badly, because beginners at authorship and enders of matrimony attract
attention. Much was said of the novices who won laurels last season,
and yet every single piece that ran a hundred nights or so on Broadway
was by an Avery Hopwood, a Winchell Smith, or a David Belasco. Any
number of brilliant young men flashed into view, and probably will
remain in view, but, as yet, of necessity, they are conspicuous for
promise rather than for fulfillment. The greatest originality, the
most synthetic ingenuity, and the sharpest wit were displayed by H. S.
Sheldon, in "The Havoc"; by Philip H. Bartholomae, in "Over Night"; by
Anne Caldwell, in "The Nest Egg"; by Tom Barry, in "The Upstart"; by
Al Thomas, in "Her Husband's Wife", and by George Bronson Howard and
Wilson Mizner in "The Only Law."
The danger faced by new men is that they may be snuffed out by their
first failures. Such an ungenerous reception as was given "The
Upstart", for example, might well discourage an author to the utter
ruin of his career. Managers, too, are likely to judge by the box
office rather than by the play--an exceedingly short sighted policy in
a "business" whose future depends upon the proper nursing of its
infants. The fluttering fledgling of today is the eagle of tomorrow.
Porter Emerson Browne, Jules Eckert Goodman, Edward Sheldon, Thompson
Buchanan, Avery Hopwood, James Forbes, the debutants of yester-year,
are the leading dramatists of this.
Naturally, everybody is trying to duplicate their experience.
Everybody writes plays. Some time ago an ambitious individual walked
into my office and announced that he had come from Rochester to submit
a tragedy in blank verse. I suggested that he need not have gone to so
much trouble and expense. "It wasn't any trouble or expense", he
replied. "I had to come anyway. I'm a conductor on the New York
Central."
Theodore Burt Sayre, who wrote "The Commanding Officer", and who is
the reader for Charles Frohman, told me not long ago that his most
persistent visitor was a policeman, who had composed a farce in six
acts. He also showed me a letter the author of which declared "I seen
menny plays that cost a doler and wasn't won-too-three with my play."
Every manager in New York has received a Brooklyn shoemaker who feels
certain he has produced a comic opera infinitely superior to the best
efforts of Gilbert and Sullivan. Of the would-be dramatists in the
learned professions, I should say that physicians are rarest as
playwrights, that journalists provide the best material, and that
clergymen produce the most and the worst.
With so many Cinderellas attempting to crowd their feet into the shoes
of Pinero and Jones, there can be no limit to the number of
manuscripts submitted each week to well known producers. The general
idea, I believe, is that managers are quite buried beneath piles of
plays. This is not absolutely true. Such an office as that of Henry B.
Harris, in the Hudson Theater, or of The Liebler Company, in Fifth
Avenue, may be the destination of from six to ten manuscripts a week.
About a third of this number come from agents, and these are likely to
receive quickest consideration, since the reader knows that, if they
were utterly without promise, they would not have been sent him. The
crop of flat and cylindrical packages fluctuates with altered
conditions. The manager who makes money out of the work of an unknown
author is sure to receive far more than his share of contributions
during the next year or two. William A. Brady got a thousand plays a
month from obscure aspirants immediately after the production of "'Way
Down East."
It is a fallacy widely current among new writers that their "copy" is
returned unread. One of the first theatrical stories I ever heard
concerned a woman who put sand between the pages of her rolled
manuscript and found it there still when the piece came back to her.
Nowadays, when the demand for material so far exceeds the supply as to
have become almost frantic, it is true not only that every play is
looked into, but that almost every play is looked into by every
manager. Round and round the circle they go, being judged from a
hundred viewpoints by a hundred men who know that a lucky strike means
a fortune, and who are eager in proportion. It is my firm belief that
all the good plays, not to speak of a fair number of bad ones, have
been or are about to be produced. Any piece that is not utterly,
hopelessly valueless is sure to find some appreciator in the end.
There are instances of manuscripts that, like "My Friend From India",
travel up and down Broadway for years, only to be accepted and staged
at last.
I have said that the dramatist who "arrives" generally has announced
himself first through various rolled and typewritten visiting cards.
