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.
[Illustration: "_The Thalia's stage has supported nearly all the great
actors of an earlier time_"]
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!"
[Illustration: "_A play censor with a club_"]
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.
[Illustration: "_All reputable scoundrels do their killing by
machinery_"]
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.
[Illustration: "_Comstockians wear blinders that shut from their view
everything East and West of Broadway_"]
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:
[Illustration: "_The peculiarities of royal love-making_"]
_Lord Dash_: Good afternoon! Rippin' weather, isn't it? (Bus. of
stroking mustache.) I've a bit of disagreeable news for you.
_Lady Blank_: Indeed? Will you have a cup of tea, Lord Dash? What is
it?
_Lord Dash_: No, thank you; I never take tea. Your eldest son, havin'
been detected in an act of forgery, has just blown out his bally
brains.
_Lady Blank_: Poor lad! He was always impulsive! I hope he isn't
seriously hurt, Lord Dash? Dead? Ah! Now you really must let me pour
you a cup of tea.