The Show
FROM Belshazzar Court to the theatre district is only a thirty minutes’ ride in the Subway, but usually we reach the theatre a few minutes after the rise of the curtain. Why this should be I have never been able to explain. It is a fact that on such nights we have dinner half an hour early, and Emmeline comes to the table quite ready to go out except that she has her cloak to slip on. Nevertheless we are a few minutes late. While Emmeline is slipping on her cloak I glance through the editorial page in the evening paper, answer the telephone, and recall several bits of work I overlooked at the office. I then give Harold a drink of water in bed, help Emmeline with her hat, clean out the drawers in my writing table, tell Harold to stop talking to himself and go to sleep, and hunt for the theatre tickets in the pockets of my street clothes. After that I have time to read a page or two of John Galsworthy and go in to see that Harold is well covered up. Emmeline always makes me save time by having me ring for the elevator while she is drawing on her gloves. Nevertheless we are a few minutes late for the first act.
But if I frequently leave Belshazzar Court in a state of mild irritation, my spirits rise the moment we enter the Subway. I am stirred by the lights and the crowd, this vibrant New York crowd of which I have spoken before, so aggressively youthful, so prosperous, so strikingly overdressed, and carrying off its finery with a dash that is quite remarkable considering that we are only a half-way-up middle-class crowd jammed together in a public conveyance. Since our trip abroad some years ago I am convinced that the Parisian woman needs all the chic and esprit she can encompass. I will affirm that in half an hour in the Subway, at any time of day, I see more charming faces than we saw during six weeks in Paris. I have hitherto been timid about expressing this opinion in print, but only the other night I sat up to read Innocents Abroad after many years. What Mark Twain has to say of the Parisian grisette encourages me to make this confession of faith. As I swing from my strap and scan the happy, well-to-do faces under the glow of the electric lamps, I sometimes find myself wondering what reason William D. Haywood can possibly have for being dissatisfied with things as they are.
We are usually late at the theatre, but not always. There are times when Harold will get through with his dinner without being once called to order. He then announces that he is tired and is anxious to get into bed. On such occasions Emmeline grows exceedingly nervous. She feels his head and makes him open his mouth and say, ‘Aaa-h-h,’ so that she may look down his throat. If Harold carries out his promise and does promptly go to sleep, it intensifies our anxiety and threatens to spoil our evening; but. it does also save a little time. It brings us to the theatre a minute or two before the curtain goes up, and gives us a chance to study the interior decorations of the auditorium, completed at great cost, the exact amount of which I cannot recall without my evening paper. If you will remember that we go to the theatre perhaps a dozen times during the season, and that the number of new theatres on Broadway every season is about that number, you will see why very frequently we should be finding ourselves in a new house.
It is a matter of regret to me that I cannot grow enthusiastic over theatrical interiors. I do my best, but the novel arrangement of proscenium boxes and the upholstery scheme leave me cold. I recall what the evening paper said of the new Blackfriars. Its architecture is a modification of the Parthenon at Athens, and it is nine stories high and equipped with business offices and bachelor quarters. It was erected as one of a chain of amusement houses stretching clear across to San Francisco, by a manager who began three years ago as a moving-picture impresario in the Bronx. Having made a hit in the ‘ legitimate ’ with an unknown actress in a play by an unknown writer, he immediately signed a contract with the playwright for his next six plays, hired six companies for the road, and built a chain of theatres to house the plays. This is the American of it. If three years from now this Napoleon of Longacre Square is back at his five-cent moving-picture place in the Bronx it will also be the American of it. When I tell Emmeline that the ceiling has been copied from a French château, she looks up and says nothing.
The curtain goes up on the famous ten-thousand-dollar drawing-room set which has been the hit of the season. The telephone on the real Louis XVI table rings, the English butler comes in to answer the call, and the play is on. The extraordinary development of the telephone on the New York stage is possibly our most notable and meritorious contribution to contemporary dramatic art. The telephone serves a far higher purpose than Sardou’s parlor-maid with the feather-duster. It is plain, of course, that the dramatist’s first purpose is to sound a universal human note which shall immediately establish a bond of sympathy between the actors and the audience. And the telephone is something which comes very close to every one of us. If the English butler, instead of answering a telephone call, picks up the instrument and himself calls for some familiar number, like 3100 Spring, which is Police Headquarters, you can actually perceive the responsive thrill which sweeps the house. The note of universal humanity has been struck.