The parcel that comes from Findlay, Ohio, or Omaha, Nebraska, bearing
the address of some one of whom the reader never heard before, is
pretty certain to be without promise. Usually, the manuscript betrays
itself in its first ten pages, and what follows rarely contains an
idea that might have been valuable even if its owner had learned his
trade. When the manager does discover a story worth while, or the
suggestion of a story, usually he is quick to put its originator in
touch with a literary manicure.
Charles Frohman, who frequently is styled "The Napoleon of the Drama",
takes no such Napoleonic chances. If you will look over one of Mr.
Frohman's budgets you will find that two-thirds of the plays he
announces have been presented abroad, and that the other third are
from the pens of such celebrities as Augustus Thomas. Naturally, this
is the safe, sane, and more-or-less sure method, and yet, even when
judged from a purely commercial view-point, it has its disadvantages.
If the system does not entail such losses as other managers suffer,
neither does it render possible such gains. Mr. Frohman paid George
Ade royalties for "Just Out of College", which was a failure, far in
excess of those granted by Henry W. Savage for "The County Chairman."
Popular dramatists turn out pretty poor stuff at times, as Mr. Frohman
was reminded when he produced William Gillette's "Electricity", and
excellent material may come from an unexpected source, as Wagenhals &
Kemper discovered when they purchased "Paid in Full" from a man whose
only previous work had been the unlucky "Sergeant James." As to the
invariable wisdom of offering here plays that were hits in Paris and
London, I can say only that sometimes we in America differ with our
cousins in France and England. We differed widely in the cases of
"The Speckled Band", "The Scarlet Pimpernel", and "The Foolish
Virgin." It would appear to be a much safer expedient to turn over
doubtful pieces to stock companies in one provincial city or another
and then to abide by the result. This expedient, by the way, has the
advantage of being inexpensive.
It is very difficult to identify a good play. When I was sixteen years
old, and didn't know whether manuscripts were an inch thick or a mile,
I felt quite sure that the manager who produced a bad play was a fool.
I used to say this frankly in the newspaper on which I was employed,
just as a lot of other cock-sure young men have been doing ever since.
Latterly, however, I have observed that a great many experienced
producers average about three failures to every one success, and I
leave the superior attitude to the literatti whose cleverness is
valued by their employers at from fifteen to fifty dollars a week. The
late A. M. Palmer, after a long life-time of experience, said to me:
"There does not live a man who can tell a good play from a bad one by
reading it. If there _were_ such a Solomon he would be worth half a
million dollars per annum to any manager in New York. Personally, I
have refused so many money-makers and accepted so many money-losers
that I select material now-a-days by guess work. I tossed a coin once
to decide whether or not I should buy what afterward proved to be one
of the biggest hits of my career."
I have said that it is difficult to identify a good play; it should
not be difficult to pass upon a bad one. Some of the things that reach
our stage are so very bad that nothing in the foregoing paragraph
excuses or explains their production. Several years ago there was
referred to me a romantic drama, written by a visiting Englishman. I
advised against it, but my employers were determined in its favor, and
the piece was presented soon afterward at the Princess Theater.
On the opening night, just after the second act, Louis De Foe,
dramatic critic of The World, came to me, and said: "I got here
late, and so lost the thread of the story. Can you tell me what the
play is about?"
[Illustration: "_It is very difficult to identify a good play_"]
I tried and failed.
One of my employers stood nearby. "Let's ask him?" I suggested. We
did--and _he_ didn't know. "Haven't you seen it?" inquired Mr. De Foe.
"Yes", quoth the manager, "and I've read it, and--and it has something
to do with love, but I--I forget the details." He suggested that we
wait until after the performance and speak to the author.
That gentleman told us that the story concerned a soldier of fortune,
who was about to do something or other--I don't remember what--when he
received a letter that altered his intentions.
"So I observed", said Mr. De Foe. "But why should it have altered
them? What was in the letter?"
The author looked at him blankly. "By Jove!" he explained. "I don't
know. I never thought of _that_!"
