Chapter VI: Part 6

However bitterly their success may be resented, it is to the newcomers, to the recruits from the "legitimate", that vaudeville owes its steady advancement. One may sympathize with the acrobat who, after a life time spent in acquiring proficiency in his specialty, sees the big salaries being paid to men who devoted a week to rehearsing some sketch, and who couldn't turn a handspring to save their souls. The fact remains that vaudeville's claim to the consideration of intelligent people rests largely upon these tabloid comedies and dramas. The vogue of such clever little plays as "At the Telephone", "The Man From the Sea", "Circumstantial Evidence", "In Old Edam", "When Pat Was King", "The Welcher" and "The Flag Station"--which, by the way, was written by Eugene Walter, author of "The Easiest Way"--marks a step forward in the possibilities of "the two a day." It enables such men as Will Cressy, whose whole output has been of sketches, to venture upon higher ground, and it banishes more surely the mixture of buffoonery and maudlin sentiment that formerly passed as playlets.

The progress made in this sort of entertainment is indicated by the unequivocal success of Frank Keenan in "The Oath", an intense little tragedy, founded upon a theme used by Lope de Vega. Only ten years ago this same Frank Keenan suffered complete lack of appreciation of his fine work in an adaptation of Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather." Many well-made sketches, logically planned and skillfully written, still owe their presence in vaudeville wholly to the reputation of their stars. "The Walsingham", as Walsingham Potts used to say in Madison Morton's farce of "A Regular Fix", "is a sort of guava jelly in which you swallow the bitter pill, Potts." Other one act dramas of great merit fail altogether.

London successes like "The Monkey's Paw", and Paris successes, like "The Submarine" and "After the Opera", have ended miserably in New York. Such authors as Clyde Fitch have seen their work retired after a fortnight's trial. Two tabloid pieces, "Dope" and "By-Products", from the pen of Joseph Medill Patterson, author of "The Fourth Estate", after scoring triumphs of esteem in Chicago, have not been given bookings in the East. It is not yet true that any three one-act plays in vaudeville, if given continuity and put together, would make a passable three act play, but there are optimists among us who feel that that time will come. We believe that, without being less entertaining, less diversified, or less easily enjoyed, vaudeville will come to be made up of fewer "Jewish" or "Irish" comedians, fewer "sister acts", fewer trained seals, and a greater number of people who have something really clever to offer in song or speech or impersonation.

The place of the tabloid drama is secure, since it bears the same relation to the ordinary drama that the short story does to the novel. One day we shall have a Theatre Antoine or a Theatre des Capucines in New York. The popularity of the short play, with all its opportunities for skillful construction and good acting, will follow as the night the day. The nudities and lewdities of last year and this are but a passing phase. Whatever vaudeville was in the past, or is in the present, it offers endless promise for the future.

_WITH THE PEOPLE "IN STOCK"_

Concerning Camille, ice cream, spirituality, red silk tights,
Blanche Bates, Thomas Betterton, second-hand plays,
parochialism, matinee girls, Augustin Daly, and other
interesting topics.

"Why is a resident theatrical organization known as a _stock_ company?" Blanche Bates repeated after me one afternoon when she was playing in "The Dancing Girl" at the Columbia Theater, Washington. "Simply because the people in it work like horses."

Miss Bates, whose name at that time probably was as unfamiliar to David Belasco as any word in Arabic, knew whereof she spoke. She had been for several seasons with T. Daniel Frawley in San Francisco, she had had four roles and a row with Augustin Daly inside of two months in New York, and finally she had cast her lot with a combination that was whiling away the summer months by producing a new piece every week in the hottest city in America. After a little time I'm going to tell you just what labor is involved in producing a new--or, rather, a different--piece every week. For the present, suffice it to say that Miss Bates' witticism was founded on a whimsical view of facts, and that the modern stock company is exclusively responsible for the existence of that amazing anomaly, a hard-working actor.

Most actors are kept fairly busy three weeks each year, that period being devoted to rehearsing the one play in which they appear during the course of a season. Throughout the remainder of eight months they are actually occupied about four hours per diem, and at the end of these eight months they count on having four months for rest, recreation and relaxation. This is not at all true of the man or woman "in stock", who, in the language of the street, "is on the job" twenty-four hours a day and, when there is special need of exertion, gets up an hour earlier in the morning to make it twenty-five.

The great bulk of New York theater-goers, with the parochialism that characterizes them, know practically nothing about stock companies. Perhaps, the chief reason of this is that within the memory of man they never have had fewer than five at one time. Stock companies in Philadelphia or Boston they might have studied at long distance as curious institutions, but never stock companies so unappealingly near as Fifty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. Your blithe Broadwayite leaves such places of amusement to the people in their neighborhood, and sticks to musical comedy in the vicinity of Times Square.

Broadway used to keep close track of stock companies when the two Frohmans had fine organizations at the old Lyceum and at the Empire--when John Drew and Henry Miller and Georgia Cayvan were seen in such new pieces as "The Grey Mare" and "The Charity Ball." Fifth Avenue is beginning to re-make an acquaintance with the scheme of resident organizations, through the medium of that at the New Theatre, and Charles Frohman recently has announced his intention of establishing an important stock company under the directorship of William Gillette. This announcement brings with it high hopes; the very suggestion calls to mind the departed glories, not only of the Empire and the Lyceum, but of the Union Square, Daly's, and the Madison Square.

