[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 "Nobody'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 assets; 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 pass judgment on his work.