This point is worth keeping in mind. If I am somewhat insistent on being in time for the beginning of the play, it is because I want to subject myself to the magic touch of the telephone bell, and not because I am afraid of missing the drift of the playwright’s story. Of that there is no danger, because I know the story already. I don’t know whether college courses in the drama still spend as much time as they used to fifteen years ago in laying emphasis on the fact that the first act of a play is devoted to exposition. If college courses are really as modern as they are said to be, professors of t he drama will now be teaching their students that the playwright’s real preparation for his conflict and his climax is not to be found in the first act at all, but several weeks before the play is produced, in the columns of the daily press.
If Goethe were writing Faust to-day he would not lay his Prologue in Heaven but in the newspapers. I know what I am about to see and hear, because I have read all the newspaper chatter while the play was in incubation and in rehearsal. I have been taken into confidence by the managers just before they sailed for Europe in the imperial suite of the Imperator. If they omitted anything, they have cabled it over from Paris at: enormous expense. Through interviews with stars and leading ladies, through calculated indiscretions on the part of the box-office with regard to advance sales, through the newspaper reviews after the first night, I am educated up to the act of seeing a play with a thoroughness that the postgraduate department of Johns Hopkins might envy.
Consequently, there is not the slightest danger, even if we come late, that I shall laugh in the wrong place or fail to laugh in the right place, or that Emmeline will fail to grope for her handkerchief at the right time. Through the same agency of the newspaper the funniest lines, the strongest ‘punch,’ the most sympathetic bits of dialogue have been located and charted. At college I used to be told that the tremendous appeal of the Greek drama was dependent in large measure on the fact that it dealt with stories which were perfectly familiar to the public. The Athenian audience came to the theatre expectant, surcharged with emotion, waiting eagerly for the proper cue to let its feelings go. But Athens was not conceivably better informed than New York is today when it goes to the theatre.
Even James M. Barrie does it. I remember when Emmeline and I went to sec Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, some years ago. What we really went for, like ten thousand other good people of New York, was to hear the muchadvertised tag with which Barrie ended his play, to the effect, namely, that woman was not made out of man’s rib but out of his funny bone. I do not recall that a single dramatic reviewer in New York after the first night omitted to concentrate on that epigram; if he did he must have been called down severely by the managing editor. Now it is my sincere belief that the Barrie joke is a poor one. It is offensively smart, it has the ‘punch’ which it is Barrie’s merit to omit so regularly from his plays. It is inferior to any number of delightful lines in that really beautiful play. That is, I say so now when I am in my right senses. But when Emmeline and I, under the hypnotic spell of the newspapers, went, to see What Every Woman Knows, what was it that we waited for through four longish acts, — what but that unhappy quip which everybody else was waiting for? Of course we laughed and applauded. We laughed in the same shamefaced and dutiful manner with which people stand up in restaurants when the band plays the ‘ StarSpangled Banner.’ Often I wonder what would Shakespeare and Molière not have accomplished if they had had the newspapers to hypnotise the audience for them instead of being compelled to do so themselves.
Hypnotism everywhere. One of the popular plays that we never went to see was recommended to Emmeline by a very charming woman who said it was a play which every woman ought to take her husband to see. In itself that is as admirable a bit of dramatic criticism as could be distilled out of several columns of single-leaded minion. But the trouble was that this charming woman had not thought it out for herself. She had found the phrase in the advertising notices of this play. It was so pat, so quotable, and the press agent was so evidently sincere in using it, that it seemed a pity not to pass it on to others. After half a dozen friends had recommended the play to Emmeline as a good one for me to be taken to, she rebelled and said she would not go. She was intellectually offended. Her ostensible reason was that she doubted whether the play would do me any good. I had my revenge not long after when I offered to take her to a play which dealt with woman’s extravagance in dress, and which the advertisements said every man ought to take his wife to see. Emmeline said that my sense of humor often betrays me.
This, I am sorry to say, happens rather frequently. My feeble jest about the play which all wives ought to be taken to see was devised on the spur of the moment. But there is one sly bit of humor which I regularly employ and which I never fail to regret. This happens whenever, in reply to Emmeline s suggestion that we take in one of the new plays, I say with malice aforethought that the piece is one to which a man would hardly care to take his wife. The response is instantaneous. It makes no difference that our views on this subject are identical. Apostrophizing me as an exemplar of that muddle-headed thing which is interchangeably known as fossilized Puritanism and Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, Emmeline begins by asking whether a play that is not fit for a man’s wife to see is fit for the husband of that wife. Since I agree with her, the question remains unanswerable. She then goes on to ask whether it might not be an excellent thing for the theatre to abolish the distinction between plays that a man’s wife can see and those she cannot see, and to make it a law, preferably a Federal law under the general scheme of social justice, that no man shall be allowed to enter a theatre without a woman companion.