The stock company with which we have become familiar of late has been a very different kind of affair. Its field has been limited, and the purpose of its managers merely the giving of old plays at popular prices. If you have been in the world long enough to learn that whatever is cheap in price is cheap in quality--that no merchant deliberately sells at a loss--you will have little difficulty in understanding that, with rare exceptions, the performances offered have been mediocre. Sixteen, eighteen or twenty fairly competent actors and actresses are formed into a cast that prepares a different play every week in its season. The plays generally have had their day in the hands of regular traveling organizations. It is not often that the result has in it more than three letters from the word "artistic." Such aggregations have held forth in Gotham at various times on the stages of the American, the Fifty-eighth Street, the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, the Yorkville, the Fifth Avenue, the Murray Hill, the West End, the Plaza, and other theaters. They used to be particularly indigenous to that portion of our metropolitan soil known as Harlem, but now are confined almost entirely to Brooklyn.

This brand of stock company, which we may as well label "The Contemporary Brand", had its origin in some large Eastern city where an enterprising theatrical manager planned to provide summer amusement for such of his patrons as wanted to stay in town through the hot weather--and for the husbands of those who didn't. The traveling troupes had all shut up for a few months, so this manager was obliged to form an organization of his own. I'll bet that, at the same time, he originated the story about installing a pipe system for distributing cool air throughout his house--a pleasant little Christian Science lie that since has become classic. However that may be, the venture paid. Imitation is called initiative in the theatrical business, and the following year there were fifty "summer stock companies." Then somebody discovered that these combinations, playing at low prices, had attracted a _clientele_ of their own, that they drew people whose purses would not permit their visiting the best theaters, and whose taste stood between them and the other houses. So somebody else tried running a stock company all through the season, and succeeded. Within a little time there were enterprises of this sort in most cities of the size of Pittsburg or Cincinnati; then they crept into towns like Hartford and Providence; now-a-days any village populous enough to boast of two saloons, a church and a dry goods store has also its opera house and its stock company.

In the big cities these aggregations of histrionic talent generally offer a fresh play every week; in some of the smaller places two are given in the course of seven days. One play a week is the usual thing, however, and the amount of labor it involves is stupendous. Not only must that one play be prepared in the time mentioned, but simultaneously the company must be thinking of and acting another play--that already being performed for the benefit of the public. Dr. Doran, in his "Annals of the Stage", speaks of the hard work accomplished by actors in the Eighteenth Century, when Thomas Betterton "created a number of parts never equaled by any subsequent actor--namely, one hundred and thirty." The good doctor, who waxes quite enthusiastic over Betterton, adds: "In some single seasons he studied and represented no less than eight original parts--an amount of labor that would shake the nerves of the stoutest among us now." Dr. Doran's esteemed friend, Master Betterton, probably would have had his own nerves a good deal shaken had he found himself in this year of our Lord 1911--say at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

Victory Bateman, a charming actress whose health recently was reported to be seriously affected by the strain of the work she had done in stock companies, played twenty leading roles in five months. Of these and the number of words in each she gives the following account in a book she wrote in collaboration with Ada Patterson:

Mrs. Winthrop in "Young Mrs. Winthrop" 7,000

Floradilla in "A Fool's Revenge" 6,750

Louise in "The Two Orphans" 7,250

Cecile in "David Laroque" 6,500

Adrienne in "A Celebrated Case" 7,000

Camille in "Camille" 7,300

Carmen in "Carmen" 7,200

Portia in "Julius Caesar" 6,500

Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 7,500

Ruth in "The Wages of Sin" 6,000

Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet" 7,500

Dora in "Diplomacy" 6,900

Portia in "The Merchant of Venice" 7,600

Ophelia in "Hamlet" 7,000

Mrs. Gregory Graxin in "The Tragedy" 6,500

Desdemona in "Othello" 7,000

Alice in "In Spite of All" 7,500

Frou-Frou in "Frou-Frou" 7,000

Vera in "Moths" 6,000

Roxane in "Cyrano" 8,000
-------
Total 140,000 words

Some of the details of this statement strike me as being erroneous. I do not believe, for example, that Roxane is a longer part than Juliet. One thing I do not doubt--that the average stock leading woman learns 140,000 words in a season. And 140,000 words, we must understand, are the number contained in two fair-sized novels or "fourteen pages of a large newspaper."

The mere statement that so much matter has to be committed to memory does not give a fair idea of the amount of work that has to be accomplished by the actor or the actress--especially the actress--under these conditions. In addition to learning each role she must rehearse it. These rehearsals will occupy every morning of the six days whose afternoons and evenings are devoted to the public performance of another part. In addition, the actress must figure on giving time to dressmakers, since each character must be properly costumed; to wig makers and to allegedly unavoidable social duties. The inevitable result is a crudity and carelessness in the interpretation of plays that would not be tolerated by any theater-goers in the world except those that do tolerate it. This can be better understood when one learns that the average time spent in the preparation of a piece to run in New York is something like three weeks--three weeks in which the players have nothing else to occupy their minds.

