The Footlights Fore And Aft Part 3

Once upon a time, in a speech delivered somewhere, I said that, everything else being equal, the author who had never produced a play had the best chance of producing a good one. I was wrong. It is true that the newcomer is likely to have fresher ideas than the old stager, and that generally he dramatizes a lifetime of experience, instead of dramatizing only what he has gleaned between contracts. That accounts for the fact that some tyros never repeat their primal successes. But, even in this period of the novice, when appreciation of novelty submerges appreciation of skill, statistics prove that a majority of the p.r.o.nounced hits are the work of established authors.

We believe the contrary, as we believe that most marriages turn out badly, because beginners at authors.h.i.+p and enders of matrimony attract attention. Much was said of the novices who won laurels last season, and yet every single piece that ran a hundred nights or so on Broadway was by an Avery Hopwood, a Winch.e.l.l Smith, or a David Belasco. Any number of brilliant young men flashed into view, and probably will remain in view, but, as yet, of necessity, they are conspicuous for promise rather than for fulfillment. The greatest originality, the most synthetic ingenuity, and the sharpest wit were displayed by H. S.

Sheldon, in "The Havoc"; by Philip H. Bartholomae, in "Over Night"; by Anne Caldwell, in "The Nest Egg"; by Tom Barry, in "The Upstart"; by Al Thomas, in "Her Husband's Wife", and by George Bronson Howard and Wilson Mizner in "The Only Law."

The danger faced by new men is that they may be snuffed out by their first failures. Such an ungenerous reception as was given "The Upstart", for example, might well discourage an author to the utter ruin of his career. Managers, too, are likely to judge by the box office rather than by the play--an exceedingly short sighted policy in a "business" whose future depends upon the proper nursing of its infants. The fluttering fledgling of today is the eagle of tomorrow.

Porter Emerson Browne, Jules Eckert Goodman, Edward Sheldon, Thompson Buchanan, Avery Hopwood, James Forbes, the debutants of yester-year, are the leading dramatists of this.

Naturally, everybody is trying to duplicate their experience.

Everybody writes plays. Some time ago an ambitious individual walked into my office and announced that he had come from Rochester to submit a tragedy in blank verse. I suggested that he need not have gone to so much trouble and expense. "It wasn't any trouble or expense", he replied. "I had to come anyway. I'm a conductor on the New York Central."

Theodore Burt Sayre, who wrote "The Commanding Officer", and who is the reader for Charles Frohman, told me not long ago that his most persistent visitor was a policeman, who had composed a farce in six acts. He also showed me a letter the author of which declared "I seen menny plays that cost a doler and wasn't won-too-three with my play."

Every manager in New York has received a Brooklyn shoemaker who feels certain he has produced a comic opera infinitely superior to the best efforts of Gilbert and Sullivan. Of the would-be dramatists in the learned professions, I should say that physicians are rarest as playwrights, that journalists provide the best material, and that clergymen produce the most and the worst.

With so many Cinderellas attempting to crowd their feet into the shoes of Pinero and Jones, there can be no limit to the number of ma.n.u.scripts submitted each week to well known producers. The general idea, I believe, is that managers are quite buried beneath piles of plays. This is not absolutely true. Such an office as that of Henry B.

Harris, in the Hudson Theater, or of The Liebler Company, in Fifth Avenue, may be the destination of from six to ten ma.n.u.scripts a week.

About a third of this number come from agents, and these are likely to receive quickest consideration, since the reader knows that, if they were utterly without promise, they would not have been sent him. The crop of flat and cylindrical packages fluctuates with altered conditions. The manager who makes money out of the work of an unknown author is sure to receive far more than his share of contributions during the next year or two. William A. Brady got a thousand plays a month from obscure aspirants immediately after the production of "'Way Down East."

It is a fallacy widely current among new writers that their "copy" is returned unread. One of the first theatrical stories I ever heard concerned a woman who put sand between the pages of her rolled ma.n.u.script and found it there still when the piece came back to her.

Nowadays, when the demand for material so far exceeds the supply as to have become almost frantic, it is true not only that every play is looked into, but that almost every play is looked into by every manager. Round and round the circle they go, being judged from a hundred viewpoints by a hundred men who know that a lucky strike means a fortune, and who are eager in proportion. It is my firm belief that all the good plays, not to speak of a fair number of bad ones, have been or are about to be produced. Any piece that is not utterly, hopelessly valueless is sure to find some appreciator in the end.