It is a sore point with her. We had as guest at dinner one night an estimable young man who told us that, being anxious to take his betrothed to a certain play, he had bought a ticket for the family circle the night before, to see whether the play was a fit one for the young woman to be taken to. Emmeline cast one baleful glance at the young man, which he fortunately failed to catch, his head being bent over the asparagus. But she has never asked him to call again. To me, afterwards, she scarified the poor young man.
‘Imagine,’she said. ‘Here is a man in love with a woman. He is about to take her, and give himself to her, for better and for worse. He asks her to face the secrets of life and the fear of death with him. But he is afraid to take her to the theatre with him.’
The joy of combat makes me forget that my views are quite the same.
‘It shows his thoughtfulness,’ I said. ‘There are any number of nasty plays in town.’
‘Why are they here?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
‘ I ’ll tell you why,’ she said: ‘ to meet the demand for plays that a man cannot take his wife to.’
I assured her that this common phrase really did not mean all she read into it. The average citizen, I said, does not look upon his wife as a tender plant to be shielded against the breath of harm. It was only another instance of our falling in with a phrase, and repeating it in parrot fashion, until we are surprised to find ourselves living up to it. But Emmeline said it was Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy superimposed on the universal Sklavenmoral from which woman suffers. At this point I am convinced that a sense of humor often does betray one.
Steeped in the sincere, if often ferociously sincere, realism of the Russian writers, it is plain why one should revolt against the catch-phrases which make up so large a part of our speech and thought. Because she knows the realism of European literature, Emmeline grows angry with the stage manager’s realism in which we have made such notable progress of late. She has refused to be impressed by Mr. Belasco’s marvelous reproduction of a cheap restaurant, though the tiled walls, the coffee-urns, the cash-registers, and the coat-racks were so unmistakably actual as to make a good many of us forget that the action which takes place in this restaurant might just as well have taken place in the Aquarium or on top of the Jungfrau. There was another play. For weeks, the author, the producer, and several assistants (I am now quoting press authority) had been searching the city for the exact model of a hall bedroom in a theatrical boarding-house such as the playwright had in mind. They found what they were looking for. When the curtain rose on the opening night, the public, duly kept informed as to the progress of the quest, naturally rose with enthusiasm to the perfect picture of a mean chamber in a squalid boarding-house. The scene was appalling in its detail of tawdry poverty. Except for the fact that the bedroom was about sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high, the effect of destitution was startling.
But there is a more dangerous realism. Our stage has progressed beyond this actuality of real doors with real door-knobs. We have attained as far as the external realism of human types. As exhibited on the stage to-day, the shop-girls, the ‘crooks,’ the detectives, the clerks, the traveling salesmen, the shady financiers, are startlingly true to life in appearance, in walk, in speech. For that, one ought presumably to be thankful. Presumably it is progress to have shop-girls, clerks, financiers, ‘crooks,’ and their pursuers, instead of Pinero’s drawing-room heroines and bounders, or Mr. Bernstein’s highly galvanized boulevardiers. If people with the look of Broadway, with the tang and speech of Broadway, walk the boards, what more would one have?
‘ Soul,’says Emmeline, and she lashes out at the beautifully made puppets on the stage. External realism has gone as far as it may, but beneath the surface everything is false. The life of these amazingly lifelike figures is false, the story is false, the morals and the conclusions are false. At bottom it is tawdry melodrama. New tricks of the trade have been mastered, but the same crude, childish views of life confront us, and the same utter lack of that form which is the joy of art. The American stage never had an excess of form. We have less now than we ever had.
As I think back over the last few paragraphs I find that I may have given an utterly wrong impression of how the theatre affects Emmeline and me. It would be deplorable if the reader should get to think that we are highbrows. It is quite the other way. Between the acts and at home, the two of us may be tremendously critical, but while the business of the stage is under way we are grateful for the least excuse to yield ourselves to the spirit of the thing. Provided, only, there is nothing in the play about a young woman who beards a king of finance and frightens him into surrendering a million dollars’ worth of bonds. Financiers and their female private secretaries I cannot abide. Otherwise, I delight in nearly everything: in The Old Homestead, in George M. Cohan, in Fanny’s First Play, and in the farce-comedies where a recreant husband, surprised by his wife, steps backward into his own suitcase. Emmeline confesses that she has seldom seen a proposal of marriage on the stage without wanting to sniffle sympathetically.
