Daly’s Theatre, in the days when Ada Rehan was at the height of her charm and power, was sometimes called “the Théâtre Français of America.” The leading man was John Drew (who did not become an independent “star” until 1892); the comedian was James Lewis, a talented, intelligent, genuinely comic actor;[139] the “dowager parts” were played by the incomparable Mrs. James Gilbert; and the younger women of the company were Isabel Irving and Kitty Cheatham, both clever actresses, though they paled beside Rehan. At Daly’s one saw acting that dispelled any impression of theatricalism. Mr. Daly’s rule was rigorous, his standards exacting.[140] He was altogether an exceptional manager, scholarly and thorough; and his instructions and advice were of immense benefit to the actors in his company,—a fact that Ada Rehan always freely acknowledged.
The list of parts that Miss Rehan in the twenty years between 1879 and 1899 acted in Mr. Daly’s company is simply amazing in its extent and range. We think of her as Katherine, as Viola, Rosalind or Beatrice, but she had been with Mr. Daly several years before the company attempted Shakespeare. Before, there had been a long succession of plays whose names mean nothing to us nowadays. Many of them were adaptations, made by the versatile Mr. Daly himself, from the German. Adaptations from the French, the American, and English stage had seen in plenty; but the German comedies afforded Mr. Daly a comparatively unworked field of which he made the most. One gets a satisfying sense of the essential improvement since 1890 in the art of playwriting in America upon reflecting that these translations and rearrangements of pieces grown on a foreign soil would seem, if presented in our theatres today, peculiarly thin and artificial. Miss Rehan’s more discerning admirers regretted the waste of her great talent in them, but then, as now, the theatre had to be made a paying institution in order to exist at all, and these plays indubitably succeeded. The finished acting of the Daly company, admirable both in individual impersonation and in ensemble, made them one of the keenest of the theatrical pleasures of the day.[141]
Miss Rehan did not at once leap into recognition as the leading American actress of the day. For a long time she was thought of merely as a prominent member of an excellent organization. Gradually, however, by sheer merit, her preëminence became evident. With confidence she undertook all kinds of rôles, and, in the midst of her work, there would occasionally flash forth an impersonation that would seem, what it often was, acting of unique quality.
Rehan was essentially a queen of comedy. Though she attempted from time to time impersonations of a grave and even of a tragic nature, and by virtue of sincerity and womanliness gave them much appeal, she never would have gained her preëminent position by such means. Her range was as wide, however, as the true meaning of the word “comedy,” and extended from the graceful performance of the mirthful or sentimental foolery of Daly’s adaptations, through the satire of The Critic to the farcical comedy of The Shrew, the tenderly romantic comedy of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, and the sophisticated “high comedy” of Much Ado.[142]
It is difficult for one who has seen her in the part to think of Shakespeare’s Katherine, in The Taming of the Shrew, without at once thinking of Ada Rehan. The pride, the majesty, the complete identification with the varying moods of the character, and the humanity she gave to what can easily be made merely a stage figure, were quite irresistible. Perhaps she succeeded so well in this part because it was in many ways a reflection of her own personality.[143]
Her Rosalind, by all accounts, was probably the best, possibly excepting Adelaide Neilson’s, that the American stage has seen; her Viola “manifested a poetic actress of the first order.” Add to these her Beatrice, her Mrs. Ford, her Helena, her Portia, not to speak of the half dozen heroines of Shakespeare she played before she joined Daly’s company, and you have a well rounded accomplishment as a Shakespearean actress, which, if she had done nothing else, would have won her fame.
And she did much else. One of Mr. Daly’s noteworthy departures from the ordinary theatrical routine was his revival of various specimens of old English comedy: The Country Wife (in Garrick’s version called The Country Girl), The Inconstant, She Would and She Would Not, The Recruiting Officer were all Restoration comedies, modified by Mr. Daly to suit modern taste; and The Critic was his one-act rearrangement of Sheridan’s famous three-act satire of that name. These pieces all involved difficult tasks for a modern actress, for their language is of another time, their feelings of a different civilization. The plays are never professionally revived nowadays; and Mr. Daly’s ventures with them succeeded mainly through the conspicuous ability of Miss Rehan to give her characters, whatever their dress or speech, naturalness and vitality.
There was some surprise when Mr. Daly produced Coppée’s The Prayer, for the usually buoyant Rehan had now to portray a thoroughly serious character. Yet, says Mr. Winter:[144] “No one acquainted with her nature was surprised at the elemental passion, the pathos, and the almost tragic power with which she expressed a devoted woman’s experience of affliction, misery, fierce resentment, self-conquest, self-abnegation, forgiveness and fortitude. She did not then, nor at any time, show herself to be a tragic actress, but she evinced great force and deep feeling.”
It further strengthens one’s impression of Miss Rehan’s really triumphant versatility to read the records of her Lady Teazle, which subtly suggested the country girl within the fine lady; of her Letitia Hardy with “its intrinsic loftiness of woman’s spirit”; of her Jenny O’Jones, an irresistibly comic figure done in the spirit of frank farce; or of any of her half hundred impersonations in modern comedy, on which she lavished the spirit, the beauty, the technical proficiency that were always in evidence, whether or not the material she worked with was wholly deserving of her gifts. She was always ambitious, always a patient hard worker, and she never slighted her tasks.
In 1884, when Miss Rehan and the reorganized Daly company had been working together for five years, they made their first visit to London, where they played a six weeks’ summer season at Toole’s Theatre. London did not take kindly either to Mr. Daly’s pieces from the German, which then formed their repertoire, or to Miss Rehan herself, whose style of acting was a surprise to conservative eyes. William Archer wrote in The World: “The style of Miss Ada Rehan is too crude and bouncing to be entirely satisfactory to an English audience. She makes Flos a painfully ill-bred young person,—surely not a fair type of the American girl; and her way of emphasizing her remarks by making eyes over the footlights is certainly not good comedy.”[145] Clement Scott, on the other hand, praised her. No great impression was made, on the whole, but two years later, (1886) when Mr. Daly again took his company to London, Miss Rehan really made a name for herself, although the plays were as yet what seem to us now paltry pieces for such an actress: A Night off, and Nancy and Company. At this time Mr. Daly offered his company in the English provincial cities and even ventured to present them in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris, where they met some success.