A few years ago we thought of her as a powerful emotional actress who had come through an apprenticeship in barnstorming, and an early recognition of merit as Roxane to Mansfield’s Cyrano, to full measured achievement in Mrs. Dane’s Defence, The Great Divide, and The Awakening of Helena Ritchie,—with a large number of plays and parts scattered in between. But of late years she has broadened her art and made secure her place among contemporary actresses not only by plunging wholeheartedly into a campaign in Shakespeare, but by ranging even farther and acting the heroines of Greek tragedy. Miss Anglin is as effective in comedy—witness Green Stockings and Lady Windermere’s Fan as recent instances, and her Lady Eastney in Mrs. Dane’s Defence for an earlier one—as she is in emotional rôles; she has acted in Australia as well as in America; she was the first artist to carry about the country a repertoire of plays set in accordance with the ideals of the new stagecraft; and as Mr. Eaton has said, “as a stage manager she has succeeded in reviving something of the atmosphere of good breeding, of polite comedy, of perfect ensemble and polish, which we associate with the memory of Lester Wallack.” It is an ample, dignified career, now happily at its height, of hard working service to the art of the actress.
When in 1913 Miss Anglin made herself a Shakespearean actress-manager, the size of her repertoire, the general excellence of her interpretations, and the revelation of the beauties of the new stage art that signalized her performances combined to give American theatregoers a new idea of her ability and broadening ambition. The plays were The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra; the scenery in each case was a beautiful example—by Livingston Platt—of the imaginative revolt from old stage conventions that has notably marked the last decade; and Miss Anglin’s own women of Shakespeare,—though her Cleopatra was a comparative failure and was soon dropped from her repertoire, and though her Viola was to a degree lacking in high spirits—were charming and technically admirable impersonations.
In the Greek Theatre of the University of California at Berkeley, Miss Anglin has acted four of the classic dramas of ancient Greece,—the Antigone and the Electra of Sophocles, the Iphigenia in Auris and the Medea of Euripides. Though her training and her speech have always been primarily those of the modern actress, she has revealed in these classic tragedies a simplicity of method and an authority of voice and presence that few actresses, either of England or America, could equal. With Miss Lillah McCarthy presenting so beautifully the women of Greek tragedy at one end of the country, and Miss Anglin at the other, the classics have had a day of real, if brief, glory.
If the roster of American actresses is given a cosmopolitan aspect by the inclusion of the names of Edith Wynne Matthison, Martha Hedman, Hedwig Reicher and Bertha Kalich, all of whom lived many years in Europe, the most striking example of all is Alla Nazimova.[215] She was born in Russia, went to school in Switzerland, studied the violin at Odessa, the drama in Moscow, and after a few years’ apprenticeship in her native land and a year at St. Petersburg, she acted with Paul Orleneff’s company (of course, in Russian) in London. Coming then to America she played a season in Russian with her compatriots; and then, in June, 1906, having signed a contract to act in English in November of the same year, she set herself to the mastery of the new language, much as Modjeska had done thirty years before. She kept her word, and when the appointed time came she acted Hedda Gabler, which she followed during the next half-dozen years, with others of Ibsen’s plays: A Doll’s House, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, as well as several other plays, like The Comet, The Marionettes, and Bella Donna, in none of which the actress possessed the significance that marked her when she confined herself to Ibsen.
To play first in an obscure hall on the lower East Side, then in two or three scarcely less obscure theatres, and then, a year and a half after her unheralded arrival, to act in a new tongue in one of New York’s leading theatres—it all makes one of the most dramatic of careers. If, however, Nazimova is “a tigress in the leash of art,” as Julius Huneker called her, an artist must hold the leash, or it becomes too much a circus tigress, going through the expected tricks, but in a cage of which she is always conscious. Nazimova did us a real service in her vivid impersonation of Ibsen’s heroines. Mrs. Fiske apart, no one else has done much for Ibsen in this country. But apparently she cannot go on playing Ibsen profitably; her art, which “expresses itself in a continual physical virtuosity which startles and thrills,” does not find an outlet in the sort of play English and American dramatists are likely to write; and, as Mr. Ruhl points out, “of late she has drifted far from her simpler beginnings and over-accented the more exotic side of her personality as if determined to ‘run it into the ground.’” Like another actress of striking talent, Nance O’Neil, Madame Nazimova is idle chiefly because she and the dramatists seem unable to meet on a common ground.
