it is to be said that it is one of the most charming of the many plays
of its gifted and long-laboring author, Louis N. Parker. It is a
pleasantly old-fashioned, idyllic comedy of the England of Victoria’s
accession, and seems to have disclosed equally Miss Adams’s gifts of
comedy and of pathos;--a play well suited to her middle period.
At this time James M. Barrie was in America. He was planning the
dramatization of his novel _The Little Minister_. He saw Miss Adams as
Dorothy and marked her at once as the woman to play his Lady Babbie.
Mr. Frohman already had half-formed plans for promoting her, and the
opportunity to play _The Little Minister_ came just at the right
moment. Mr. Drew was deprived of his popular leading woman, and on
September 13, 1897, at the Lafayette Square Opera House in Washington
(and two weeks later at the Empire in New York) Maude Adams was
launched upon her career as a “star.” The success of play and player
was immediate and great, for on this occasion began that combination
of dramatist and actress--Barrie and Maude Adams--that has proved so
singularly appealing,--not only in this play, but in _Quality Street_,
in _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_, and in _The Legend of
Leonora_.[204]
For three whole seasons Maude Adams played Lady Babbie, the first
season in New York and then, until the spring of 1900, up and down the
whole country. It earned for her several fortunes. The play is, as Mr.
Winter[205] has said, a “neat but inadequate paraphrase” of the novel,
and the character of Babbie has not the substance and power of the
Babbie of the book. Relieved of the necessity for an emotional power
that is probably beyond her, Miss Adams was left free to delight her
audience with the waywardness and sweetness of the new Babbie of the
play. Miss Adams gave the character a peculiar other-worldly charm that
seemed then to have made its way to the stage for the first time, and
that lingers in the minds of many playgoers as the best remembered
achievement of her career. It is probably true that she had even before
had parts calling for more varied and difficult work, but the popular
success of _The Little Minister_ was one of the extraordinary incidents
in American theatrical annals.[206]
To vary the task of repeating the same rôle months on end, and (perhaps
chiefly) to satisfy her ambitions, Miss Adams essayed, in the Spring of
1899, her first Shakespearean part, Juliet in _Romeo and Juliet_. The
result was anything but a complete success, though her thick-and-thin
admirers professed themselves pleased. William Faversham was Romeo,
and James K. Hackett, Mercutio. Miss Adams as Juliet left much to be
desired. She has a gracious, elfish, quite individual charm; she has
winning humor and a quiet, directly appealing power of pathos; she is
the interpreter _par excellence_ of the delicate, touching whimsies
of Barrie; but she has not, or had not then, tragic power. Juliet,
it need not be said, demands a large share of such power. Young as
Shakespeare represents her to be, she is a creature of glamorous beauty
and consuming passion. Such Miss Adams could not make her. She could
and did make Juliet pleasantly and touchingly girlish, a graceful,
fragile, pathetic figure. But _Romeo and Juliet_ was not an artistic
success (though it was a financial one) and Miss Adams speedily
dropped the part. “I have not done what I intended to do,” she honestly
acknowledged.
But her next part was not, as one might have expected, a return to the
medium of her accepted successes. It was even a step further away.
Bernhardt, in the spring of 1900, had acted the Duke of Reichstadt
in Rostand’s play _L’Aiglon_. Reichstadt was the son of Napoleon the
Great and Marie Louise of Austria. The play tells the story of his
abortive attempt to regain his father’s throne. Miss Adams, a few
months after Bernhardt’s production in Paris, essayed the part in New
York, of course in an English version.[207] Like one part she had
played before, Juliet, and another she was to play later, Chanticler,
Reichstadt was too large and exacting a part for her. Yet by reason
of her own physical characteristics she suggested the weakness and
effeminacy of the young Duke, and in the lighter scenes she was
pleasing and satisfying. In the more serious scenes--and there are two
that require great acting in the tempestuous strain: the Mirror Scene,
in which Reichstadt is shown by Metternich the hopeless weakness of
his character and the desperation of his cause; and the scene on the
battlefield of Wagram, where “the eaglet” is crushed by visions of his
father’s ruthless career,--in these scenes Miss Adams was interesting
and pathetic, but she hardly exhausted the possibilities.[208] The
production of _L’Aiglon_ could not, however, fail to add to her
artistic reputation and to her immense popularity, if that were
possible.