The members of the ordinary stock company scarcely pretend to know their lines before the third repetition of the comedy or drama in hand. John Findlay, a fine old actor, used to complain to me that always he "had just begun to understand what a piece was about when they took it off and put on another." I remember an amusing incident in connection with a rendering of a certain light comedy by a stock company in Baltimore. A scene in this comedy was divided between two men, one of them seated at a desk and the other standing before that article of furniture with his hat in his hand. Both actors having forseen opportunities of concealing their manuscripts where they could see them and the audience could not, neither had learned a single word of the dialogue. The first player had his part on the desk; the second hid it in his hat. But the second man had forgotten that, at a critical moment, the office boy was supposed to take that hat. The moment arrived, the boy took the hat, and the unlucky Thespian, at his wits' end, could think of nothing better to do than read the remainder of his speeches over the shoulder of his colleague.

Opening nights with stock companies would be dreadful affairs, but for that kindly provision of Fate, "the old stock actor." There usually are three or four of this man and woman in an organization, and each of the three or four, at one time or another, has played nearly every part known to his or her "line of business." Your "old stock actor", who need not be old as to years, will be familiar with half the roles entrusted to him or her in a season, so that a little study serves to prompt recollection of the lines, and even such memory of details as may be of great assistance when communicated to the stage director.

Unfortunately, scenery and other accessories cannot share this advantage. The small town stock company possesses eight or ten regular settings and a scene painter, whose efforts usually are confined to retouching shabby spots on the canvas and to coloring furniture, cannon, trees and similar trifles. Occasionally he paints new wall paper and pictures, which, with the blessed aid of the stage carpenter, who can change windows from left to right and doors from right to left, transform the banquet hall of some Roman noble (Period 40 B. C.) to the front room of a Harlem apartment (Period 1911 A. D.) A week doesn't allow much time for accuracy, and mine eyes have seen the tent of Mark Antony electric lighted, Louis XVI chairs in the palace of Macbeth, and a Queen Ann cottage occupied by Shylock and his daughter Jessica.

When melo-drama is produced worse horrors than this are likely to intrude themselves upon first nights. Balky locomotives _will_ refuse to run over prostrate heroines, and I once witnessed a _premier_ matinee of "The Gunner's Mate" at which the jib boom displayed a most distressing _penchant_ for knocking off the helmet of the ship's Captain. Stage management frequently is responsible for even worse blunders.

The theater-goers who frequent the homes of stock companies--they are, for the most part, wives of sign painters and journeyman printers--don't seem to mind things of this sort in the least. Early in the season they begin to pick favorites in the organization, and they follow the annual progress of such play-acting pilgrims with great care. The value of a man or woman to his or her stock company depends largely upon his or her personal following, and I have known leading men to be so sure of this following that, upon being dismissed, they have harangued crowds on the street in front of their theaters. This very episode, by the way, occurred only a few years ago in New York.

Matinee idols achieve popularity, not according to their own deserts, but according to the heroism of the folk they impersonate in the course of a season. It might be estimated safely that one opportunity at Sydney Carton, one at Armand Duval, and one at Romeo would establish the least prepossessing of leading men in the marshmallowy affections of the stock company matinee girl. These young women and their neighbors have singularly distorted ideas of good acting, and their partizanship makes them blind to the imperfections of their favorite players. In Brooklyn it used to be a common thing to hear that Cecil Spooner was much better than Mrs. Leslie Carter as Zaza, and a little time ago Pittsburg did not hesitate to put Sarah Truax above Mrs. Fiske for her impersonation of Nora.

The manager who successfully pilots a stock company through the shoals and shallows of forty weeks must have uncommon perspicacity. Not alone must he secure players who are likely to become popular, but, more important still, he must select plays that will appeal to all of his patrons all of the time. Too much tragedy and he is quite sure to lose the men in his gallery; too much comedy and the girls in the orchestra begin to thin out. Then, too, his purse must be considered. The rental of popular plays is high. When first the piece was released for stock the royalties asked for "Peter Pan" were a thousand dollars per week. Few plays bring as much as this, but royalties rarely are under one hundred dollars and generally range between two hundred and fifty and four hundred. Of course, there are many dramatic works whose age makes them anybody's property, and the skillful manager balances his profit and loss neatly by sandwiching these in with the costly ones. When you see that your pet stock company is to follow "Salomy Jane" with "Camille" you may be sure that its manager is evening up matters on his books.

The same degree of skill that is required in other theatrical advertising is required of the man who conducts a stock company. Various odd schemes have been tried with effect, the best seeming to be that of giving things away. There are now various theaters at which food and drink is served between acts, generally eliciting real evidences of appreciation. Personally, I cannot see how a bad performance of "Too Much Johnson" with ice cream would be more endurable than the same performance without, but apparently this failure on my part indicates a unique state of mind. Receptions on the stage, at which the public meets the players, have proved an attraction, and they have the additional merit of helping to establish the necessary _entente cordiale_. The distribution of actors' photographs, the inauguration of guessing and voting contests, and similar features, keep alert the brain of the man at the helm of the small town "stock."

