Sometimes our heart bleeds for actors and actresses, when we think what
they have to go through with. The other night at Watertown, N. Y.,
Miss Ada Gray was playing “Camille,” and in the dying scene, where she
breathes her last, to slow music, an accident occurred which broke her
all up. She was surrounded by sorrowing friends, who were trying to do
everything to make it pleasant for her, when the bed on which she
was dying,--an impromptu sort of a bed got up by the stage
carpenter,--tipped partly over, and the dying woman rolled over on the
stage, tipped over a wash-stand filled with tumblers and bottles of
medicine, and raised a deuce of a row. It would have been all right, and
she could have propped the bed up and proceeded with her dying, had not
the actress got rattled.
Most actresses get lost entirely when anything occurs that is not in
the play, and Miss Gray was the scaredest female that ever lived. She
thought it was a judgment on her for playing a dying character, and
thought the whole theatre had been struck by lightning, and was going
to fall down. To save herself was her first thought, so she grabbed her
night-dress,--which was embroidered up and down the front, and had point
lace on the yoke of the sleeves,--in both hands and started for the
orchestra, the wildest corpse that ever lived.
The leader of the orchestra caught her, but not being an undertaker he
did not undertake to hold her, and she fell over the bass viol and
run one foot through the snare drum, and grasping the fiddle for a
life-preserver she jumped into the raging scenery-back of the stage
which represented a sea.
They had to pull her out with boat-hooks, and it was half an hour before
she could be induced to go to bed again and proceed with her dying.
Actresses are often annoyed at the remarks made by foolish fellows in
the audience. A remark by a person in the audience always causes people
to laugh, whether the speaker says anything smart or not.
Recently, in the play of “Cinderella at School,” a girl came out with a
sheet over her, as a ghost, to frighten a young fellow who was “mashed”
on her. He looked at the ghost for a moment, and kept on lighting his
cigarette, when a galloot up in the gallery said, so everybody could
hear it, “He don't scare worth a damn!” and the audience went fairly
wild, while the pretty girl stood there and blushed as though her heart
would break.
Such things are wrong.
Probably one of the meanest tricks that was ever, played was played on
Mary Anderson. It will be remembered that in the play of “Ingomar,”
Parthenia and the barbarian have several love scenes, where they lop on
each other and hug some--that is, not too much hugging, but just hugging
enough. Ingomar wears a huge fur garment, made of lion's skin, or
something. One day he noticed that the moths were getting into it, and
he told his servant to see about the moths, and drive them out. The
servant got some insect powder and blowed the hair of the garment full
of it, and scrubbed the inside of it with benzine.
Ingomar put it on just before he went on the stage, and thought it
didn't smell just right, but he had no time to inquire into it. He had
not got fairly in his position, before Parthenia came out on a hop,
skip and jump, and threw herself all over him. She got one lung full
of insect powder, and the other full of benzine, and as she said, “Wilt
always love me, Ingomar?” she dropped her head over his shoulder, and
said in an aside, “For the love of heaven, what have you been drinking?”
and then sneezed a couple times.
Ingomar held her up the best he could, considering that his nose was
full of insect powder, and he answered:
“I wilt “: and then he said to her quietly:
“Damfino what it is that smells so!”
They went on with the play between sneezes, and when the curtain went
down she told Ingomar to go out and shake himself, which he did.
It was noticed in the next act that Ingomar had a linen duster on, and
Mary snoze no more.
There was another mean trick played on a comedian a short time ago. In
one of the plays he comes into a room as a tramp, and asks for something
to drink. There is nothing to drink, and he asks if he may drink the
kerosene in the lamp, which is on the table unlighted. The lamp has been
filled with beer, and when he is told that he can slake his thirst
at the lamp, he unscrews the top, takes out the wick, and drinks the
contents. Everybody laughs, and the idea is a good one.
At Chicago, recently, some friend took out the beer and filled the lamp
with a liquid of the same color, but the most sickish tasting stuff that
ever was. The comedian drank about three swallows of the neatsfoot oil
before he got onto the joke, and then he flew around like a dog that had
been poisoned, and went off the stage saying something like “Noo Yoick.”
He has agreed to kill the fellow that loaded that lamp for him.