Because I take pleasure in seeing frivolous young men step into their own suitcases I am not averse to musical comedy. Emmeline rarely accompanies me; not because she is afraid that it is the kind of a play a man should not take his wife to, but because it does not interest her. She is fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and she likes The Chocolate Soldier; but of our own native musical comedy I think she has seen only one example. I have described this piece elsewhere, and if the editor of the Atlantic has no objections, I can repeat in substance what I then wrote.
The play was called The Girl from Grand Rapids. The principal characters are an American millionaire and his daughter who are traveling in Switzerland. They come to the little village of Sprudelsaltz and are mistaken by the populace for the German Kaiser and his Chancellor who are expected on a secret mission. The American millionaire, in order to outwit a business rival who belongs to the Furniture Trust, consents to play the part. He accounts for the apparent sex of his Chancellor by declaring that the evil designs of certain French spies have made it necessary for his companion to assume this peculiar disguise. The Chancellor falls in love with the young British attaché, who has come to Switzerland for the purpose of unearthing certain important secrets relative to the German navy. At their first meeting the supposed German Chancellor and the British naval attaché sing a duet of which the refrain is, ’Oh, take me back to Bryant Square.’ Ultimately the identity of the pseudo Kaiser and his Chancellor is discovered. They are threatened by the infuriated Swiss populace in fur jackets and tights, and are saved only through the intervention of a comic Irish waiter named Gansenschmidt. They escape from Switzerland and in the second act we find them at Etah, in Greenland, where the millionaire’s daughter is compelled to wed an Eskimo chieftain who turns out to be the British naval attaché in disguise. The third act shows an Arab carnival in the Sahara. Repeatedly, in the course of the evening, Emmeline asked me why I laughed.
There is also a business motive in my playgoing. I am learning how to build a complicated dramatic plot. Years ago I set out to write a play. Like all people of slipshod habits I have sudden attacks of acute systematization, and when I began my play, I assigned so much time for working out the plot, so much for character-development, so much for actually writing the dialogue. The scheme did not quite work out. I forget the details; the point is that at the end of a year I had written all my dialogue, but had made little progress with my character-development and had done nothing whatever on my plot. Since that time I have moved ahead. My characters are to me fairly alive now. But I still have a plot and incidents to find for my play. Emmeline says that my quest is a vain one. She is convinced that I have no gift for dramatic complication, and that the best I can hope for is to do something like Bernard Shaw. But I refuse to give in. I go to see how other men have done the trick, and some day, who knows, I may yet find a skeleton on which to hang my polished and spirited dialogue.
Between the acts there are two things which one naturally does. I read in the programme what men will wear during the winter, and I scan faces, a habit which I find growing upon me in all sorts of public places and which will some day bring me into serious trouble. People are rather stolid between the acts. It is a very rare play in which the sense of illusion carries over from one act to the next and is reflected in the faces of the spectators. The perfect play, as I conceive it, should keep the audience in a single mood from beginning to end. Between the fall and the rise of the curtain the spell ought to hold and show itself in a flushed, brighteyed gayety, in a feverish chatter which should carry on the playwright’s message until he resumes the business of his narrative. But as a rule I am not exalted between the acts, and I perceive that my neighbors are not. It is not a play we are watching, but three or four separate plays. When the eurtain descends we lean back into an ordinary world. The business of the stage drops from us. We resume conversation interrupted in the Subway. A young woman on the left furnishes her companion with details of last night’s dance. Two young men in front argue over the cost of staging the piece. One says it cost $10,000, and the other says $15,000, and they pull out their favorite evening papers from under the seat and quote them to each other. Emmeline wonders whether she looked down far enough into Harold’s throat when he said, ‘Aaa-h-h.’
It is not entirely our own fault if we lose the sense of continuous illusion between the acts. There is little in the ordinary play to carry one forward from one act to the next. We still talk of suspense and movement and climax, whereas our plays are not organic plays at all, but mere vaudeville. They do not depend for their effect on cumulative interest, but on the individual ‘punch.’ Drama, melodrama, comedy, and farce have their own laws. But our latest dramatic form combines all forms in a swift medley of effects that I can describe by no other term than vaudeville. George M. Cohan is our representative dramatist, not because he has flung the star-spangled banner to the breeze, but because he has cast all consistency to the winds. Who ever heard of a melodramatic farce? Mr. Cohan is writing them all the time. They are plays in which people threaten each other with automatic pistols to the accompaniment of remarks which elicit roars of laughter.