The next day he drafted a letter that would explain matters and asked
me to have it printed in the program. But, as the piece was to close
the following night, it didn't seem worth while.
Of course, no play as bad as this should ever find its way to the
footlights, and yet I am obliged to confess that a great many do. In
fact, fifteen years of observation have forced me to the conclusion
that the finer the texture of a play, the more unusual its theme, the
smaller the author's chance of finding a manager for it. Also, one
must admit, the smaller that manager's chance of finding a public.
Though they are not so numerous as one would like to see them, we have
producers of keen artistic sensibilities; some of them, like Charles
Frohman, George Tyler, Henry B. Harris, David Belasco, Henry Miller
and Wagenhals & Kemper, men who are not averse to losing money on a
worthy enterprise or, at least, to taking a long chance of making it.
For these men we should be grateful, and, though the New Theater has
brought out nothing remarkable from an untried pen, we should be
grateful, too, for an institution whose purpose is producing the best,
whether the best is profitable or not.
So many mental qualities are essential to the correct appraisal of a
play. For one thing, the manager must see not only what it is but what
it may become. Often the hardest work in playwriting has to be done
after the play has been produced. Pieces that seemed hopeless when
they were acted initially have been turned into huge successes. Scenes
are switched about, lines changed, often whole acts reconstructed. I
know a woman who was compelled to cut her play in half after it was
produced. Ordinarily one minute is required to act each page of
typewritten manuscript, but this work, which contained only one
hundred and fifty pages, ran nearly five hours. Difficult as such
condensation must have been, the task that confronted the author in
question was not to be compared with that of lengthening a play. It is
not advisable for embryonic dramatists to cut too closely according
to pattern. To tone down a strong play or shorten a long one is easy;
to build up a weak play or successfully pad out a short one is
impossible.
Most of the manuscripts that come to the desk of the reader do not
prompt sufficient doubt for any manager to be willing to try them. A
great many would seem to be the product of lunatics. Not long ago I
had a dramatization of a Russian novel that contained eleven acts and
twenty-one scenes. The adapter simply had melted down the whole six
hundred pages of fiction and was trying to pour it onto the stage.
Another offering, called "The Dogs of Infidelity", proved to be an
argument against atheism in five acts and seven scenes. The scoundrel
of this masterpiece was Robert G. Ingersol, and the play was
accompanied by a cartoon showing the agnostic fleeing from two police
officers, marked "Logic" and "Sarcasm", who were pursuing him at the
bidding of Justice, in the person of the author. Beneath this picture
were typewritten the favorable opinions of a number of people who
claimed to have read the piece. Standing in the center of the stage,
the villain of a melodrama still in my possession is supposed to
commit suicide by exploding a dynamite cartridge in his mouth. Beneath
the directions for this bit of business, the author has written: "The
performance concludes here." I should think it might!
[Illustration: "_A woman who was compelled to cut her play in half_"]
Of course, it is not often that one gets plays as absurd as these. If
it were, the reading of manuscripts would not be so dull and profitless
a task. The ordinary play is notable only for its crudity, its
artificiality, its lack of color, and its hopeless failure to rise
above the conventional and the commonplace. Dramatists follow each
other like sheep, and the smaller the dramatist happens to be the more
closely he follows. Thus it is that whenever somebody produces a piece
with a situation that creates comment, every second manuscript one
reads from that time on contains exactly the same situation. A long
while ago I grew so much interested in the likeness between plot and
plot that I catalogued two hundred plays according to their general
character. The result was as follows:
Dramas in which woman goes to man's
rooms at midnight 37
" in which woman betrays man and
then saves him 19
" in which wronged woman gives evidence
at end of play 6
" in which man unwittingly falls in
love with woman meant for him 9
" in which woman unwittingly falls
in love with man meant for her 3
" in which wealth is unexpectedly
derived from a mine or a patent 22
" built on the question of "love or
duty" 24
" built on the question of the fitness
of a reformed man or woman
to marry 16
" in which man or woman reforms
the person he or she loves 3
Comedies in which husband or wife ends
the philandering of wife or husband
by seeming to condone it 20
Farces based on mistaken identity 31
" built around the necessity of a man
lying to his wife 28
The total of the table is not two hundred, because several of these
plays had none of the features mentioned, while others had more than
one.
