later with a flatness commensurate with the length of the halt. Above all other sounds rings the clarion voice of the director, shouting to electricians, stage hands, actors. Everybody makes notes, to be quietly gone over with the company on the morrow, just before the actual performance.
At last, when the gray dawn is peeping in at the windows, when everyone concerned has reached the ultimate stage of exhaustion, the rehearsal is dismissed. The director makes a few remarks--sufficient censure to prevent over-confidence, mixed with enough hope to give courage. "Pretty bad", he says, "but I look for you to pull up tonight. We'll get together for a little chat at four o'clock in the smoking room of the theater."
Thus ends the period of rehearsal--a period of hard work, trials, tribulations, constant nervous strain. And it may all go for nothing. In three short hours the labor of years on the part of the author, of months on the part of the manager, of weeks on the part of the players, may be proved utterly worthless and without result. This, however, depends upon the public; those concerned have done all they know, all that can be done, not by random and haphazard work; but by skillful following of what is at once an exact science and a variable art. The philosophic author shrugs his shoulders as he leaves the theater.
"Well?" inquires the stage director.
"Well", he replies. "We've done our best. It's on the knees of the gods."
_THE ART OF "GETTING IT OVER"_
Being the sort of title to suggest a treatise on suicide, whereas, in point of fact, this chapter merely confides all the author does not know about acting.
Even in a dictionary of slang, inquisitive reader, you will not find the phrase, "getting it over." "Art has its own language," and the language of dramatic art sometimes is fearful and wonderful to contemplate. In this particular idiom, "it" stands for an impression or expression, and the precise boundary that the impression or expression "gets over" is the footlights. Do I make myself clear? As to the art of "getting it over," that is a thing about which no two people are likely to agree. When, on the first night of F. Ziegfeld's "Follies of 1910," a lady named Lillian Lorraine, ensconced in a swing and two gorgeous silk stockings, was projected into the tobacco smoke above the third row of orchestra seats, a great many star-gazers united in the idea that her manager had solved the problem.
Paul Potter's comedy, "The Honor of the Family," was a melancholy failure at 8.40 o'clock on the evening of its premiere in the Hudson Theater. At 8.42 Otis Skinner, in the character of Colonel Philippe Bridau, his aggressive high hat tilted at an insolent angle, his arrogant cane poking defiance, had walked past a window in the flat, and the piece was a success. Without speaking a word, without doing the least thing pertinent to the play, Mr. Skinner had reached out into the auditorium and gripped the interest of sixteen hundred bored spectators. This is so fine a demonstration of the thesis that my article really should be advertised as "with an illustration by Otis Skinner."
"In that instant," the rescuer said afterward, "I knew I had them." Any actor would have known. "Getting it over," vague as the phrase may be to a layman, is almost a physical experience to the man or woman who accomplishes it. The thought sent out seems as material a thing as a handball, "and," once remarked Richard Mansfield, "I can see it go smashing past the footlights and into the brains of my auditors, or striking an invisible wall across the proscenium arch and bouncing back to the stage."
The ability to send the thought smashing is surprisingly separate from the art of acting. Many schooled and skilled performers, whose names are omitted from this chronicle because I don't want to swell the waiting list of my enemies, have never got into an auditorium without coming through the door back of the boxes. Knowledge may be power, but it isn't propulsion. Nothing is more brainless than a mustard plaster, yet it draws. George W. Lewes wrote several illuminative works on histrionism, and we have the word of A. B. Walkley that his Shylock made tender-hearted persons glad that Shakespeare died in the seventeenth century.
On the other hand, there are mediocre mimes who possess the faculty of establishing immediate communication with an audience. All of us have applauded the chorus girl who, while endeavoring conscientiously to put her best foot forward at the exact moment and in the precise manner that thirty other best feet advanced, has scored a distinct individual success. A young woman did that on the first night of Peter Dailey's "The Press Agent" at the Hackett. She was fined $5 for it, but another chorister, whose name is Elsie Ferguson and who attracted attention in "The Girl From Kay's," is starring this year under direction of Henry B. Harris.
Call it art, truth, intelligence, personality, magnetism, telepathy, hypnotism--Edwin Stevens, in a recent interview, called it hypnotism--or the _wanderlust_ of a personally-conducted aura, the fact remains that there is a something by which some actors, without visible effort, convey a distinct and emphatic impression. We have seen John Drew step upon the stage, and, even while the applause lingered over his entrance, shed a sense of elegance, manner and mastery. We have responded to the charm of John Barrymore and A. E. Matthews before they opened their mouths to speak. We have absorbed the radiance of May Irwin's good humor, we have felt unbidden the piquancy of Marie Tempest, we have laughed at a look from Bert Williams, and we have been awed when William Gillette, walking on as though there was nothing in the wind, has portentously and with sinister purpose flicked the ashes from the tip of his cigar.
No, friends and fellow dramatic critics, this is not acting. The art and experience of acting may go into it, but acting can not be held to account for what happens before a man begins to act. The curtain rising on the second act of "Such a Little Queen" discloses two girls, a telephone operator and a stenographer, chatting obliviously while a clerk, at the other end of the office, robs the mail. It is important that the robbery should register, else much that follows can not be understood. For a long time, when we were rehearsing, it seemed impossible to get this theft over the footlights. The girls were pretty, their dialogue was breezy, and, for catching the mind, a word in the mouth is worth two conveyed by pantomime. Our clerk, a capable enough young fellow, simply could not get the attention of the audience. After he had failed to do so at several trial performances, Frank Keenan, who was staging the play, mounted the rostrum and took his place. Mr. Keenan did exactly what had been done by his predecessor. His movements, like the other man's, were according to the book; his facial expression was the same, and, of course, he did not speak. But he held us--Heavens, how he held us! Every eye was on him the instant the curtain lifted, and, for all the notice they got, the girls might as well have been painted on the proscenium arch. Even after that, the original couldn't do it. While he was robbing the mails, we had to rob the females of every distracting line of dialogue. Wherever Frank Keenan sits is the center of the stage.
If you ask me--and we'll assume that you _have_ asked me--what is responsible for this sort of an achievement, I shall answer "self." I don't mean personality. I mean that, whether he wishes it or not, what "gets over" isn't so often what a man thinks or desires, but what he _is_. The same thing is true of painters and sculptors and novelists--"For," said Walter Bagehot, "we know that authors don't keep tame steam engines to write their books"--and how much more likely is it to be true of the artist who is himself the expression of his art. In the footlight trough of a burlesque theater in the Bowery, invisible to the audience but staring the performers in the face, is the legend: "Smile, ladies, smile!" Yet these ladies, thus, perpetually reminded, never spread the contagion of merriment and good humor for which a Puritan community would have quarantined Blanche Ring. Don't tell me Miss Ring is an artist. She isn't, but she's jolly!
The board of governors, or the house committee, or whatever it is that directs the destinies of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau isn't far wrong, if, as is reported, it insists upon purity in its Madonna and beneficence in its Man of Sorrows. Imagine a woman of notoriously evil life, or even of evil life that wasn't notorious, impersonating Sister Beatrice in the marvelous miracle play of Maeterlinck's. A gentleman who had driven four wives--tandem--to death or the divorce court would have been an offense as Manson in "The Servant in the House." Mr. Forbes-Robertson is an admirable artist, but it was his spirituality, his asceticism that "got over" in his delightful portrayal of The "Third Floor Back". Certainly, it isn't the frankness of lines, verbal or anatomical, that makes the difference between a musical comedy and a salacious "girl show." It's the intention; the character of producer and produced.