There are instances of ma.n.u.scripts that, like "My Friend From India", travel up and down Broadway for years, only to be accepted and staged at last.

I have said that the dramatist who "arrives" generally has announced himself first through various rolled and typewritten visiting cards.

The parcel that comes from Findlay, Ohio, or Omaha, Nebraska, bearing the address of some one of whom the reader never heard before, is pretty certain to be without promise. Usually, the ma.n.u.script betrays itself in its first ten pages, and what follows rarely contains an idea that might have been valuable even if its owner had learned his trade. When the manager does discover a story worth while, or the suggestion of a story, usually he is quick to put its originator in touch with a literary manicure.

Charles Frohman, who frequently is styled "The Napoleon of the Drama", takes no such Napoleonic chances. If you will look over one of Mr.

Frohman's budgets you will find that two-thirds of the plays he announces have been presented abroad, and that the other third are from the pens of such celebrities as Augustus Thomas. Naturally, this is the safe, sane, and more-or-less sure method, and yet, even when judged from a purely commercial view-point, it has its disadvantages.

If the system does not entail such losses as other managers suffer, neither does it render possible such gains. Mr. Frohman paid George Ade royalties for "Just Out of College", which was a failure, far in excess of those granted by Henry W. Savage for "The County Chairman."

Popular dramatists turn out pretty poor stuff at times, as Mr. Frohman was reminded when he produced William Gillette's "Electricity", and excellent material may come from an unexpected source, as Wagenhals & Kemper discovered when they purchased "Paid in Full" from a man whose only previous work had been the unlucky "Sergeant James." As to the invariable wisdom of offering here plays that were hits in Paris and London, I can say only that sometimes we in America differ with our cousins in France and England. We differed widely in the cases of "The Speckled Band", "The Scarlet Pimpernel", and "The Foolish Virgin." It would appear to be a much safer expedient to turn over doubtful pieces to stock companies in one provincial city or another and then to abide by the result. This expedient, by the way, has the advantage of being inexpensive.

It is very difficult to identify a good play. When I was sixteen years old, and didn't know whether ma.n.u.scripts were an inch thick or a mile, I felt quite sure that the manager who produced a bad play was a fool.

I used to say this frankly in the newspaper on which I was employed, just as a lot of other c.o.c.k-sure young men have been doing ever since.

Latterly, however, I have observed that a great many experienced producers average about three failures to every one success, and I leave the superior att.i.tude to the literatti whose cleverness is valued by their employers at from fifteen to fifty dollars a week. The late A. M. Palmer, after a long life-time of experience, said to me: "There does not live a man who can tell a good play from a bad one by reading it. If there _were_ such a Solomon he would be worth half a million dollars per annum to any manager in New York. Personally, I have refused so many money-makers and accepted so many money-losers that I select material now-a-days by guess work. I tossed a coin once to decide whether or not I should buy what afterward proved to be one of the biggest hits of my career."

I have said that it is difficult to identify a good play; it should not be difficult to pa.s.s upon a bad one. Some of the things that reach our stage are so very bad that nothing in the foregoing paragraph excuses or explains their production. Several years ago there was referred to me a romantic drama, written by a visiting Englishman. I advised against it, but my employers were determined in its favor, and the piece was presented soon afterward at the Princess Theater.

On the opening night, just after the second act, Louis De Foe, dramatic critic of The World, came to me, and said: "I got here late, and so lost the thread of the story. Can you tell me what the play is about?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_It is very difficult to identify a good play_"]

I tried and failed.

One of my employers stood nearby. "Let's ask him?" I suggested. We did--and _he_ didn't know. "Haven't you seen it?" inquired Mr. De Foe.

"Yes", quoth the manager, "and I've read it, and--and it has something to do with love, but I--I forget the details." He suggested that we wait until after the performance and speak to the author.

That gentleman told us that the story concerned a soldier of fortune, who was about to do something or other--I don't remember what--when he received a letter that altered his intentions.

"So I observed", said Mr. De Foe. "But why should it have altered them? What was in the letter?"

The author looked at him blankly. "By Jove!" he explained. "I don't know. I never thought of _that_!"