With _Quality Street_, a delightful, simple, sunshiny play by Barrie in
which she was the lovable and thoroughly feminine Phœbe Throssell, and
in the far less attractive play _The Pretty Sister of José_, in which
she was a Spanish girl, “of delicate, winning sensibility,”[209] Miss
Adams returned to the sort of acting which in _The Little Minister_ had
made her name universally known.
Never, however, before or since, has Miss Adams’ popularity risen
to such a pitch as it did upon the production of _Peter Pan_. First
produced in 1905, it ran for three seasons, and when Miss Adams revived
it recently and took it far and wide about the country it proved
as popular as ever. It may be, as Mr. Winter says, “immeasurably
inferior, in fancy and satire, to _Alice in Wonderland_.” But then, Mr.
Winter found it at times puerile and tedious, and could discern nothing
in it but a diversion for children. _That_ it certainly was, but the
children’s ages ran from four to fourscore. It was a matter of common
observation, even in that supposed center of case-hardened worldliness,
New York, that the audiences were largely of grown-ups, and that
stock-brokers, “tired business men,” and others who would flee miles
from the ordinary “children’s play,” came not once, but thrice, a dozen
times, in some cases, to see the triumph of Peter over Captain Hook.
The elfin quality, the gracious charm and warm-hearted humor of Miss
Adams’ _Peter Pan_ may not have been sufficient to make it, as a feat
of acting, her most memorable achievement; but play and player have won
their way into the public’s affections more thoroughly than anything
else she has done--more even than _The Little Minister_.
In another Barrie play, _What Every Woman Knows_--produced after the
comparatively short life of _The Jesters_, a romantic mediæval play
in which she displayed her familiar ability without working any great
advance or change--Miss Adams accomplished what remains as probably
the most noteworthy acting, _as acting_, of her career. She entered
thoroughly into the part of Maggie Wylie--the Scotch woman who, while
regaining, in a novel way, her errant husband, demonstrates again “what
every woman knows,”--the dependence of mere man upon woman. The play
was a delightful instance of Barrie’s gift for dressing human truths in
whimsical fancy; Miss Adams, in the well chosen words of Mr. Winter,
combined “goodness, tenderness, magnanimity, pride, motherhood, and
pity with some little dash of tartness,--and gave a performance which
needed only flexibility and more essential Scotch character to make it
as entirely enjoyable as it was artistically consistent.”[210]
When Maude Adams was announced as Mr. Frohman’s choice for Chanticler
in Rostand’s barnyard drama of that name, there was much plain-spoken
wonder. It was felt by even her most cordial well-wishers that her
ambitions and Mr. Frohman’s indulgence of them could not well go
further. Facetiously expressing this feeling, _Life_ announced that
Mr. Frohman’s next production would be Shakespeare’s tragedy of _King
Lear_, with Maude Adams in the title part. Chanticler demands an actor
of the somewhat florid style, at least an actor skilled in poetic
speech. The “make-up” is as nearly as possible the fac-simile of our
old friend the barnyard rooster, comb, tail feathers, spurs and all.
It can easily be seen that an elocutionist, in such a part, is a
necessity. It was generally said that the single and obvious choice
for Chanticler was Otis Skinner, who would indeed have been ideal.
Still, Miss Adams, somehow, certainly escaped failure. She is fragile
and a woman, not a robust man; but her Chanticler took on, through her
intelligence and sincerity, a share of the impressiveness that the part
needed, though one felt that Miss Adams could have been spending her
ability to better advantage. The apparent perversity that has taken
a sweetly feminine, very American woman, of limited powers but sure
ability to delight within her proper, modern field, and made her first
a heroine of Shakespearean tragedy, then a decadent, disease-stricken
youth, then a young mediæval nobleman in masquerade, and later the
embodiment, several times life size, of a rooster, has been one of
the strange phenomena of the recent American stage. The extenuating
circumstances are first that managers are always more or less at a loss
for good plays, particularly for a strongly individualized actress; and
further that Miss Adams, greatly to her credit, did nothing without
casting over it at least the glamour of a fine intelligence and an
admirable ambition.
