contains the speeches and "business" of the actor for whom it is
intended, with "cues", or the last few words of each speech preceding
his, so that he may know when to speak. An extract from the "part" of
the Queen in "Hamlet" (Act III; Scene I) would look something like
this:
(You enter L.3.E.)
Did he receive you well?
----free in his reply.
Did you assay him to any pastime?
----he suffers for.
I shall obey you. Etc.
The director shows the actor where he shall stand, and where go, at
every speech, and the stage manager notes on the manuscript such
"business" as is not already written in it. Also, he sets down
memoranda for the raising and "dimming" of lights, the ringing of
bells, and other things to be done "off stage."
After a couple of days' rehearsal the players may be told that they
must have the lines of the first act committed to memory within a
certain time. "Letter perfect on Thursday!" says the director. "Don't
forget; I want to hear every 'if, 'and', and 'but' spoken on
Thursday!"
So, act by act, the piece is learned, and, within a week, "parts" are
put away, and the real work of rehearsal begins. By this time, the
"roughing out" of the production has been done, positions have been
taught, and the director begins devoting himself to details.
Throughout the first fortnight he interrupts frequently; compels the
people to go back a dozen times over this scene or that; halts, thinks
out trifles, suggests and experiments. When the rehearsals are
two-thirds done, however, he and the author break in less and less
often. They sit, notebooks in hand, jotting down their observations,
which are read aloud to the company at the end of each act.
Meanwhile, the director has attended to several important matters with
which the cast has no immediate concern. He has made out a list of
"properties", or small articles to be handled in the performance, and
has given it to the manager. This list requires care. For example, if
matches are needed in the play, it must be ascertained what kind of
matches were used at that period, and sulphur, parlor, or "safety"
matches must be specified. The manager must also be given lists of
furniture and draperies. Later on, a table of "music cues" must be
made out for the orchestra, and one of "light cues" for the
electrician. The play must be timed, so that it may be known to a
minute at what hour the curtain will rise and fall on every act.
Generally, a page of typewritten manuscript will occupy a minute, but
guess work on this point does not suffice for the director. The
players begin to consult him about their costumes, too, and he must
take into account the blending of colors, the fashions of the period,
and the personal characteristics likely to manifest themselves in
attire.
I wish I could make you see a theater during the progress of a
rehearsal. The great auditorium is dark and vacant, but for two or
three cleaners, who may be sweeping and dusting. White cloths cover
the seats, and hang over the facades of the boxes. Through the center
of the stage, just behind the footlights, a gas pipe rears itself to a
height of five or six feet, and a single jet burns at the end of it.
Close beside this pipe is the table I have mentioned, where, with
their backs to the auditorium, sit three very busy, very attentive
gentlemen. Farther on the stage, which is bare except for a couple of
tables and a few chairs, stand two or three actors, attired in street
dress, talking in a fashion utterly out of keeping with their
every-day appearance. And on all sides are little groups of men and
women, who pay no attention to the people in the scene and to whom the
people in the scene pay no attention, who laugh and chat in subdued
tones until some "cue" brings them into the action.
One day a notice appears on the call board. The company will leave
from the Grand Central Station the next morning at 7:20 o'clock. The
destination may be Syracuse, N. Y. The hotels in that city are
so-and-so. The theater is the New Wieting. There will be a dress
rehearsal there tomorrow night at 8. "Everybody will please be made up
half an hour earlier."
[Illustration: "_This is the first time the director has seen them
'made up' and he is likely to have many suggestions_"]
The dress rehearsal is the crowning ordeal in the business of
producing plays. It is the summing up of everything that has gone on
before; the concentration into one evening of all the work and nervous
strain of the past month. It is safe to say that in no other
profession is so much labor and agony crowded into a single effort.
Very often dress rehearsals last from eight o'clock at night until
eight the next morning. Sometimes they last longer. The dress
rehearsal of "The Burgomaster", at the Manhattan Theater, New York,
began at noon on Sunday and continued, without intermission, until
eleven o'clock Monday. Frequently, coffee and sandwiches are served in
one of the dressing rooms, or on the stage, and the tired players
snatch a bite or two between scenes.