The case for the poetic actress is little better. After acquiring in England a thorough grounding in her profession, Edith Wynne Matthison[216] came to America in 1903 and played Everyman with a dignity, a charm of voice and person, and a poetic poignancy that made the fifteenth-century “morality” forever memorable for any one who saw it. After brief experiments with Viola, Portia, and Kate Hardcastle, she returned to England, and then, after dividing the intervening years between her old home and her new, she settled more or less permanently in America in 1910, when she joined the company of the New Theatre. She must be regarded as of the American theatre.
Miss Matthison is preëminently a poetic actress. Her moods and methods, her rich and tender voice, her whole training and personality fit her rarely for the realization of the heroines of poetic drama. How truly this is not the age of the poetic drama, however, is shown by the short list of rôles—outside of Shakespeare’s heroines—that Miss Matthison has had, at once adapted to her and worthy of her talents. At the New Theatre she played Sister Beatrice in Maeterlinck’s play of that name, The Piper, and Light in The Blue Bird. And the New Theatre was not wholly a response to public taste; it was largely an attempt to foster it. For the rest, Miss Matthison’s American appearances (and her English experience was similar) have been distributed among many plays of many kinds, some of them excellent, like The Great Divide and The Servant in the House, but all of them rather beside the point, so far as Miss Matthison’s peculiar talent was concerned. When she played, and beautifully played, Andromache in Mr. Barker’s recent production of The Trojan Women, she again came briefly into her own.
If Miss Anglin and Miss Matthison almost exhaust our list of first-rate poetic actresses (now that Miss Marlowe has retired), the case is far otherwise with the comédiennes. There are two, at least,—Grace George and Laura Hope Crews,—who are practiced adepts, thoroughly at home amid the subtleties of high comedy.
The place of Miss George[217] among American actresses is only partly indicated by the announcement that she is to direct her own theatre in New York. Though she merits that distinction, it is one that is easily within the grasp of the wife of William A. Brady. But it is indeed something to be one of our few actresses who are mistresses of comedy. Miss George made her first appearance on the professional stage (she had previously acted much as an amateur) as long ago as 1894, but it was not until 1907, when she acted Cyprienne in Divorçons, that she disclosed her talent brought to its fullness by long and varied training. Playing with her in Divorçons was that excellent actor, Frank Worthing, and the effect produced by them remains one of the memorable incidents of American acting.[218] During the dozen years that preceded Divorçons and again during the period that has followed, Miss George has been condemned to play in a long succession of comparatively inferior plays. The list is varied only occasionally by brief appearances in genuine high comedy, such as her Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal at the New Theatre and her Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Taking it all in all, she is best represented, so far, by her Cyprienne, an admirable impersonation, compact with rich humor, naturalness and charm,—and achievement in real comedy. Miss George promises to come into her own, however, with the opening of the theatre in New York of which she is to be the guiding spirit and the chief actress, for, if promise fails not, it is to be a rigorously guarded home of nothing but the best in the realm of comedy.
Like Miss George, Laura Hope Crews[219] has earned by long training and by brilliant accomplishment the admiration she now wins. She had been a child actress in the far West, and, returning to the stage in her ’teens, had undergone the rigorous training of stock company work in San Francisco and New York for a half dozen years before she attracted any considerable notice. Such an experience in American stock companies, with weekly changes of bill, means either a sinking to a dead level of mechanical acting, or a constantly enlarging technical resource. The latter was the case with Miss Crews. As Mr. Eaton has pointed out, though she has come to be looked upon as an actress of such sunny parts as Polly in The Great Divide, and the whimsical heroine of Her Husband’s Wife, it is because Miss Crews for so long went from such plays as Hoyt’s A Bunch of Keys, to others like Magda and Hedda Gabler that she is today not merely an attractive personality, but an actress of complete technical equipment. Such she has again proved herself to be by the finesse of her impersonation of the wife in The Phantom Rival. By virtue of the power of consistent impersonation which she brings to bear upon her warmly human heroines, her high spirits and her thoroughly trained resources of humorous suggestion, she has earned a high place as a comédienne; but the sincerity and the variety of her art would equip her at a moment’s notice to revert to the emotional heroines of a more sober drama.