To the most casual reader even this very casual article must have made apparent the disadvantages of the average resident aggregation. First among these, perhaps, is the impossibility of producing new plays under a system which requires the presentation of fresh material so frequently. A new play cannot possibly be rehearsed in a week. This is a misfortune to the company, which must develop its best talent in unhackneyed vehicles; a misfortune to the public, which must tire of seeing second-handed comedies and tragedies; and most of all a misfortune to the inner circle of theatrical folk, to whom the stock organization should offer unrivalled opportunities for the quick and inexpensive testing of untried manuscripts.

Since new plays are not within the range of these organizations, it seems a pity that they cannot be allowed more leisurely preparation of the old. Performances never can be good, much less artistic, while they are made ready as rapidly as is necessary at present. Neither can they be good so long as a certain small body of people must divide among them whatever parts offer, regardless of equipment or natural tendencies. Because Minnie Jones is suited to the _ingenue_ role in this week's farce it does not follow that she will be ideal in the _ingenue_ role of the tragedy done next week.

We hear that this sort of thing means excellent histrionic training, but there is no law compelling audiences to attend training schools, and the results of putting square pegs into any old sort of hole are often too ludicrous. It is appalling to reflect that the lady who plays Mrs. Micawber today may be cast for Du Barry tomorrow. I remember one poor little girl who had been engaged to "do" soubrettes at the National Theater, Washington. She was a charming little thing, and for a whole season she successfully met all comers of her weight and age. In "Esmeralda" I recall having thought her the most ethereal of women. Two weeks later she became the comic opera star in "All the Comforts of Home," and I discovered that what was spirituality in "Esmeralda" became emaciation in red silk tights.

Much as I have harped on the disadvantages of the stock company, I believe most solemnly that its advantages are over-balancing. Even bad bread is better for the system than good whiskey, and a crude performance of "Romeo and Juliet" is to be preferred to the best possible performance of "The Girl and the Outlaw." The prices for these "attractions" are about the same, and the people who now go to see "Romeo and Juliet" are precisely the people who otherwise would go to see "The Girl and the Outlaw." Slowly but surely, even the current stock company interpretations educate the taste of theater-lovers, until they begin asking for better things, and, seeking, find. In addition, there seems no doubt that these organizations provide exceptional schooling for young actors, who, by their aid, play two or three hundred parts in a period during which otherwise they would play five. It has been urged against this that they also acquire habits of haste and carelessness, but I always have found actors with stock experience superior to those without it. The consequence of this particular phase of the stock system must be of inestimable value to the theater in America.

Then, too, it is a kind of interchangeable cause and effect that the quality of stock performances improves with the taste of their patrons. Of late years, fewer autographed photographs have been distributed among audiences, and more money has been spent in the painting of proper scenery. Manner has been less frequently required for stage receptions, and more frequently for drawing room drama. The combination of several organizations under one management, like that of the Baker Chain, in Seattle, Portland and Spokane, with consequent possibilities of reciprocal borrowing, has accomplished wonders in the way of betterment.

"Out West", where touring companies are rarer than this side of the Missouri, and where metropolitan successes arrive tardily, notably fine stock aggregations have come largely to take the place of visiting stars. There are two excellent companies located in Los Angeles, and I have heard that the superiority of their performances has seriously injured the business of the "first class" theaters. John Blackwood, at the Belasco, and Oliver Morosco, at the Burbank, make complete productions of every piece offered, and often they are able to give Los Angelites their first view of some much-discussed triumph of Broadway. In such cases, it is not unusual for the play to last six or eight weeks, and George Broadhurst's "The Dollar Mark", initially presented at the Belasco, had a longer run there than in New York. It will be seen at once how such public support enables a company to be worthier of support--a kind of beneficent perpetual motion.

While the East is not yet so far advanced, nor so nearly rid of the stock company that has been made typical in this article, there are fine organizations in half a dozen of our larger cities. It can be only a matter of time before enforced haste and economy in staging stock performances will disappear before the demands of a more and more enlightened clientele. There will be a greater number of rehearsals and a smaller number of matinees. The people who patronize these presentations now will have got ahead in the world, and will be able and willing to pay more generously for their entertainment, and it is to be hoped that the people who turned to moving pictures from cheap melodrama--which, in its whilom prosperity, we are to consider in our next chapter--in due time may turn from moving pictures to adequate representations of classic, standard and popular plays.

All this will come in the nature of evolution. The movement will be accelerated if Charles Frohman keeps his promise of giving us in New York such a stock company as his brother maintained at the old Lyceum, and which, at the same time, included Edward J. Morgan, William Courtleigh, George C. Boniface, Mary Mannering, Elizabeth Tyree, Mrs. Charles Walcot, Hilda Spong, Grant Stewart, Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, and John Findlay.

_SITTING IN JUDGMENT WITH THE GODS_

Being an old manuscript with a new preface--the former dealing
with a lost art, and the latter subtly suggesting who lost it.

The article that fills the following pages was written in 1905. Originally printed as a protest and a prophecy, it is reprinted here as history.

Melodrama is dead. It died of poor circulation and failure of the box office receipts. There were no flowers, and there need be no regrets. Neither is there reason to fear resuscitation.

I should like to think that popular priced melodrama had been killed by a general desire for better things. That, however, is not the case. The death blow was struck when the inventor of moving pictures supplied a form of entertainment that demanded even less of the spectator than had been demanded by such classics as "Through Death Valley" and "The Millionaire and the Policeman's Wife." The people who patronized these plays are not now patronizing worthier plays; they are attending performances that appeal to them wholly through the medium of the eye.