The next day he drafted a letter that would explain matters and asked me to have it printed in the program. But, as the piece was to close the following night, it didn't seem worth while.

Of course, no play as bad as this should ever find its way to the footlights, and yet I am obliged to confess that a great many do. In fact, fifteen years of observation have forced me to the conclusion that the finer the texture of a play, the more unusual its theme, the smaller the author's chance of finding a manager for it. Also, one must admit, the smaller that manager's chance of finding a public.

Though they are not so numerous as one would like to see them, we have producers of keen artistic sensibilities; some of them, like Charles Frohman, George Tyler, Henry B. Harris, David Belasco, Henry Miller and Wagenhals & Kemper, men who are not averse to losing money on a worthy enterprise or, at least, to taking a long chance of making it.

For these men we should be grateful, and, though the New Theater has brought out nothing remarkable from an untried pen, we should be grateful, too, for an inst.i.tution whose purpose is producing the best, whether the best is profitable or not.

So many mental qualities are essential to the correct appraisal of a play. For one thing, the manager must see not only what it is but what it may become. Often the hardest work in playwriting has to be done after the play has been produced. Pieces that seemed hopeless when they were acted initially have been turned into huge successes. Scenes are switched about, lines changed, often whole acts reconstructed. I know a woman who was compelled to cut her play in half after it was produced. Ordinarily one minute is required to act each page of typewritten ma.n.u.script, but this work, which contained only one hundred and fifty pages, ran nearly five hours. Difficult as such condensation must have been, the task that confronted the author in question was not to be compared with that of lengthening a play. It is not advisable for embryonic dramatists to cut too closely according to pattern. To tone down a strong play or shorten a long one is easy; to build up a weak play or successfully pad out a short one is impossible.

Most of the ma.n.u.scripts that come to the desk of the reader do not prompt sufficient doubt for any manager to be willing to try them. A great many would seem to be the product of lunatics. Not long ago I had a dramatization of a Russian novel that contained eleven acts and twenty-one scenes. The adapter simply had melted down the whole six hundred pages of fiction and was trying to pour it onto the stage.

Another offering, called "The Dogs of Infidelity", proved to be an argument against atheism in five acts and seven scenes. The scoundrel of this masterpiece was Robert G. Ingersol, and the play was accompanied by a cartoon showing the agnostic fleeing from two police officers, marked "Logic" and "Sarcasm", who were pursuing him at the bidding of Justice, in the person of the author. Beneath this picture were typewritten the favorable opinions of a number of people who claimed to have read the piece. Standing in the center of the stage, the villain of a melodrama still in my possession is supposed to commit suicide by exploding a dynamite cartridge in his mouth. Beneath the directions for this bit of business, the author has written: "The performance concludes here." I should think it might!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_A woman who was compelled to cut her play in half_"]

Of course, it is not often that one gets plays as absurd as these. If it were, the reading of ma.n.u.scripts would not be so dull and profitless a task. The ordinary play is notable only for its crudity, its artificiality, its lack of color, and its hopeless failure to rise above the conventional and the commonplace. Dramatists follow each other like sheep, and the smaller the dramatist happens to be the more closely he follows. Thus it is that whenever somebody produces a piece with a situation that creates comment, every second ma.n.u.script one reads from that time on contains exactly the same situation. A long while ago I grew so much interested in the likeness between plot and plot that I catalogued two hundred plays according to their general character. The result was as follows:

Dramas in which woman goes to man's rooms at midnight 37

" in which woman betrays man and then saves him 19

" in which wronged woman gives evidence at end of play 6

" in which man unwittingly falls in love with woman meant for him 9

" in which woman unwittingly falls in love with man meant for her 3

" in which wealth is unexpectedly derived from a mine or a patent 22

" built on the question of "love or duty" 24

" built on the question of the fitness of a reformed man or woman to marry 16

" in which man or woman reforms the person he or she loves 3

Comedies in which husband or wife ends the philandering of wife or husband by seeming to condone it 20

Farces based on mistaken ident.i.ty 31

" built around the necessity of a man lying to his wife 28

The total of the table is not two hundred, because several of these plays had none of the features mentioned, while others had more than one.