I know of course that Shakespeare has a drunken porter on the stage while Macbeth is doing Duncan to death. But George M. Cohan is different. I have in mind a homeless little village heroine of Mr. Cohan’s who is about to board a train for the great city with its pitfalls and privations. Emmeline was quite affected by the pathetic little figure on the platform, with the shabby suitcase — until six chorus men in beautifully creased trousers waltzed out on the train platform and did a clog-dance and sang, ‘Good-bye, Mary, don’t forget to come back home.’ I can’t conceive Shakespeare doing this sort of thing. It is gripping while it lasts, but when the curtain falls, one chiefly thinks how late it will be before one gets home.
But if the playwright’s story does not always hold me, the people on the stage seldom fail to bring me under the spell. I am not a professional critic and I have no standards of histrionic skill to apply. It may be, as people say, that our actors are deficient in imagination, in the power of emotional utterance, in facial eloquence, in the art of creating illusion. Perhaps it is true that they seldom get into the skin of their characters, and never are anything but themselves. But precisely because they are themselves, I like them. I like their lithe, clean-cut length, their strong, clean-shaven faces, their faultless clothes. I like the frequency with which they change from morning to evening dress. I like the ease with which they order taxicabs, press buttons for the club waiter, send out cablegrams to Shanghai, and make appointments to meet at expensive roadhouses which are reached only by automobile. The nonchalance with which George M. Cohan’s people distribute large sums is a quickening spectacle to me.
After this it will be difficult for any one to accuse me of being a highbrow. Let me dispose of this matter beyond all doubt. I do not understand what people mean when they speak of intellectual actors and the intellectual interpretation of stage rôles. Possibly it is a defective imagination in me which makes me insist that actors shall look their part physically. Not all the imaginative genius in the world will reconcile me to a thin Falstaff, suggestive of vegetarianism and total abstinence. I am not even sure that I know what an intellectualized Hamlet is. I insist upon a Hamlet who shall wear black and who shall recite slowly the lines which shake me so when I read them at home, instead of intellectually swallowing the lines as so many do. I cannot see how Mrs. Fiske’s intellectuality qualifies her for playing robust, full-blooded women like Tess, or like Cyprienne in Divorçons. But I like Mrs. Fiske as Becky Sharpe and as Ibsen’s Nora, because both were small women.
I imagine it is a sign of Wagner’s genius that he made all his women of heroic stature. He must have foreseen that by the time a singer has learned to interpret Brünhilde she is apt to be mature and imposing. Thus I feel, and I know that most of the people in the audience agree with me. Those who do not have probably read in their evening papers that they were about to see an intellectual interpretation. Whenever they are puzzled by the actor they ascribe it to his intellect.
When the final curtain falls, the play drops from us like a discarded cloak, people smile, dress, tell each other that it was a pretty good show, and hold the door open for the ladies to pass out into the glow and snap of Broadway. We do not carry illusion away with us from the theatre. In spite of the fact that we have purchased our tickets in the conviction that every husband and wife ought to see the play, we do not correlate the theatre with life. Primarily it is a show. We do not ask much. If it has offered us a hearty laugh or two, a thrill, a pressure on the tear-ducts, this tolerant American public, this patient, innocent, cynical public that is always prepared to be cheated, feels grateful; and there ends the matter.
And Aristotle? And the purging of the emotions through pity and terror? I still remember a play called The Diamond Breaker, which I saw on Third Avenue when Benjamin Harrison was President. I remember how the young mining engineer was foully beset by his rival and tied hand and foot, and dropped into the open chute that led straight into the pitiless iron teeth of the stonecrushing machine. I remember how the heroine rushed out upon the gangway and seized the young engineer by the hair; and the wheels stopped; and the girl fainted; the strong men in the audience wept. Is it my own fault that such sensations are no longer to be had? Or has the drama indeed degenerated, within these twenty years?
From the evening papers I gather that the crowd, after leaving the new ninestory Blackfriars Theatre, modeled after the Parthenon at Athens, invades and overruns the all-night restaurants on Broadway. Yet the trains in the Subway are jammed, and Emmeline has to stand more than half-way to Belshazzar Court.