Of the seven theaters mentioned in this article at present three are devoted to moving pictures, two to burlesque, one to vaudeville, and one to drama in Yiddish. A few cheap companies are presenting melodrama in the provinces, but not a single place of amusement shelters it in New York. Requiescat in pace.

"Sitting in Judgment With the Gods" is republished as a contemporary opinion of a lost art. It was my intention to alter the wording somewhat, substituting more recent examples for those mentioned, but I found the result was apt to be like a history of Rome brought "up-to-date" by introducing gattling guns at the Battle of Pharsalius. So here is the story as it was set down in the beginning, and may you find amusement in reading it.

Melodrama, according to my dictionary, is "a dramatic performance, usually tragic, in which songs are introduced." The encyclopedia adds that the name was bestowed first upon "the opera by Rinuccini", and that it was derived from two Greek words meaning song and drama. This is extremely awesome and impressive, but I'm afraid I can't allow you to accept it as applying to offerings in our popular-priced places of amusement. Melodrama isn't a bit like that in New York.

It was the dictionary that started me on a tour of investigation which comprehended visits to all of the seven theaters in town that habitually present melodrama. There are so many classes of people in this big city, and each class has so many characteristic ways of working and playing, that no one hundredth of the population can be expected to know how any other one hundredth lives. The men and women who go to see "Man and Superman" don't go to see "No Mother to Guide Her", and I think I am quite safe in saying that most of the men and women who witness "No Mother to Guide Her" are conspicuous by their absence at "Man and Superman."

Sitting in judgment with the gods leaves me in doubt as to why the latter part of this statement should be true. The plays of the "No Mother to Guide Her" type are so hopelessly bad, so obviously false, so absolutely vicious, that it is hard to comprehend a mind that can prefer them, if not to "Man and Superman", at least to such better melodramas as "The Lion and the Mouse" or "The Squaw Man." The matter of money is no explanation at all. Harry and Harriet might have excellent seats in the balcony of the Lyceum or Wallack's for the price of orchestra chairs at the American, and, if it comes to pride, what choice is there between the gallery, politely disguised as "the second balcony," of the Belasco, and a box at the Thalia?

Melodrama today not only differs from the melodrama of day-before-yesterday defined in the dictionary, but it differs too from the melodrama of yesterday. Bartley Campbell and Dion Boucicault have given way to Theodore Kremer and Martin Hurley, while sterling old plays like "Siberia" and "The Octoroon" have been supplanted by such monstrosities as "Why Girls Leave Home" and "Too Proud to Beg." Our dramatic literature knows no finer examples of play-building than "The Two Orphans" and "The Rommany Rye", but these pieces are popular no longer with the people who frequent the Fourteenth Street and the Third Avenue. Fading interest in works of that kind led to a falling off in the patronage of "popular-priced" houses which was arrested only by an immediate appeal to the lowest and basest passions of which mankind is capable. It is on the power of pandering to these passions that the present vogue of melodrama is founded.

Emile Zola, that great photographer of souls, would have found in a visit to one of New York's low-priced theaters unlimited scope for analysis of character, comment on decay, and description of dirt and squalor. The Murray Hill Theater, the Third Avenue, the Thalia, the American and the Metropolis, five of the seven local places of amusement given up to sensational plays, are relics of infinitely better days. The Thalia was known formerly as the Bowery Theater, and its stage has supported nearly all the great actors of an earlier time. McKee Rankin, in his palmiest period, directed the fortunes of the Third Avenue, while each of the other three houses was intended originally for the best class of productions. The New Star, alone among buildings of its class, has no history except that it is making now.

The Thalia, where I began my travels, is full of contrasts. Evidences of departed grandeur elbow old dirt and new gaudiness. In the lobby, with its marble floor and lofty ceiling, stand hard-faced officials in uniforms that glitter with gold braid. Lithographic representations of various kinds of crime and violence hang on the walls, advertising the attraction to follow that holding the boards. The auditorium is architecturally stately and old fashioned, bearing an outline resemblance to the colosseum at Rome. The ground floor is a succession of steps, on each of which is a row of seats, while three balconies of horse-shoe shape afford opportunities to the patron whose financial limit is ten, twenty or thirty cents. There are queer little boxes on either side of the stage, which slopes perceptibly and has in its middle a prompter's hood--survival of the days when parts were so long, and so many had to be learned each week, that no actor could be trusted out of sight of the man with the manuscript. The Thalia is a theatrical anachronism, dilapidated, decayed and degraded. It is a royal sepulchre containing rags and old iron, a family mansion utilized as a boarding house, a Temple of Thespis managed by "Al" Woods and devoted, on the night of my visit, to the representation of a stirring comedy drama in five acts, entitled "Lured From Home."