The director has been in the theatre all the afternoon, superintending
the setting of scenes and the "dressing" of the stage, which means
the placing of furniture and the hanging of curtains. Half an hour
before the rehearsal begins, the members of the company come from
their rooms, one by one, for an inspection of costumes. This is the
first time the director has seen them "made up", and he is likely to
have many suggestions. This wig isn't gray enough, that beard is too
straggling, the dress over there isn't in character. Back go the
actors to remedy these defects, and after a time the rehearsal is
started.
Dress rehearsals invariably are prefaced by the managerial
announcement that there will be no interruptions, but I have never
seen an uninterrupted dress rehearsal. The leading man stops in the
middle of a love scene to inquire what he shall do with his bouquet,
or the leading woman to complain that the property man hasn't placed a
bundle of letters where it ought to be. I remember that, when we came
to the final rehearsal of "The Little Gray Lady", the manager, Maurice
Campbell, finished his remarks about interruptions, and called upon
the orchestra to begin the overture. The orchestra promptly struck
up "The Dead March from Saul", and the forbidden interruption came
on the spot.
[Illustration: "_The interruption came on the spot_"]
A dress rehearsal is supposed to be an ordinary performance without an
audience. But it isn't. There is no excitement, no enthusiasm, no
inspiration. Speeches fall flat, dialogue seems inordinately long and
wearisome, bits of "business" that have appeared all right before look
wholly different in changed surroundings. The actors, finding
themselves for the first time in the setting to be used, are utterly
lost. By-play with small articles, rehearsed twenty times, is
blundered over when the player finds the "prop" actually in his hands.
To observe the most experienced actor, and man of the world, handle a
tea cup or a card case at a dress rehearsal you would swear that he
had never seen such a thing before in his life.
And, O, the wickedness of inanimate things--doors that will not shut,
matches that cannot be lit, table drawers that positively refuse to
open! Whenever something of this sort goes wrong, the carpenter or the
property man has to be called upon, and the scene stops, to be
resumed later with a flatness commensurate with the length of the
halt. Above all other sounds rings the clarion voice of the director,
shouting to electricians, stage hands, actors. Everybody makes notes,
to be quietly gone over with the company on the morrow, just before
the actual performance.
At last, when the gray dawn is peeping in at the windows, when
everyone concerned has reached the ultimate stage of exhaustion, the
rehearsal is dismissed. The director makes a few remarks--sufficient
censure to prevent over-confidence, mixed with enough hope to give
courage. "Pretty bad", he says, "but I look for you to pull up
tonight. We'll get together for a little chat at four o'clock in the
smoking room of the theater."
Thus ends the period of rehearsal--a period of hard work, trials,
tribulations, constant nervous strain. And it may all go for nothing.
In three short hours the labor of years on the part of the author, of
months on the part of the manager, of weeks on the part of the
players, may be proved utterly worthless and without result. This,
however, depends upon the public; those concerned have done all they
know, all that can be done, not by random and haphazard work; but by
skillful following of what is at once an exact science and a variable
art. The philosophic author shrugs his shoulders as he leaves the
theater.
[Illustration: "_Matches that cannot be lit_"]
"Well?" inquires the stage director.
"Well", he replies. "We've done our best. It's on the knees of the
gods."
_THE ART OF "GETTING IT OVER"_
Being the sort of title to suggest a treatise on suicide,
whereas, in point of fact, this chapter merely confides all the
author does not know about acting.
Even in a dictionary of slang, inquisitive reader, you will not find
the phrase, "getting it over." "Art has its own language," and the
language of dramatic art sometimes is fearful and wonderful to
contemplate. In this particular idiom, "it" stands for an impression
or expression, and the precise boundary that the impression or
expression "gets over" is the footlights. Do I make myself clear? As
to the art of "getting it over," that is a thing about which no two
people are likely to agree. When, on the first night of F. Ziegfeld's
"Follies of 1910," a lady named Lillian Lorraine, ensconced in a swing
and two gorgeous silk stockings, was projected into the tobacco smoke
above the third row of orchestra seats, a great many star-gazers
united in the idea that her manager had solved the problem.