A marvelous exhibition of what Miss Adams and Mr. Frohman, when
they put their heads together, could do in the way of contrast to
Phœbe Throssell and Maggie Wylie, was the production for a single
performance in the great Stadium at Harvard, one night in June, 1909,
of Schiller’s _Maid of Orleans_. Miss Adams had played _Twelfth Night_
in Sanders Theatre one evening a year before. The _Maid of Orleans_
was an outgrowth of the earlier performance and was undertaken at
the suggestion of the German department of Harvard. That there were
one hundred and fifty mounted knights in full armor, one thousand
men-at-arms, two hundred citizens, one hundred and fifty women and
children, one hundred and twenty musicians, and ninety singers,
besides sixty speaking parts, gives some idea of the magnitude of
this unique presentation. In the coronation scene more than fifteen
hundred persons were on the improvised Stadium stage. The cost of
this single evening’s performance, with its specially constructed
scenery and long preparation, was tremendous. And Maude Adams planned
and carried through the entire proceeding. “This,” said one perhaps
over-enthusiastic spectator, “is the biggest thing ever undertaken by
any woman, except the one she is representing.” And through it all Miss
Adams was playing the Maid, even to leading, on a great white charger,
the troops of France in the battle charge. The spectacular effects--the
storm scene, the battle scene, the scene of the coronation--were vastly
impressive, though the petite figure and delicate art of the principal
actress were often lost in the largeness of her surroundings.
Maude Adams and James M. Barrie seem to have been, artistically, born
for each other. At any rate, it is in his plays--_The Little Minister_,
_Quality Street_, _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_,--that she
has deservedly won her fame. The latest in the list is _The Legend
of Leonora_, in which she has forsaken Chanticler’s feathers and
Peter Pan’s breeches once more to don petticoats. It brings Miss
Adams back to a doting public in a part that gives rein to her old
time ability as a light _comédienne_. That a portion of this public
is more or less shocked to see its beloved Maude Adams playing the
part of a murderess--even though Leonora and her crime are amiable
unrealities--indicates the strongly personal element in the popularity
of the actress.[211]
This personal element has been introduced into the Maude Adams worship
solely across the footlights. That is to say, the public knows next to
nothing of her as a human being except as her personality is poured
into and out of her work. Out of a native shyness as well as out of
a desire to avoid publicity except as an actress, she carries her
self-effacement off the stage to the last degree. She is never met at
social gatherings, she has never addressed meetings or written magazine
articles; she is seldom seen on the streets or driving in the park,
and the occasions on which she has, in many years, gone to any theatre
as one of the audience could be numbered on one’s fingers. She dresses
with the utmost quietness and with small regard to current styles.
But her shrinking from “the general” is, one need hardly say, without
trace of a sour attitude toward the world. She is said to be chary of
personal friendships, but those who know her best speak glowingly of
her bountiful kindness. She has, of course, made a great deal of money.
A considerable share of it has gone, unostentatiously, to the relief of
the needy. She is said to have a list of pensioners:--old, destitute
players, or acquaintances of her early life.[212]
Miss Adams has always taken a keen interest in the mechanical side
of the theatre. More than most actresses she knows the intricacies
and the artistry of scenery and lighting, and has much to say of them
when she is to appear in a new part. She has, indeed, her own office
in the Empire Theatre building and there conducts the many details
of organizing a production. In adoring a sweet and fragile woman her
admirers are likely to forget that Maude Adams is a thoroughly trained
woman of the theatre, of tried executive ability.
The sweetness and simplicity of Maude Adams herself and of her acting
comes in part, one is tempted to think, from her very real love of
nature. She has a New York home--and a quiet retreat it is--but her
real abiding place, when her work permits, is at Sandygarth Farm on
Long Island, where she owns what may fairly be called an estate. She
has there her stables, her kennels, her fields under cultivation, her
woods; and she knows the details of farming only less well than the
secrets of stagecraft. She has, too, a bungalow in the Catskills.