The audiences at the Thalia are composed principally of peddlers, 'longshoremen and girls from the sweat shops. Farther up town one sees sailors and mechanics, with a sprinkling of families large enough, numerically and physically, to delight Roosevelt. Everywhere small boys abound and Jews predominate. Perched aloft in the gallery, one picks out scores of types and observes dozens of humorous incidents. Down town there were men who took off their coats and kept on their hats, probably for no better reason than that they were supposed to do neither. A fat negress sat next to a loudly dressed shop girl, who was too absorbed to draw the color line while the performance was in progress, but glared furiously between acts. The contention that the Third Avenue is "a family theater" was supported by a mother who nursed her baby whenever the curtain was down and the lights up. Two precocious youths discussed the "form" of certain horses that were to race next day, while their "best goils", one on either side, alternately stared at each other and at their programs. Reference to this bill of the play, printed by the same firm that supplies programs for the better class of theaters, disclosed the fact that a large part of the pamphlet was devoted to articles on "What the Man Will Wear" and "Chafing Dish Suggestions." It seemed to me that these indicated utter lack of a sense of humor on the part of publisher and manager. "The Man" at the Third Avenue probably wears whatever is cheapest, and I can't fancy the woman feeling a keen interest in oyster pan toast or orange mousse.

Barring a little difference in millinery and a difference of opinion as to the indispensability of neckwear, the audiences at all these theaters are very much alike. They read pink papers assiduously before the play begins and eat industriously throughout the intermissions. Melodrama seems to affect the American appetite much as does an excursion. You may have noticed that lunches appear the moment a pleasure trip begins, and every cessation of histrionic action at a popular-priced house is a signal for the munching of apples, candy, pop-corn, peanuts or chewing gum. Most of the material for these feasts is furnished by small boys who begin the evening selling "song books" and conclude it dispensing provisions. Just as the orchestra emerges from under the stage the merchant appears, taking his place at the foot of an aisle and unburdening his soul of a carefully prepared announcement. "I wish to call your attention for just about a few minutes to the company's 'song book'", he commences. These volumes invariably are marked down from ten to five cents, and, for good measure, the vendor throws in an old copy of The Police Gazette. Sweets are his stock in trade between acts, though one also has the pleasure of hearing him announce: "Now, friends, I've a postal card guaranteed to make you laugh without any trouble."

Reserve is not a characteristic of these gatherings. They hiss steamily at what they are pleased to consider evil, and applaud with equal heartiness that which seems to them good. Especially remarkable instances of virtue also bring out shrill whistles, verbal comment and the stamping of feet. The management maintains in the gallery a play censor with a club, who knocks loudly against the railing when he feels that these evidences of approval are passing bounds. What would not your two dollar impressario give if he could transplant this enthusiasm to Broadway? How gladly Charles Frohman or Henry W. Savage would trade his surfeited first night audience for one of those which requires only an heroic speech to wear out its individual hands in frenzied applause!

They are a queer, child-like lot--the people who compose the clientele of the Murray Hill and the Third Avenue. Intermissions have to be made short for them, because they have not the patience to wait for setting scenery, and he would be an intrepid dramatist who would put sufficient faith in the intensity of a situation to trust to its keeping them quiet in the dark. To an assembly at the Thalia the turning out of the lights for the husband's confession in "The Climbers" would have proved only an opportunity for making weird noises without danger of being "spotted" by the "bouncer." Their tastes are primitive and their sympathies elemental. They have no time for fine distinctions between right and wrong; a character is good to them or it is bad, and there's an end to the matter. Ready and waiting with their pity, one cannot help believing that they feel only on the surface, since they are quite able to forget the tragedy of one moment in the comedy of the next. I have seen them sob like babies at the death of a child in the play and break into uproarious laughter a second later at the intrusion of the soubrette. Their prejudices are explicable, but unexpectedly strong, favoring the unfortunate under any circumstances and finding vent in bitter hatred of the prosperous. They are the natural enemies of the police officer, and, by the same token, friends to the cracksman or the convict who expresses a particle of decency. Physical heroism is the only kind these men and women recognize, and emphasis rather than ethics influences their verdict on questions of virtue and vice. Apparently the element of surprise is not a dramatic requisite with them, since every habitual playgoer of their class must know by heart every melodramatic theme in existence, together with its incidents and its outcome. Undivided in their approval of the noble and their disapproval of the ignoble, one soon learns that their ideas on the subject are theories not intended for practice. The man who most loudly applauds defence of a woman on the stage is not always above disciplining his wife vigorously when he gets home. "Zash right!" I heard an inebriate call to a melodramatic hero who had spurned the glass offered him. "Zash right! Don't you tush it!"

I have said that the stories and situations of melodrama must be familiar to the folk who attend such performances, and I speak advisedly. One melodrama is as much like another as are two circuses. Drifting into the American one night just as the players were indulging themselves in that walk before the curtain which is their traditional method of acknowledging a "call", I might easily have mistaken the principal pedestrians for the characters I had seen fifteen minutes before at the Third Avenue. There they were without exception--the sailor-hero, the wronged heroine in black, the high-hatted villain, the ragged child, the short-skirted soubrette, the police officer, the apple woman, the negro and the comic Jew. Some of these types, notably the apple woman and the negro, are as old as melodrama, while others are but recently borrowed from vaudeville. Whatever their origin, they are the handy puppets of the man who writes this kind of play; identified the moment they step on the stage and hissed or applauded according to the conduct expected of them.