[Illustration: "_A lady, ensconced in a swing and two gorgeous silk
stockings, was projected above the third row of orchestra seats_"]
Paul Potter's comedy, "The Honor of the Family," was a melancholy
failure at 8.40 o'clock on the evening of its premiere in the Hudson
Theater. At 8.42 Otis Skinner, in the character of Colonel Philippe
Bridau, his aggressive high hat tilted at an insolent angle, his
arrogant cane poking defiance, had walked past a window in the flat,
and the piece was a success. Without speaking a word, without doing
the least thing pertinent to the play, Mr. Skinner had reached out
into the auditorium and gripped the interest of sixteen hundred bored
spectators. This is so fine a demonstration of the thesis that my
article really should be advertised as "with an illustration by Otis
Skinner."
"In that instant," the rescuer said afterward, "I knew I had them."
Any actor would have known. "Getting it over," vague as the phrase may
be to a layman, is almost a physical experience to the man or woman
who accomplishes it. The thought sent out seems as material a thing
as a handball, "and," once remarked Richard Mansfield, "I can see it
go smashing past the footlights and into the brains of my auditors, or
striking an invisible wall across the proscenium arch and bouncing
back to the stage."
The ability to send the thought smashing is surprisingly separate from
the art of acting. Many schooled and skilled performers, whose names
are omitted from this chronicle because I don't want to swell the
waiting list of my enemies, have never got into an auditorium without
coming through the door back of the boxes. Knowledge may be power, but
it isn't propulsion. Nothing is more brainless than a mustard plaster,
yet it draws. George W. Lewes wrote several illuminative works on
histrionism, and we have the word of A. B. Walkley that his Shylock
made tender-hearted persons glad that Shakespeare died in the
seventeenth century.
On the other hand, there are mediocre mimes who possess the faculty of
establishing immediate communication with an audience. All of us
have applauded the chorus girl who, while endeavoring conscientiously
to put her best foot forward at the exact moment and in the precise
manner that thirty other best feet advanced, has scored a distinct
individual success. A young woman did that on the first night of Peter
Dailey's "The Press Agent" at the Hackett. She was fined $5 for it,
but another chorister, whose name is Elsie Ferguson and who attracted
attention in "The Girl From Kay's," is starring this year under
direction of Henry B. Harris.
[Illustration: "_The thought sent out seems as material a thing as a
handball. Sometimes, I can see it striking an invisible wall and
bouncing back to the stage_"]
Call it art, truth, intelligence, personality, magnetism, telepathy,
hypnotism--Edwin Stevens, in a recent interview, called it
hypnotism--or the _wanderlust_ of a personally-conducted aura, the
fact remains that there is a something by which some actors, without
visible effort, convey a distinct and emphatic impression. We have
seen John Drew step upon the stage, and, even while the applause
lingered over his entrance, shed a sense of elegance, manner and
mastery. We have responded to the charm of John Barrymore and A. E.
Matthews before they opened their mouths to speak. We have absorbed
the radiance of May Irwin's good humor, we have felt unbidden the
piquancy of Marie Tempest, we have laughed at a look from Bert
Williams, and we have been awed when William Gillette, walking on as
though there was nothing in the wind, has portentously and with
sinister purpose flicked the ashes from the tip of his cigar.
No, friends and fellow dramatic critics, this is not acting. The art
and experience of acting may go into it, but acting can not be held to
account for what happens before a man begins to act. The curtain
rising on the second act of "Such a Little Queen" discloses two girls,
a telephone operator and a stenographer, chatting obliviously while a
clerk, at the other end of the office, robs the mail. It is important
that the robbery should register, else much that follows can not be
understood. For a long time, when we were rehearsing, it seemed
impossible to get this theft over the footlights. The girls were
pretty, their dialogue was breezy, and, for catching the mind, a word
in the mouth is worth two conveyed by pantomime. Our clerk, a capable
enough young fellow, simply could not get the attention of the
audience. After he had failed to do so at several trial performances,
Frank Keenan, who was staging the play, mounted the rostrum and took
his place. Mr. Keenan did exactly what had been done by his
predecessor. His movements, like the other man's, were according to
the book; his facial expression was the same, and, of course, he did
not speak. But he held us--Heavens, how he held us! Every eye was on
him the instant the curtain lifted, and, for all the notice they got,
the girls might as well have been painted on the proscenium arch. Even
after that, the original couldn't do it. While he was robbing the
mails, we had to rob the females of every distracting line of
dialogue. Wherever Frank Keenan sits is the center of the stage.