Of course, it is well-nigh impossible for any dramatist, no matter how
well-meaning, to devise unparalleled characters, situations and
stories. Just as the fact that there are only so many notes in the
scale has been urged as an excuse for composers whose music is
reminiscent, so I would insist that there are only so many strings in
the heart. There is a limit to the number of situations that can be
brought about in real life, and, of course, there is a much more
definite limit to the number of these situations which have dramatic
value. In certain elemental facts all plays must be alike. For
example, it is inevitable that a large number of plays shall have
what is known as the "dramatic triangle"--which means the conflict of
two men and a woman or of two women and a man. It is inevitable that a
great majority of plays shall deal with that one great elemental
emotion--love. Once, when I was very young indeed, I experimented in
writing a comedy in which nobody was in love. The piece was presented
in Washington, and, to the best of my recollection, it lasted two
consecutive nights. This convinced me that there might be a line
beyond which one could not go in the effort to be unique.
There are a great number of things, however, that are so hackneyed and
conventional that it is no longer possible for an author to attempt
them. I do not think any manager would buy another play in which the
crucial situation was the concealment of the heroine in the apartments
of the hero or the villain. From time immemorial this has been the
stock episode for the third act climax in a four act play, and
audiences have begun to expect it as they expect supper after the
fourth act. Personally, I am free to confess that I should not be
likely to recommend the purchase of any drama in which the conclusion
of the third act did not bring a surprise calculated to make an
audience sit up and take notice. No author of today would dare begin
his work with a conversation between a maid and a butler. Neither
would he care to conceal one of his characters behind a screen or to
conclude his play with the finding of a bundle of papers. The
cigarette is still the hero of the society drama, and it is still true
on the stage that the happy conclusion of the love affair between the
juvenile and the ingenue usually is coincident with the conclusion of
the love affair between the leading man and the leading woman. We
begin to have heroes who are not too angelically good, however, and
villains who have motives more human than the mere desire to be
beastly and draw a hundred and fifty dollars a week for it. Very
slowly and gradually the perfect woman, the high-hatted knave, the
wronged girl, the comic Irishman, the naval lieutenant of comic
opera, the English butler and their associates are passing from our
midst. Peace to their ashes!
Plays have their epochs, just as books do, and there are fashions in
the drama as pronounced as those in dress. Always one successful work
of a particular class brings about a host of imitations, and, for a
time, it seems as though the public would never tire of that
particular kind of entertainment. "The Prisoner of Zenda" was
responsible for a hundred romances laid in mythical kingdoms; "Lady
Windimere's Fan" brought drawing room comedy into vogue; "'Way Down
East" bred a perfect epidemic of pastorals; "Sherlock Holmes" created
a demand for plays concerning criminals. All of these varieties of
entertainment, save possibly the last, have been laid on the shelf,
and we now are going in vigorously for frothy farce and comic opera in
long skirts. The manner in which one author follows the lead of
another, as demonstrated above, extends beyond the selection of such
important things as stories, and reaches even to titles. Ten years
ago we couldn't have a name without the word "of" in it. On the
bill-boards were advertised "The Whitewashing of Julia", "The
Manoeuvres of Jane", "The Superstitions of Sue", "The Stubbornness of
Geraldine" and a score of others. Then somebody christened a charming
sketch "Hop-o'-My-Thumb", and for a while it seemed that we could get
nothing but hyphenated titles, such as "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire" and
"All-of-a-Sudden-Peggy." Now-a-days the vogue seems to be the
combination of an article and a noun--"The Boss", "The Nigger", "The
Gamblers" and "The Concert."
