A dress rehearsal is supposed to be an ordinary performance without an audience. But it isn't. There is no excitement, no enthusiasm, no inspiration. Speeches fall flat, dialogue seems inordinately long and wearisome, bits of "business" that have appeared all right before look wholly different in changed surroundings. The actors, finding themselves for the first time in the setting to be used, are utterly lost. By-play with small articles, rehearsed twenty times, is blundered over when the player finds the "prop" actually in his hands. To observe the most experienced actor, and man of the world, handle a tea cup or a card case at a dress rehearsal you would swear that he had never seen such a thing before in his life.
And, O, the wickedness of inanimate things—doors that will not shut, matches that cannot be lit, table drawers that positively refuse to open! Whenever something of this sort goes wrong, the carpenter or the property man has to be called upon, and the scene stops, to be resumed later with a flatness commensurate with the length of the halt. Above all other sounds rings the clarion voice of the director, shouting to electricians, stage hands, actors. Everybody makes notes, to be quietly gone over with the company on the morrow, just before the actual performance.
At last, when the gray dawn is peeping in at the windows, when everyone concerned has reached the ultimate stage of exhaustion, the rehearsal is dismissed. The director makes a few remarks—sufficient censure to prevent over-confidence, mixed with enough hope to give courage. "Pretty bad", he says, "but I look for you to pull up tonight. We'll get together for a little chat at four o'clock in the smoking room of the theater."
Thus ends the period of rehearsal—a period of hard work, trials, tribulations, constant nervous strain. And it may all go for nothing. In three short hours the labor of years on the part of the author, of months on the part of the manager, of weeks on the part of the players, may be proved utterly worthless and without result. This, however, depends upon the public; those concerned have done all they know, all that can be done, not by random and haphazard work; but by skillful following of what is at once an exact science and a variable art. The philosophic author shrugs his shoulders as he leaves the theater.
"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 gods."