This sameness of character is paralleled by a sameness of dialogue that is amazing. Few melodramatic heroes do very much to justify their popularity, but all of them have a pugilistic fondness for talking about what they are going to do. Certain phrases favored by this class of playwright have been used so often that the most casual theater-goer will be able to recall them. "I can and will", "my child", "stand back", "on his track", "do your worst", "you are no longer a son of mine" and "if he knew all" are convenient terms for expressing a variety of violent emotions. Most of them mean nothing specific, and herein lies their recommendation. It is so much easier to say "if he knew all" than to figure out precisely what part of a purple past is of sufficient theatrical value to be dilated upon in a speech.

Apropos of purple pasts and of heroines in black, it is worthy of note that propriety in the hue of one's garb is another of the inviolable conventions in the cheap theaters. Olga Nethersole probably thought she was doing a wonderfully original thing some years ago when she announced that she would wear various colors to typify the regeneration of Camille, but a chromatic index to character antedates the English actress by many decades. To anybody acquainted with sensational plays a white dress means innocence, a black dress suffering and a red dress guilt just as infallibly as the cigarette habit and a _penchant_ for sitting on the arms of chairs indicates utter depravity in a female. If you told an Eighth Avenue amusement-lover that good women sometimes smoke and often sit on the arms of chairs he wouldn't believe you.

With puppets and speeches to be had ready-made, the receipt for writing a melodrama would not seem to be particularly complicated. The favorite story for a piece of this sort concerns two men--one poor and good, the other wealthy and bad--who love the same girl. For that reason and because the hero "stands between" him and "a fortune", the villain plans to "get him out of the way." The soubrette saves the intended victim from death, the would-be assassin is disgraced, and the play "ends happily." There may be a dozen variations of this theme, such as an effort to send the hero to prison "for another's crime", but, until managers found a gold mine in the lechery of their low-browed patrons, it formed the central thread of four offerings out of five. The stock plot now-a-days is the frustration of sundry attempts to sell women to waiting despoilers; the dramatization of what the newspapers describe, hideously enough, as "white slavery." This is an unpleasant subject in any form, but the part it plays in current melodrama is so gross and evil that I shall risk referring to it again in another paragraph.

The "fortune" that serves as bone of contention in the tale related above never happens to be less than a million. Such trifling sums as fifty thousand pounds or a hundred thousand dollars are given very little consideration in melodrama. Everyone of importance lives in a "mansion" and carries about huge rolls of greenbacks. When the villain tries to murder the hero he resists the temptation to stab or shoot him quickly and quietly, having found the expedient of binding him across a railway track or throwing his insensible body on a feed belt more conducive to a thrilling rescue. Handmade murder has no place in melodrama; all reputable scoundrels do their killing by machinery. The strongest situation possible in the sensational play is that in which the comedienne flags the train or stops the belt. Next to this "big scene" is the inevitable encounter between the villain with a knife, the unarmed hero, and the heroine, who arrives with a revolver at what Joseph Cawthorne calls "the zoological moment." I have seen the superiority of the pistol over the dagger demonstrated five times in a single melodrama, yet the villain never seems to profit by experience. One would think he would learn to carry a "gun", just as one would think that the hero would learn not to leave his coat where stolen bills might be placed in the pockets, but the playwrights of the popular-priced theaters seem to model their people on the dictum of Oscar Wilde, who said: "There are two kinds of women--the good women, who are stupid, and the bad women, who are dangerous." Notwithstanding their crass improbabilities, many melodramas of the better sort are interesting and not without occasional evidences of clumsy originality and crude strength. I enjoyed eight or ten genuine thrills in the course of my tour of inspection.

If I was thrilled ten times, however, I was sickened and disgusted a thousand times at the appeal to low animalism that has become the dominant factor in these houses. Remembering the legal obstacles put in the path of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," I could not help wondering whether the Comstockians wear blinders that shut from their view everything East and West of Broadway. Even if their mental harness includes this visage-narrowing accoutrement it is difficult to understand why the billboards scattered about town have not indicated to these censors the trend of the popular-priced theaters. Do not the titles of the pieces presented indicate the truth of the situation? What may one suppose is the character of such plays as "Her First False Step", "Dealers in White Women", "Why Women Sin", "Queen of the White Slaves" and "New York by Night"?

"Dangers of Working Girls", a piece of this type which I saw at the American, might easily be set down as one of the worst of the "Dangers of Working Girls." The principal figure in the play was Doctor Sakea, whose profession was Mrs. Warren's and whose assistants were Chinamen hired to lure maidens into a place of evil resort. The production was full of such lines as "Don't spoil her beauty; it means money to us" and "Ah! More pretty girls for the master's cage", while its principal situation was the auctioning of a number of half-dressed women to the highest bidder. For this scene a crowd of bestial degenerates attracted by the posters waited with gloating eyes and open jaws. There was no sugar-coating over the pill--no bright dialogue, no philosophy, no hint at a "moral lesson." It was simply a ghastly, hideous, degrading appeal to everything that is vile and loathsome in the under side of human nature.