She is fond of riding and of long walks in the country. Books form
an inevitable furnishing in all three houses. She has given herself
a good schooling in French, and she is on more than speaking terms
with the philosophers and poets. She likes foreign travel, and has
made several trips to Europe and the near East. She plays well the
piano and the harp and when opportunity offers she goes to symphony
concerts. Altogether she is a serious-minded devotee of the essential,
the beautiful and the simple. She is of course aware of her own great
popularity. But the feeling it inspires in her is said by her friends
to be one of humility and wonder. And whatever her rank as an artist,
she has sent across the footlights her simplicity, her sense of
sweetness and light, to be a beneficent influence. Her picture, cut
from a magazine and pinned to the wall of a ranch house in the far
West, or of a tenement in the slums of an Eastern city, is a symbol of
something good added to American life.
SOME AMERICAN ACTRESSES OF TODAY
“There is no great acting now,” the veteran theatregoer will tell you.
“The day of the stars has passed.” He who remembers vividly Charlotte
Cushman, Edwin Booth and Madame Janauschek feels that times have
changed indeed. And he is quite right. But sometimes he is sure, with
Mr. Winter, that they have changed altogether for the worse. And there
he is wrong. If it seems true that with the passing from our stage
of Madame Modjeska, Miss Rehan and Miss Marlowe the robes of high
priestess of our stage, to whom all the people delight to burn incense,
grace alone the slender form of Miss Maude Adams, that fact does not
necessarily argue a lack of genius in the artists that remain. We are,
on the whole fortunately, abolishing the rank of high priestess.
All the women, with one or two exceptions, who are the subjects of the
preceding chapters have been out-and-out exponents of the star system.
It is an undesirable system, which is not essential to the theatre
and which is only a passing phase, though it has lasted a matter of
centuries, and though we owe to it many names that make illustrious the
annals of the drama. It is undesirable because it subordinates the
play, which first and last should be “the thing,” to the interpreter
of the play, because it exercises a vicious influence on playwrights
who write to clothe personalities rather than their own ideas, and an
equally vicious influence on actors who think of plays primarily as
opportunities for histrionic exploits. “But,” some one says, “did not
Shakespeare himself write plays that are obviously for stars?” Well,
he certainly wrote plays upon which starship has battened. Like any
other good plays, however, Shakespeare’s plays are even better when
the starship, as such, is left out, as any one will testify who has
seen them acted without the extraneous element that is symbolized by
enormous type on the play-bill.
To think of the theatre first of all in terms of actors and actresses
is, however, natural enough. It is a popular way of looking at the
theatre, and it would be idle to expect its total disappearance. And
it would be ungrateful. Actors and actresses are public servants and
benefactors, to whom recognition and praise are due. But recognition
is one thing; starship, with all its adulations,--Bernhardtism,--is
another. And there are good reasons for thinking that other aspects of
the theatre are also becoming popular.
The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid
development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two
broad phenomena: first, the growing public sense of the drama as an
art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and,
secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up
the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to
liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience
and play. As an incident in that liberation, the star system is on its
way, not to destruction, for the actor of genius will always remain a
compelling figure, but at least to broad modification. Starless casts
and repertory companies have been plentiful enough to indicate the
beginnings of a strong, new current.
Again, playwriting and acting, hand in hand, have become more
realistic, more subtle, more psychological; there are far fewer
opportunities for broad effects than in the old days, there is far less
of the intense concentration of playwright and audience on a single
character and a single actor or actress. It is probable that even
if a Bernhardt or a Duse or a Cushman should spring up in our midst
she would find effective physical and psychological barriers to an
ascension to starship as those illustrious women have known it.
Very briefly indicated, these are some of the phases of the phenomenon
that may easily be mistaken by the cherisher of traditions as the
passing of first-rate acting. Though it is different in tone and
method, and leads less often to extreme heights of public notice,
acting to-day succeeds as well in its adaptation to the newer ideal of
the primacy of the play as did the older school in the exaltation of
the actor.
