=The Play=
If it be true that the future is revealed in the past, then should
there be something in the dramatic season which is dead to indicate
the character of the season not yet born. By the straws of public
approval is the course of the dramatic current determined by those
master mariners of the stage, the managers of theatres. The late
season has left no great store of such buoys to mark the fair channel
to success. Of such as there are, the purport is not altogether
convincing.
To record that "Du Barry" and "Beauty and the Beast" are notable
successes is but to record that the public, as ever, is attracted by
display of rich vestments and spectacular effect. Such straws indicate
nothing more than that a Circus or a Wild West Show will seduce to
Madison Square Garden an audience that would fill a theatre for a
month.
Mr. Hawtrey's triumph at the Garrick Theatre is as little of a guide
to popular opinion as was Anna Held's or Weber and Fields'. No
manager in his senses would suggest that because Mr. Hawtrey
succeeded with "A Message from Mars," the public are prepared to
support a series of like Christmas ghost stories. It was the novelty
that took, and the personality of a refreshingly non-American actor.
For myself I would seek the trend of public opinion in a very
different group of plays; in a batch that did not chronicle one single
great success, but each of which received a fair meed of popular
support. I refer to such plays as "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," "A
Modern Magdalen," and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." In such plays lies
the modern tragedy. They are addressed to the times, actual,
intelligible.
But such as held the New York stage in the past season were timorously
constructed, bowdlerized by stage managers and, for the most part,
poorly acted. Two of the three I have indicated are plays many seasons
old. The greatest of these is "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," interpreted
for us by the greatest actress who ever essayed the part. It indicated
a development I believe to be still in its infancy--a development that
was arrested before it had been weaned from its first timid suckling.
The public does not desire the problem play. It demands a play that
will end with a curtain definite, convincing. But in the problem plays
of the past it finds the material it fain would see applied to a
bolder, unequivocal purpose. In the eight years that have elapsed
since the production of Pinero's "Tanqueray," the public's stomach has
been strengthened. It is able to digest tragedies in drawing rooms. It
no longer requires peptonized drama. The playgoer no longer demands
whatever of primal passion is presented to him to be dressed in
doublet and hose. He can accept plain truths in the speech of the day,
villains and heroines in the costume of the clubs and Fifth Avenue.
The great play of the future must be a play of the times, must deal
with the real things of life, must balk at no expression of modern
tendencies, must reveal the skeleton in the twentieth century
cupboard.
The days of the historical romance are happily ended. Such milk and
water diet is food not fit for men. The new dramatist must provide us
with strong meat, properly served by players of intelligence and
insight, if dramatic art is to be rescued from the slough into which
it has so miserably sunk. The question is: Can America produce a
writer of sufficient originality, a manager of sufficient courage, an
actor of sufficient understanding to give the public what it asks?
If such there be, their names are not Clyde Fitch or David Belasco,
Charles Frohman or Daniel Frohman, Richard Mansfield or Amelia
Bingham.