Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

If wandering stars came along, Forrest or Booth, “Jim Crow” Rice or Lotta, they were supported by his company clothed from his wardrobe, with properties from his own storehouse and with the primitive stock-scenery which had been seen in a hundred other plays. The manners and customs of those distant days are preserved for us in the autobiographies of Anna Cora Mowatt, of Joseph Jefferson, and of Clara Morris. More often than not, the manager was himself an actor, Burton or Wallack appearing now and again on his own stage; and his wife was not infrequently the leading lady. Sometimes the manager was a playwright, William Dunlap or Augustin Daly; and then he found his profit in presenting his own pieces. Sometimes he had been recruited from some other calling, R. M. Field or A. M. Palmer; but always was he devoted to the drama, thoroughly familiar with the traditions of the stage, and thoroughly enjoying his association with the theater. He was a local institution; and sometimes, Caldwell in New Orleans or Rice in Chicago, he was one of the leading citizens of the town.

When a popular minstrel-company wanted the theater for a week or two, the manager was sometimes obliging enough to send his company to play in a smaller city if its “opera-house” chanced to be unoccupied. He did this more willingly when a glittering spectacle, the ‘Black Crook’ or the ‘Twelve Temptations’ asked him to turn out; but this complaisance hastened his downfall, since his well-worn scenery had a pallid look after the effulgent splendor of the interloper. Then, after a while, one and another of the more prominent stars (Joseph Jefferson, first of all, as he confesses in his autobiography), dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the mounting of their plays and disgusted by the carelessness and incompetence with which they were only too often supported by the stock-actors, began to engage companies of their own, with all the performers specially chosen for the characters they were to impersonate; they arranged to carry with them the special scenery required by the plays they intended to present that season. Soon there were so many of these, that at least one theater in each of the larger cities gave up its own company and relied exclusively upon these combinations, as the travelling companies were then called.

For a few years the managers of the stock-company houses made a valiant fight; but in the end they had to retire from the field, defeated. It had been a severe blow to them, when they were deprived of the potent attraction of the stars. Without these stars, and in fact in opposition to them, the performances given by the stock-companies were found to be inferior. The local scenery, the local costumes and the local properties were discovered to be mere make-shifts, unworthy at their best, and often worse than unworthy, especially when they were compared with the stricter propriety of the scenic equipment provided for the elaborate productions sent out from New York. The local offerings appeared to be provincial, whereas those which were brought from afar had on them the stamp of metropolitan approval.

So it was that sooner or later the managers of stock-companies had to withdraw from a lost battle. Some of them kept their theaters and sank to the humble position of janitors. Some moved to New York and became producers on their own account and managers of travelling companies. Some retired to obscurity; and some died in time to escape bankruptcy. Whether the vanquishing of the local stock-companies by the travelling companies was advantageous or not, it was inevitable since it was the result of inexorable economic conditions, in conjunction with equally inexorable geographic conditions. It was a swift and startling change in the methods of conducting the business of the theater, a change brought about by forces wholly beyond the control of those engaged in that business.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the organization of the theater in the United States became what it is now. In New York, in all the larger cities and in most of the smaller, the playhouses are controlled by one or the other of the two rival syndicates. The resident managers of these playhouses are scarcely more than caretakers, since they can exercise little or no choice as to the attractions which play engagements in their theaters. The producing managers choose plays, engage actors and are responsible for all the accessories. Most of these producing managers are in partnership with one or the other of the syndicates, because these syndicates control all the important theaters in all the important towns. Thus it is that the artistic guidance of the drama is in the hands of the producing managers, and the financial government is in the hands of the syndicates.

Many of the producing managers are akin in type to the managers of the resident stock-companies, that is to say, they are sometimes actors, sometimes playwrights and sometimes men drawn from other callings by the lure of the theater. Most of the members of the syndicates are men of affairs, who have gone into the theater-business as they would go into any other business, mainly for their own profit; and their interest in the drama as an art is intermittent, whereas their interest in the theater as a business is incessant. Their attitude and their actions have called for sharply hostile criticism, summed up in the accusation that they have commercialized the theater. Now, all students of stage-history know that there has always been a commercial side to the theater, excepting in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when the drama was more or less religious in its associations. In modern times we have ascertained that the drama cannot flourish as an art unless the theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to it; and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can never be independent of the takings at the door. Even in the few subsidized theaters of Europe, national or municipal, the grant in aid made by the government is never enough to support the enterprize.

IV

Commercialism in the theater is often bitterly denounced by young persons who conceive of art as ethereally detached from all financial considerations. The real question is not whether the theater is commercial, but whether it is unduly commercial, whether it has money-making for its chief aim, whether it is willing to sacrifice its artistic aspirations to the single purpose of making money. The theater was commercial, to a certain extent, in the time of Shakspere and Molière, of Sheridan and Beaumarchais; but it was not then unduly commercial. Is it unduly commercial now and here, to-day in the United States? Is its organization exclusively in the control of men who are thinking only of the profits to be made, and who know nothing and care less about the drama as an art?

Here again it is necessary to distinguish and to point out the yawning gulf between the playhouses which are truly homes of the drama and the playhouses which have been surrendered outright to mere spectacles. There are in our theaters to-day a heterogeny of so-called musical comedies, summer song-shows, Follies and Passing Shows, sometimes beautifully mounted but often empty of anything but glitter and violent movement, far-fetched fun, and unnecessary noise. These exhibitions occupy the stages of theaters where we might hope to see something better; they are money-making speculations, no more and no less; they supply nothing but vacuous entertainment for those who go to a show warranted to demand no mental effort from the spectators; they are examples of naked commercialism. As far as the drama is concerned, they are utterly negligible, as negligible as is the circus which now invades the theater only at very rare intervals.

There remain to be considered the large proportion of our theaters the stage-doors of which remain open to the drama in all its various manifestations, tragedy, comedy, farce, problem-play, or what not. Now, nobody familiar with the facts can deny or doubt that the theater here and now is hospitable to the drama. No really noteworthy European play, no matter where it was originally brought out, fails to be presented sooner or later in New York. It may be gay, the latest Parisian farce, for example; and then its chance comes sooner. It may be somber or even gloomy, the ‘Weavers’ of Hauptmann, for instance, the ‘John Ferguson’ of St. John Ervine or the ‘Jest’ of Sem Benelli; and then its chance may be late in coming. And side by side with these more or less important importations there are a host of native pieces of every degree of merit, reflecting almost every aspect of American life and character, from the ‘Salvation Nell’ of Edward Sheldon to the ‘Why Marry?’ of Jesse Lynch Williams, from the ‘Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots’ of Augustus Thomas to the ‘Get Rich Quick Wallingford’ of George M. Cohan.