[Illustration: "_William Gillette portentously flicked the ashes from
his cigar_"]
If you ask me--and we'll assume that you _have_ asked me--what is
responsible for this sort of an achievement, I shall answer "self." I
don't mean personality. I mean that, whether he wishes it or not, what
"gets over" isn't so often what a man thinks or desires, but what he
_is_. The same thing is true of painters and sculptors and
novelists--"For," said Walter Bagehot, "we know that authors don't
keep tame steam engines to write their books"--and how much more
likely is it to be true of the artist who is himself the expression of
his art. In the footlight trough of a burlesque theater in the Bowery,
invisible to the audience but staring the performers in the face, is
the legend: "Smile, ladies, smile!" Yet these ladies, thus,
perpetually reminded, never spread the contagion of merriment and good
humor for which a Puritan community would have quarantined Blanche
Ring. Don't tell me Miss Ring is an artist. She isn't, but she's
jolly!
The board of governors, or the house committee, or whatever it is that
directs the destinies of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau isn't far
wrong, if, as is reported, it insists upon purity in its Madonna and
beneficence in its Man of Sorrows. Imagine a woman of notoriously evil
life, or even of evil life that wasn't notorious, impersonating Sister
Beatrice in the marvelous miracle play of Maeterlinck's. A gentleman
who had driven four wives--tandem--to death or the divorce court would
have been an offense as Manson in "The Servant in the House." Mr.
Forbes-Robertson is an admirable artist, but it was his spirituality,
his asceticism that "got over" in his delightful portrayal of The
"Third Floor Back". Certainly, it isn't the frankness of lines, verbal
or anatomical, that makes the difference between a musical comedy and
a salacious "girl show." It's the intention; the character of producer
and produced.
"Robert Loraine isn't a good actor," William A. Brady said to me once,
"but he's sure to be a popular star, because of the vigor, the
virility, the fresh young manhood, the breath of outdoors that he
sends over the footlights." Consider the lilies in the cheeks of
Billie Burke, and then, if you can tear yourself away from that
floricultural exhibition, consider the box-office value of the youth
that spills itself from the lips of Wallace Eddinger and Douglas
Fairbanks. All the genius of Mrs. Fiske couldn't make an audience
believe in her motherhood in "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch"--"I wouldn't
trust her with a baby of mine," whispered a woman in the first-night
audience at the Manhattan--but how we felt the maternalism of Jennie
Eustace in "The Witching Hour," and, in another way, of Jessie
Millward in "The Hypocrites." Hedwig Reicher is a capital actress, but
she is also a self-reliant woman, and her skill couldn't win sympathy
for her supposed helplessness in "The Next of Kin."
Two years ago I was trying terribly to make prospective audiences
sense the pitiful plight of poor little Anna Victoria in "Such a
Little Queen." I wrote a dozen lines as to the discomfort of
starvation, the inconvenience of being put into the street. They were
things that I thought, and then I remembered that, when I came to New
York with nothing but my "cheek" a woman might say under the
circumstances, I and two dollars in money, I used to look out of the
windows--the window--of my top-story room and think: "In all this
great city there isn't a human being who cares whether I live or die."
These very words I put into the mouth of Anna Victoria, and, of all my
fine speeches, that was the only one that really "got over."
It "got over" because it was true, and because, whatever else truth
may be--has any one ever satisfactorily answered Pontius Pilate?--it
is the best bullet one can shoot across the footlights. Vicarious
experience sometimes does the trick, but only for persons of highly
developed mimetic faculty. I remember a woman in a play who was
supposed to receive her death blow with an "Oh, my God!" She was
particularly requested not to scream it, or to groan it, or to do
anything else conventional with it. It was to be a helpless "Oh, my
God!", a hopeless "Oh, my God!", an "Oh, my God!" that sounded like
the thud of a hammer at the heart. One night she got the tone. "How?"
we asked. "I heard a woman say it in the street. An ambulance surgeon
had told her her baby was dead."
