The Footlights Fore And Aft Part 9

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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 G.o.ds."

_THE ART OF "GETTING IT OVER"_

Being the sort of t.i.tle 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.

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_William Gillette portentously flicked the ashes from his cigar_"]

If you ask me--and we'll a.s.sume 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 Pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 G.o.d!" 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 G.o.d!", a hopeless "Oh, my G.o.d!", an "Oh, my G.o.d!" 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, n.o.body 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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."

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

The person to whom she alluded was Avery Hopwood, collaborative author of the play in question, and almost any auditor in the house would have declined to take the other side of the wager. "Seven Days" was an obvious success, an unexpected success, and a success that had arrived something after schedule time. Mr. Hopwood had shared with your humble servant the credit for his first work, "Clothes", and his second and third works, "The Powers That Be" and "This Woman and This Man", had not called the fire department to the Hudson River. Those watchful gentlemen, the managers, who measure a dramatist by the line in front of his box office, were beginning to wonder whether "Hopwood really can write a play." Here was a vociferous answer to the question--an answer destined to be repeated, with greater emphasis, a year later in "n.o.body's Widow." "Certainly", I thought, "Hopwood _is_ the happiest man in town at this moment!"

Subsequently, on my way out of the Astor, I came within an ace of running into "the happiest man." He was standing on the curb, half a block north of the theater, and he didn't "look the part" with which he had been invested. His face was white and set, his brow puckered into deep wrinkles, and his chief occupation seemed to be the nice one of nibbling the skin from his knuckles without actually lacerating them. "Well", he inquired, with agonized anxiety, "how did it go?"

"A knockout!" I replied, in the vernacular.

"On the level?" he asked. "You're not trying to jolly me?"

There was no suggestion of insincerity in the query. It was evident that Diogenes, if he had returned to look for the happiest, instead of for an honest man, must needs have gone farther than the author of "Seven Days."

From contact with other victims and from personal experience, I feel qualified to say that the most terrible ordeal known since the days of the inquisition is a theatrical "first night." Dramatist, manager, actors and even stage hands are tortured by it, and their sufferings are not to be gauged by the number of times they have undergone the horror. The "first night", moreover, is a thing unique in art. A painting may hang for weeks before the painter learns whether he has succeeded or not; a book may be on the market nearly a year without its author knowing the result of his effort. In either case, criticisms are many and varying. The verdict on a play, however, is given with the suddenness and force of a blow, and sometimes it is equally conclusive. Failure in any other field leaves something in the way of a.s.sets; theatrical failure sweeps away everything. Realize this, put yourself in the place of those most concerned, and you will understand the effect of a "first night." Suppose that all your possessions, representing the labor of a life-time, were tied together and suspended by a string over a bottomless abyss. The feeling with which you would watch that string as it stretched to the breaking point would be akin to the feeling with which the dramatist watches the audience come to pa.s.s judgment on his work.

Of course, it is not always, or often, true that a single production either makes or breaks those concerned in it, but even a single production is so large an element in this making or breaking that it becomes of vital importance. Sometimes, too, "first night" gatherings are wrong, and performances which they condemn afterward prove great artistic and financial hits. This, however, is rare; the say of the initial audience, made up of professional reviewers and experienced theater-goers, is likely to be conclusive. Henrietta Crosman, then an unknown actress from the West, came to New York with "Mistress Nell"

on October 9, 1900, and opened to receipts under two hundred dollars.

A single day later the sums being paid into the box office were limited only by the seating capacity of the house. Helen Ware, after years of unrecognized good work in small parts, achieved stellar honors within the three hours of her first metropolitan appearance as Annie Jeffries in "The Third Degree." No chronicle short of a six-volume book could begin to give an account of the playwrights and players whose stock has soared a hundred points during the course of a single evening on Broadway.

Failures determined with equal prompt.i.tude have been so numerous during the past few seasons that it seems idle to recapitulate. One night proved a sufficiently long time in which to guess accurately at the future of "Septimus", "Drifting", "A Skylark", "Mr. b.u.t.tles", "Miss Patsy", "The Heights", "The Upstart", "The Scandal", "The Young Turk", "The Foolish Virgin", "The Next of Kin", "The Fires of Fate", "Children of Destiny", "Welcome to Our City", and "A Little Brother of the Rich." Two or three of these had been great triumphs in London and Paris, half a dozen were by famous Englishmen and Americans, nearly all represented extravagant expenditure on the part of experienced managers, but neither precedent nor prominence disturbed the "first night" jury in New York. Augustus Thomas' "The Ranger" was voted impossible a few years ago at Wallack's with as little hesitation as though it had been written by John Jones instead of by the author of "Arizona." Frank McKee cancelled the bookings of Hoyt's "A Dog in the Manger" while the second act was in progress at Washington, and "The Narrow Path", offered for a run at the Hackett, never had another performance there--or anywhere else.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_A playwright whose stock has soared a hundred points in a single evening_"]

With such possibilities as these before his eyes, with "Mrs. Dane's Defence" at one end of the pendulum's reach and "The Evangelist" at the other, do you wonder that the playwright is nervous on a "first night"?

Unfortunately, it is not alone the behavior of the "death watch" in front of the footlights that gives cause for anxiety. Actors and actresses are uncertain creatures, while inanimate objects seem to have a perfect genius for going wrong at critical times. No amount of rehearsing can be depended upon to prevent a moon wobbling as it rises at an initial performance, or to make the crash of thunder sound unlike Bridget taking it out of the pots and pans after dinner. A laugh at a serious moment may decide the fate of a play, the fate of a play may make a difference of several hundred thousand dollars to its manager, and, this being true, what the manager says to the property man or the electrician after a _faux pas_ like either of those mentioned is a problem you can solve in half the time you once devoted to discovering the age of Ann.

I remember vividly the primal performance at Hartford of Paul Arthur's melodrama, "Lost River." One of the mechanical effects in this piece was a bicycle race, during which the contestants pedaled wildly on stationary machines. The effect of pa.s.sing landscape was given by a panorama and a fence that moved rapidly in the opposite direction. At least, they were supposed to move in the opposite direction, but on the occasion of which I speak they didn't. The race became one between the bicyclists and the surrounding country, and the surrounding country was far in the lead when an irate stage manager rang down the curtain. This accident never happened again, but, had the "first night" been in New York instead of on the road, once would have been enough.