It is a rather odd circumstance that while the English stage is rich
in its actors and comparatively scantily supplied with excellent
actresses, the reverse is true in America, so far as concerns the
younger generation. Our civilization seems to breed actresses thickly
at home, and to entice them from abroad. When Edward Sothern, Otis
Skinner, David Warfield, Henry Miller, Robert Mantell, John Drew,
William Gillette and even Mr. Hackett, Mr. Faversham and Mr. Daly shall
have retired from the stage, who is to help Ernest Glendinning and
the imported Mr. Lou-Tellegen maintain the honors of their sex? But
when Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams shall have followed Julia Marlowe into
retirement, there still will be, even if Ethel Barrymore and Margaret
Anglin should regrettably have left the stage, a considerable group of
still younger actresses, none of whom may ever achieve stardom as it
was once practiced, but each of whom fits with admirable ability into
the newer order of things.
Better than almost any one else, Miss Barrymore represents the dangers
of the star system. The daughter of one of America’s best actors,
Maurice Barrymore,[213] and the niece of another, John Drew, she was a
marked victim from the beginning. Charles Frohman made her a star in
1900, when she was twenty-one. She had had a scant half dozen years
of training in her uncle’s company in America and in Henry Irving’s
company in England, and had not played more than a dozen parts in all.
She was made a star simply on the strength of a pleasing personality,
intelligence, a pretty face, and a working grasp of stage behavior.
During the next decade, playing in pieces like _Captain Jinks of the
Horse Marines_, _Cousin Kate_, and _Sunday_, she attracted and held
a loyal public that liked to see her personality exploited in those
comparatively insignificant plays, just as adoring theatregoers throng
today to see Billie Burke and Marie Doro, whatever the slenderness and
frothiness of the play. But let Miss Barrymore, in an effort to be a
real actress, try her hand at submerging herself in an un-Barrymorelike
character, in a play of any serious interest, and that adoring public
was bewildered and disappointed and remained away from the theatre.
Such are the fruits of thinking of the theatre in terms of the actor.
But Miss Barrymore had it in her to be a real actress. Once in a
while, prompted by her ambition, she would do something that her fond
followers would think was queer. Thus, during this decade, from 1900
to 1910, in the midst of her prosperous playing of popular pieces, she
acted at one time or another _Carrots_, a one-act play from the French
in which she gave a pathetic picture of the boy-hero; then, at a single
plunge, Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_; then _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, a play
that Barrie wrote for Ellen Terry, and in which Miss Barrymore, to the
consternation of her peculiar public, appeared as a gray-haired matron;
and finally _The Silver Box_, an unrelievedly serious and honest play
by Galsworthy, in which she descended to the depths by acting an
ordinary scrub-woman.
Not all of these did Miss Barrymore play signally well; her starship,
limiting her to a play or two per year, had simply not afforded her the
training to become the actress she has since shown herself to be. But
in these brief experiments at least she was feeling her way out of the
entanglements of theatrical pettiness.
When Miss Barrymore, in January, 1910, appeared in Pinero’s
_Mid-Channel_, she had married and become a mother. Whether the
admirers of her former girlish charm and slenderness liked it or
not, she was now inevitably a deeper-natured and more mature woman
and, consequently, capable of deeper and better acting. The fact was
speedily proved in _Mid-Channel_. The play is a grim tragedy of English
middle-class life, in which a fine-natured wife, after a gradual course
of unhappy, deteriorating life with a selfish and sensual husband, ends
her problems with suicide;--surely not one of the pretty Barrymore
parts. “There will be hosts of the ‘Barrymore public,’ no doubt, who
will feel that in _Mid-Channel_ they cannot laugh with her,” wrote
Walter Prichard Eaton. “But to some more thoughtful men and women it
is a source of rare satisfaction that at last the promise of that
lovely voice and expressive face has been fulfilled, and you can weep
with her, suffer with her, understand through the spell of her acting
a little better the sorrows and perplexities of our frail humanity.
In short, Miss Barrymore has become an actress.... Her many admirers,
gathered in force, who evidently knew more about her than they cared
about Pinero, were disposed to laugh in the first act during the scenes
of her bickerings. But never after that did she allow them to suppose
for an instant that they were not watching a serious and passionate
study of a woman’s tragedy.”