Of course, it is well-nigh impossible for any dramatist, no matter how well-meaning, to devise unparalleled characters, situations and stories. Just as the fact that there are only so many notes in the scale has been urged as an excuse for composers whose music is reminiscent, so I would insist that there are only so many strings in the heart. There is a limit to the number of situations that can be brought about in real life, and, of course, there is a much more definite limit to the number of these situations which have dramatic value. In certain elemental facts all plays must be alike. For example, it is inevitable that a large number of plays shall have what is known as the "dramatic triangle"--which means the conflict of two men and a woman or of two women and a man. It is inevitable that a great majority of plays shall deal with that one great elemental emotion--love. Once, when I was very young indeed, I experimented in writing a comedy in which n.o.body was in love. The piece was presented in Was.h.i.+ngton, and, to the best of my recollection, it lasted two consecutive nights. This convinced me that there might be a line beyond which one could not go in the effort to be unique.

There are a great number of things, however, that are so hackneyed and conventional that it is no longer possible for an author to attempt them. I do not think any manager would buy another play in which the crucial situation was the concealment of the heroine in the apartments of the hero or the villain. From time immemorial this has been the stock episode for the third act climax in a four act play, and audiences have begun to expect it as they expect supper after the fourth act. Personally, I am free to confess that I should not be likely to recommend the purchase of any drama in which the conclusion of the third act did not bring a surprise calculated to make an audience sit up and take notice. No author of today would dare begin his work with a conversation between a maid and a butler. Neither would he care to conceal one of his characters behind a screen or to conclude his play with the finding of a bundle of papers. The cigarette is still the hero of the society drama, and it is still true on the stage that the happy conclusion of the love affair between the juvenile and the ingenue usually is coincident with the conclusion of the love affair between the leading man and the leading woman. We begin to have heroes who are not too angelically good, however, and villains who have motives more human than the mere desire to be beastly and draw a hundred and fifty dollars a week for it. Very slowly and gradually the perfect woman, the high-hatted knave, the wronged girl, the comic Irishman, the naval lieutenant of comic opera, the English butler and their a.s.sociates are pa.s.sing from our midst. Peace to their ashes!

Plays have their epochs, just as books do, and there are fas.h.i.+ons in the drama as p.r.o.nounced as those in dress. Always one successful work of a particular cla.s.s brings about a host of imitations, and, for a time, it seems as though the public would never tire of that particular kind of entertainment. "The Prisoner of Zenda" was responsible for a hundred romances laid in mythical kingdoms; "Lady Windimere's Fan" brought drawing room comedy into vogue; "'Way Down East" bred a perfect epidemic of pastorals; "Sherlock Holmes" created a demand for plays concerning criminals. All of these varieties of entertainment, save possibly the last, have been laid on the shelf, and we now are going in vigorously for frothy farce and comic opera in long skirts. The manner in which one author follows the lead of another, as demonstrated above, extends beyond the selection of such important things as stories, and reaches even to t.i.tles. Ten years ago we couldn't have a name without the word "of" in it. On the bill-boards were advertised "The Whitewas.h.i.+ng of Julia", "The Manoeuvres of Jane", "The Superst.i.tions of Sue", "The Stubbornness of Geraldine" and a score of others. Then somebody christened a charming sketch "Hop-o'-My-Thumb", and for a while it seemed that we could get nothing but hyphenated t.i.tles, such as "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire" and "All-of-a-Sudden-Peggy." Now-a-days the vogue seems to be the combination of an article and a noun--"The Boss", "The n.i.g.g.e.r", "The Gamblers" and "The Concert."

Please do not understand that, in calling attention to these similarities, I intend to accuse anyone of plagiarism. Deliberate theft of ideas from contemporary offerings is likely to result in law-suits, and I don't believe that there are left in the printed dramas any ideas worth stealing. I used to hear an interesting story of Paul Potter's writing original plays in the Boston Public Library, but it seemed to me that much of his work was too good to have been filched from the old fellows whose publishers bound their vulgarity, their leaden dialogue and their uningenious situations in yellow covers. It is very difficult, as I have said, to squeeze new situations out of a dull world, from the manners and morals of which about four hundred dramas have been pressed every year during the past half century. It is especially hard to devise original material in America, where prudish restrictions hedge us about and anything deep and vital in life immediately is set down as immoral. American authors cannot wring novel incidents from the emotions; they must profit by such circ.u.mstances as the invention of wireless telegraphy and the automobile. The telephone and the motor car are speedily becoming bulwarks of the drama in the United States!