The financial success of such pieces as these seems to decide once for all the question as to whether public taste influences the drama or the drama public taste. With clean and clever plays a stone's throw away, at prices by no means prohibitive, no one need attend such performances as that I have described unless he really delights in that form of entertainment. I have always insisted that nothing is more immoral than bad art, and, this being true, the influence of the popular-priced theater appears to be a very grave subject, indeed. The people who go to such places of amusement have so little pleasure in their lives that it would seem a pity to take away whatever they may crave, yet it is not improbable that these very people might be inclined toward an appreciation of better things in the playhouse. We who object to the description of crime and violence in the daily papers certainly may be expected to find evil in its depiction on the stage; we who fear the discussion of delicate topics before audiences of cultured men and women can find nothing to excuse morbid emphasis upon distressing scenes before ignorant and impressionable boys and girls. Whether or not they really believe that such plays reflect life, whether or not they are directly influenced, there certainly can be nothing beneficial to them in constant observation of coarse humor, silly pathos, and a distorted code of conduct. I wonder if there is any method by which these play-goers can be made to understand that cleverness is not incompatible with entertainment nor good drama with interest.

_THE SMART SET ON THE STAGE_

Wherein the author considers comedies of manners, and players
who succeed illy in living up to them.

"The theater has its own aristocracy", declares the author of a book about families that, generation after generation, have given actors to that institution in America. It is not of "its own aristocracy" that I intend writing, but of the aristocracy it mimics. When I speak of "The Smart Set on the Stage", the reference is to those men and women who trail their cigarette smoke and their gowns through the modern society play.

There are fashions in drama, just as there are in dresses, and managerial modistes begin to sense a return to favor of the tea cup comedy. Fifteen years ago, during an era of romance, the tinsmith superceded the tailor. A decade later, "guns" were more worn than girdles, and the prevailing mode in millinery was the Mexican sombrero, with a leather belt in place of a band. The hero of a play was the male who could shoot straightest. Now, once again, the hero is the gentleman who can successfully balance, at one and the same time, a punch glass, a plate of biscuits, and the arguments for and against running away with his friend's wife. Within the past few months we have had such examples of their school as "Electricity", "Smith", "The Gamblers", "Nobody's Widow", "Getting a Polish" and "We Can't Be as Bad as All That", the last by that inveterate dramatizer of the social whirl, Henry Arthur Jones. With Jones in his heaven, all's right with the whirl'd!

Nor do these six compose a complete list. Mary Garden is still "wallowing", and surely Salome belonged to one of the best families of the East! Lady Macbeth and her husband--not the Macbeths who make lamp chimneys; O, dear no!--must have been in the blue book of their day. We met some very nice people with Mary Magdalene, too, and Prince Bellidor, in "Sister Beatrice", behaved like one of the idle rich, but inasmuch as their conduct in society, ancient or modern, was not the theme of the works in which they appeared I shall omit further mention of these works.

The rich we have always with us. That is why Thackeray is more popular than Dickens, and that is why the smart set has been paraded theatrically since Thespis took the first wagon show on a tour of Greece. We are a lot of Pomonas--particularly the women among us--and we cannot help revelling in the doings of dignitaries whose place in life, but for fear of making this article sound railroad-y, I should describe as an elevated station. The more humble we are the greater the craving and the delight. Lizzie Brown, who measures ribbon behind a counter from breakfast 'til dinner, naturally extracts infinite pleasure from spending her evenings with only a row of footlights between herself and wonderful beings who toil not and spin nothing but yarns. That is almost like moving in the best circles oneself; it is being transported to a world millions of miles from the brass tracks in the ribbon counter. Miss Brown half believes herself a great lady by morning, as you may judge by her manner if you go to her for a yard of baby blue. Everyone of us has something of Lizzie Brown in his or her make-up. The same instinct that moves us to marry our daughter to the Prince of This or the Duke of That causes us to remember "East Lynne" when we have forgotten "Hazel Kirke."

Most of us outside the charmed circle have ideas of good society quite as exaggerated as the Biblical idea of Paradise. We may not fancy that fashionables go about with crowns of light and golden harps, but we do insist that on the stage they behave as little as possible like ordinary human beings.

That is why it is so difficult to write society plays. If the characters you create do not feel and think normally they become puppets, and if they do you are accused at once of having failed to suggest smartness. One night I stood in the lobby of the Criterion Theater as the audience came out after having seen "Her Great Match." A woman who passed me remarked: "I think it was charming, but that man didn't make love at all like a Prince." Just what are the peculiarities of royal love-making the lady didn't explain, and the idiosyncracies that got the only prince I ever knew into jail had to do, not with the _way_ he courted, but with the number of times. In any event, it was proved afterward that my friend really was descended from a respectable veterinary surgeon, which disqualifies me as an authority on the subject. When I mentioned the matter to him, Mr. Fitch observed that he had been quite chummy with a prince or two, and that, while he never actually had seen them make love, he judged from their consorts that their powers of amatory expression were quite ordinary. "However", quoth Mr. Fitch, "you can't expect the public to believe _that_."

It used to be a pretty general impression that nobody who had more than twenty thousand a year ever indulged in a show of emotion. I say "nobody", although, of course, you are aware that wealthy parents in society plays always are exceptions to the rule of good breeding. Otherwise, imperturbability of the John Drew kind was supposed to be a trade mark of culture blown in the bottle. Common folk might laugh or cry under stress of circumstances, but the souls of the elect were sheathed in ice. The approved manner of translating a crisis into the dialogue of the drawing room was something like this: