Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

To the best of my recollection no one of these nineteenth century pieces has been seen on the New York stage since the twentieth century began.

I have no right to assume that any other theater-goer of fifty years of experience would select exactly these twenty-two plays as being the Old Comedies; but I make bold to believe that my selection includes all the pieces which demand to be so grouped together.

III

A lover of the theater whose playgoing has been done in the past score of years may be moved to ask why it is that these plays, which evoked the loyal laughter of his father and his grandfather, have been utterly banished from the twentieth century stage, and why they are as unknown in the playhouses of London as they are in those of New York and of Boston. To this question it is possible to give three answers.

In the first place these Old Comedies show the signs of age, even when we read them. They seem to most moderns more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog, and more or less archaic in method. To assert this is to admit that they are hopelessly out of date both in their content and in their form. They abound, for example, in asides and in soliloquies, addressed directly to the audience; and they are decorated with frequent bravura passages, devised to exhibit the virtuosity of the performer, just as the solos of the earlier Italian operas were introduced merely to allow the soprano to execute her variations or the tenor to attain his high C. The tone of these humorous plays is too highly colored for our subdued taste, and many of their characters strike us as caricatures of humanity, almost fantastic in their wilful eccentricity. In short, these pieces one and all belong to a type of drama hopelessly out of fashion, unfamiliar in many of its aspects. In the theater what is unfamiliar is frequently ludicrous, merely because of its unfamiliarity; and we are inclined to laugh at it, as we do at the wearing apparel of a decade ago. In playmaking, as in dressmaking, styles change with disconcerting swiftness.

This brings us to the second reason for the disappearance of these Old Comedies from the twentieth century theater. Their departure was coincident with the breaking up of the stock-company, kept together year after year with only occasional changes in its membership. Forty years ago the company at Wallack’s, like that at the Boston Museum, was a homogeneous body, with customs of its own, imparted to the newcomers it enrolled and accepted reverently by these recruits. It was in the habit of appearing in one or more of the Old Comedies every winter; its elder members knew the traditional business and the traditional effects in each of these comic dramas; and they were glad to pass on this knowledge to the younger members. As a result of this an Old Comedy could always be used as a stop-gap when a new play had failed to please the public; and it could be brought out at a week’s notice. In other words, the stock-company was a repertory company, ready to revive on demand any one of a dozen or more Old Comedies and assured in advance that this revival would be welcome to a majority of the playgoers, many of whom would be glad of the chance to compare it with the performances of two or three seasons before.

Altho these companies at Wallack’s in New York and later at Daly’s also, as well as that at the Museum in Boston, utilized the Old Comedies mainly as life-preservers, to be put on whenever new plays sank under them, they relied upon these new plays for the major part of their season, reserving their revivals for sudden contingencies. But these new plays of half-a-century ago were not widely unlike the Old Comedies in their external characteristics; they also had their soliloquies, their asides, and their bravura passages; they were also more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog and more or less archaic in method, or at least they would so appear to us of the twentieth century if they could be galvanized into life again for our inspection.

The pleasant comedies of T. W. Robertson, ‘Caste’ for one and ‘Ours’ for another, which were hailed on their first appearance as “natural” and even as “realistic,” have revealed themselves at their most recent resuscitations to be almost as mannered and as mechanical as were the Old Comedies. In fact, the more closely we study the English drama between 1860 and 1870 the more clearly we perceive the influence of the English drama between 1770 and 1780. In the century which stretches from 1770 to 1870 we can observe no violent break in the continuity of the development of the drama.

But between 1870 and 1920 there was a startling change; the drama made a new departure; and this is the third reason why the Old Comedies have been cast out of our twentieth century theaters. The new departure was the result of two influences, working simultaneously. One of these influences was internal; it was the rapid advance of the so-called realistic movement, of which Balzac was the pioneer in the novel and of which the younger Dumas was the pioneer in the play. It is easy for us to see now that Balzac and Dumas were both of them on occasion ultra-romanticist; but none the less were they more realistic than their immediate predecessors had been. They tried to present life as they saw it with their own eyes, animated by an unquenchable desire to deal with it frankly and honestly. Balzac spent himself in the effort to be exact and to relate all his myriad characters to the background before which each of them had posed for him; and Dumas was almost as strenuous in his demand for veracity.