The first principle of "getting it over," then, is being, feeling,
believing. It is a principle that draws interest. Believing is very
important. Do you think John Mason could have held his audience
through the episode under the electrolier in "The Witching Hour" if he
hadn't believed in it? I don't. Perriton Carlyle, in "The Little Gray
Lady," made a mistake. It was a bad mistake, composed chiefly of a
hundred dollars that didn't belong to him. I never knew any one in my
life who hadn't stolen something sometime, and many of my friends are
pretty respectable now. I believed that Carlyle's foot had slipped,
and that, in spite of the accident, he might walk straight the rest of
his days. I couldn't get an actor to believe it. Edgar Selwyn didn't,
and Eugene Ormonde didn't, and, while they played the part, nobody
did. John Albaugh, Jr., an actor inferior to both of them, felt sure
of the inherent goodness of Carlyle, and so made possible the success
of a piece that could not have succeeded without universal sympathy
for its hero.
Well, we've ridden a long way astride of a hobby. Let's get back, and
admit that we like sugar on our strawberries, which is to say art with
our nature. For, after all, a generous admixture of skill is required
in the expression of instinct, just as the peach-bloomiest complexion,
displayed in the high light of the theater, must have rouge upon it to
seem what it really is. Every stage manager knows the genuine society
girl who is engaged to lend verisimilitude to a drawing-room drama,
and who, at rehearsals, regards her teacup as though it were some
strange and savage animal.
Edwin Booth's Othello was the triumph of an artist. He made audiences
forget that his embodiment of the Moor was a thin-chested, undersized
student of sensitive face and dreamy eyes. Charles Kean's first
appearance in London was as Macbeth, and his Lady Macbeth, a great
woman in both senses of the word, refused to play opposite a leading
man who "looked like a half-grown boy." Afterwards, she swore that he
grew during the performance. Salvini drawing tears from an audience
ignorant of his tongue by counting from one to an hundred; Bernhardt
scolding an actor in the death tones of Camille; Margaret Anglin
repeating "Poor little ice-cream soda" until her hearers broke down
sobbing--these are examples of pure artistry, of "getting over"
impressions without even a thought behind them. No one who knows the
first thing about the theater can underrate, be it never so slightly,
the value of training, of experience; the effectiveness of
carefully-thought-out "business", of inflection, of nuance, of pitch,
of rhythm, of all the things that require years of study, labor, and
perseverance.
Tully Marshall, whose Hannock in "The City" was the finest, and seemed
the most inspired, acting of last season, tells me that he worked
out, almost mechanically, every thrill in his big scene at the end of
Act III. Mr. Marshall made so convincing the degeneracy, the
besottedness of the character that I have heard laymen insist he must
be a drug fiend. Yet this actor knows exactly how he produced his
effects. Ethel Barrymore, on the other hand, knew only that she had
striven for years, and had never quite felt herself "go smashing past
the footlights and into the brains of her auditors."
[Illustration: "_Lady Macbeth swore that he grew during the
performance_"]
Then, on the first night in New York of John Galsworthy's "The Silver
Box," when, as Mrs. Jones, charwoman, she stepped down from the
witness stand, silent, but thinking with all the force that was in her
of the wretched, squalid home to which she was returning alone, and
the curtain fell between her and the vast stillness of the awed
audience, she knew that at last she had "got it over."
"And, oh!" says Ethel Barrymore, "I found the knowledge sweet."
_SOMETHING ABOUT "FIRST NIGHTS"_
Wherein is shown that the opening of a new play is more
hazardous than the opening of a jackpot, and that theatrical
production is a game of chance in comparison with which
roulette and rouge-et-noir are as tiddledewinks or old maid.
While the curtain was rising and falling after the third act of "Seven
Days", then being given its initial performance in New York at the
Astor Theater, a woman behind me remarked: "I'll bet Hopwood is the
happiest man in town at this moment!"