The Footlights Fore And Aft Part 13

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 cla.s.s of productions. The New Star, alone among buildings of its cla.s.s, 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 ma.n.u.script. 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, ent.i.tled "Lured From Home."

The audiences at the Thalia are composed princ.i.p.ally of peddlers, 'longsh.o.r.emen 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 cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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 a.s.siduously before the play begins and eat industriously throughout the intermissions.

Melodrama seems to affect the American appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sembly 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s must know by heart every melodramatic theme in existence, together with its incidents and its outcome. Undivided in their approval of the n.o.ble and their disapproval of the ign.o.ble, 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 gla.s.s offered him. "Zash right! Don't you tush it!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt-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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 cra.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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 t.i.tles 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 princ.i.p.al figure in the play was Doctor Sakea, whose profession was Mrs. Warren's and whose a.s.sistants 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 princ.i.p.al situation was the auctioning of a number of half-dressed women to the highest bidder. For this scene a crowd of b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 coa.r.s.e 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 inst.i.tution 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 gla.s.s, 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", "n.o.body'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 d.i.c.kens, 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body who had more than twenty thousand a year ever indulged in a show of emotion. I say "n.o.body", 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 circ.u.mstances, 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:

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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.

Having to combat that sort of folly was the thing that made it hard to write a society play. It was like dramatizing a novel and trying to create a heroine who would agree with the ten thousand notions of her cherished by the ten thousand readers of the book. Gradually, as the mirror held up to nature has become more nearly true, we have grown to understand that, in the grip of a great joy or grief, a n.o.bleman behaves very much like a bricklayer; sometimes a trifle better, and sometimes, as in the case of the bazaar disaster in Paris, a good deal worse.

One fact not universally understood by persons who criticize the smart set on the stage is that there are many kinds of society. The group depicted in "Gallops" or "Lord and Lady Algy" is antipodally different from that shown in "The Way of the World" or "His House in Order." The self-made men of "The Pit" and "The Lion and the Mouse" are miles removed from the aristocrats of "The Idler" or "A Royal Family." The gambling males and cigarette-smoking females of "The Walls of Jericho"

and "The House of Mirth" have very little in common with the conservatives of "The Hypocrites" and "The Duke of Killicrankie." All society looks alike to the a.s.sistant dramatic editor, however, and, if some girl delivers herself of a slang phrase, he is quick to realize that the playwright who created her can know nothing of good form.

The man who deals with fashionables on the stage fingers a pianoforte with a single octave. More than half of the conditions that produce sentiment and sensation in Harlem never get as far down town as Fifth Avenue. That is why most drawing room dramas are worked out with the same characters and about the same stories. Someone has said that there do not exist more than three plots for farce; certainly, not more than ten have been used in society plays. Of these, the favorite is the tale of the good-for-nothing gentleman who goes away with the wife of the studious or hard-working hero. Sometimes, he is only _about_ to go away with this malcontent when the hero aforesaid finds her at midnight in the "rooms" of his rival. The places in which a woman is found at midnight are always "rooms"; never, by any chance, chambers, or apartments, or a flat. Occasionally, the lady, or the gentleman, or both, are quite innocent of wrong-doing. The lady may have come to save the reputation of another lady, or to prepare a rarebit, but when the husband has tracked her by the fan that years of Wilde have not taught such callers to hide with them, he gets into a towering rage and does not get out again until the end of the fourth act. Henry Arthur Jones calls tea the prop of our drama. I disagree with him. It is the careless lady with a _penchant_ for nocturnal visits who makes the theater possible in England and America. You don't believe it? Well, some of the comedies produced in New York during one season in which this incident figured were "Popularity", "Man and His Angel", "The Chorus Lady", "The Three of Us", "The House of Mirth", "Daughters of Men", "The Straight Road", and "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." James M. Barrie satirized the situation in "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire", and then employed it seriously for his most effective scene.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_The lady may have come to prepare a rarebit_"]

Of course, one or two of the pieces in the list given do not come strictly under the head of drawing room drama, but the fact remains that a majority of the young women who go calling on the stroke of twelve dive into indiscretion under Marcel waves. The coveting of his neighbor's wife is supposed to be a specialty of the society man, and thus it is that so many comedies of manors are founded on that theme.

The marriage of convenience is much used in plays of this type, too, as well as the _mesalliance_ that afterward turns out well. Divorce is coming more and more into vogue as a subject. Then there are satires in which the follies of the smart set are held up to ridicule and execration; comedies in which the vulgarisms of a very rich man, usually an American and father of the heroine, are contrasted favorably with the culture of the aristocracy of Europe; and plays in which the wronged girl figures, wearing a wan expression and a becoming black dress. Add to these varieties that cla.s.s of composition in which society is only the background for contests in politics, diplomacy, business, or detective work, and we have pretty well come to the end of our possibilities.

Whatever else happens in the society play, there always is a dance at which the juvenile lovers flirt, and the serious people discuss such tragic things as ruin and sudden death, while an orchestra "off at R."

fiddles through "Love's Dream After the Ball." Next to elopements, ruin and sudden death are the chief necessities of the society play.

Whenever a gentleman gets on the wrong side of the market, or has the misfortune to possess a wife whose lover is the hero of the piece, instead of the villain, he promptly kills himself. After reading a succession of dramas like "The Climbers" and "The Moth and the Flame"

one is amazed to discover that in the United States only about one hundreth of one per cent. of the population cashes in its checks self-endorsed.