Please do not understand that, in calling attention to these
similarities, I intend to accuse anyone of plagiarism. Deliberate
theft of ideas from contemporary offerings is likely to result in
law-suits, and I don't believe that there are left in the printed
dramas any ideas worth stealing. I used to hear an interesting story
of Paul Potter's writing original plays in the Boston Public Library,
but it seemed to me that much of his work was too good to have been
filched from the old fellows whose publishers bound their vulgarity,
their leaden dialogue and their uningenious situations in yellow
covers. It is very difficult, as I have said, to squeeze new
situations out of a dull world, from the manners and morals of which
about four hundred dramas have been pressed every year during the past
half century. It is especially hard to devise original material in
America, where prudish restrictions hedge us about and anything deep
and vital in life immediately is set down as immoral. American authors
cannot wring novel incidents from the emotions; they must profit by
such circumstances as the invention of wireless telegraphy and the
automobile. The telephone and the motor car are speedily becoming
bulwarks of the drama in the United States!
The possibility of giving subtle and original treatment to familiar
phases of life, together with the attendant possibility of revealing
human nature in the theater, hold forth the chief promise along this
line. Clever twisting and turning will make a new incident from an
old one, as is best demonstrated in what Beaumont and Fletcher did
with Lope de Vega when they adapted "Sancho Ortez" into "The Custom of
the Country", and playwrights are learning to turn little things to
vital account in the construction of their plays. A glance at a
photograph now-a-days is made to convey all what was indicated in a
five-minutes talk between butler and maid twenty years ago.
As to the matter of heart interest, that, after all, is the thing that
counts most, and that is eternal and inexhaustible. Charles Klein,
author of "The Music Master", put this to me neatly not long ago in an
attempt to prove the advantage of the realistic drama over the
romantic. "Supposing a man comes to you", he remarked, "and says that
his wife has just fallen out of a balloon. You're not sorry, because
you can't understand why his wife should have gone up in a balloon.
Let the same man say to you, however, that he is out of a position and
that his family is starving, and see how quickly the tears will come
into your eyes. So far as modern audiences are concerned, the old
duel-fighting, hose-wearing romantic heroes are up in a balloon. We
want sorrows and joys we can comprehend."
It is this creed that makes the new dramatist an entity worth seeking.
If it proves difficult to discover him among the thousands who write
plays, it at least is worth while to cultivate him when he is found
among those who write promising plays. "By their works ye shall know
them" is particularly applicable to the men who will some day succeed
Barrie and Pinero. They will bear watching. If I were a producing
manager I should keep in touch with the men whose first pieces
indicate the possession of ability. I would set them at work, not at
tailoring plays to fit personalities, but at realizing their ideas and
their ideals. Certainly this great country is full of material waiting
for dramatization, and it must be equally true that it is full of
authors capable of accomplishing the task. They will not be the
illiterate glory-hunters who deluge theatrical offices with their
manuscripts, nor will they be the celebrities whose brains have been
pressed dry. It were wise to look for them among the people whose
professions draw them into close touch with the real world and the
theater; among the newspaper men and the enthusiastic play-lovers;
among those whose first and second efforts are now the financial
failures on Broadway.
_THE PERSONALITIES OF OUR PLAYWRIGHTS_
Being an effort to out do Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.
D. Roberts at their own game--which is speaking literally.
Not long ago an intelligent young man walked into a meeting of the
Society of American Dramatists and Composers, at the Hotel Astor, and,
after scanning the faces about him, inquired: "Is this the Cloak and
Suit Manufacturers' Association?"
Don't blame the young man. If tomorrow you undertook on a wager to
tell a prosperous tailor from a celebrated author, your safest plan
would be to select the individual who looked more like a tailor, and
say: "That is the author!" Among persons whose acquaintances do not
figure in the public prints, except as "Old Subscriber" or "Vox
Populi", the playwright is still supposed to be distinguishable by
long, curly hair, a flowing tie, a high hat, and a frock coat, worn
with the right hand inserted in the space between the first and second
buttons.
As a matter of fact, this description fits only the quack doctor and
the vender of patent medicines. There _are_ flowing-tie playwrights,
but generally they belong in the ranks of the ineffectual and the
unproduced. One sees them oftener at studio teas than at "first
nights." In whatever other respects they may differ, our dramatists
are pretty much alike as regards the commonplaceness of their manner
and appearance. Most of them regard the writing of plays as a
business, and go about it as a baker goes about making his loaves or a
plumber about mending a pipe.