On August 29th, 1922, George Kelly was a perfectly good Philadelphian in his late twenties who was much better known to vaudeville than to fame. He had written, directed, and played in about a dozen one-act comedies and dramas on Keith and Orpheum time. He had begun by quitting his family’s private tutor to try acting in a playlet by the late Paul Armstrong. Then—with no more preparation, apparently—he had begun to write his own vehicles. A certain drama in France absorbed his attentions for a while. After that more “sketches”—as the vaudeville powers call any effort above vocal or bodily acrobatics—and suddenly a play.
The origin of The Torch-Bearers was simple enough. Kelly wrote the kind of tight, effective short plays that amateur actors and little theatre directors are always looking for. He had a perfectly good Philadelphia family behind him. And so he was being invited to lunch every now and then by the Pampinellis of the cities in which he played. To hear them was enough. They had to live a wider life.
The Torch-Bearers passed a prosperous term on Broadway, and I think it will go far in the little theatres which it satirizes. But upon the opening night I remember much dubious debate about its chances. We had laughed ourselves almost literally sick, and at the end of the second intermission we had not yet seen the rather prosy last act. Yet—conscious of our personal superiority—we wondered.... Brander Matthews and Aristotle would scoff at it, George M. Cohan and Professor Baker would scowl. The Torch-Bearers broke all the rules, and it had no plot. Obviously, by all the rules, it ought to fail.
There may be a good many reasons why it didn’t, and some may lead you far into aesthetic explorations of the present breakdown of dramatic form all over the world. But the reader will find more cogent reasons in the pages that follow this introduction. Personally, I should put it down to the fact that the character-study of the first act and the hokum of the second are irresistible. We have all met our Pampinellis, and we have all seen the lady prompter take a curtain call, or had our mustache fall off in the big scene. We can never resist some characterization on the stage, and as for such hokum as this record of all the mishaps of the amateur actor, ill luck is the heart of broad comedy and when ill luck comes where it is most painful—in personal display—Cassandra herself must smile.
There were other things to make the death-watch wonder whether The Torch Bearers could live. It was satire. Satire is not ordinarily a popular commodity in the theatre. It defeats sympathy, and sympathy is necessary to emotion, and emotion to theatrical success.
Satire has had its great moments, however, in the history of the drama. Aristophanes made merry over the fashions, foibles, and philosophies of Athens. Satire was Molière’s stock in trade. Shaw has done very well by poking a finger at society. Every nation has at least one outstanding theatrical satire to its credit. But for the war, the wise of Paris might still be laughing at the French Academy because of de Flers and de Caillavet’s L’Habit Vert. England has The School for Scandal, as Ireland has The Playboy and John Bull’s Other Island. Germany, though a little heavy in the theatre, can still point to Schnitzler’s Literature.
Just at the moment America is beginning to display a surprising fondness for theatrical satire. Beginning is hardly the word, perhaps, for the first American drama, The Contrast, lampooned society with a large “S”; Fashion, our first play by a woman, spoke out smartly against the smart world, and from Our American Cousin down to date, so many of our playwrights have spoofed the alien and the aristocratic for the benefit of the homespun, that it is only by a hair that I can risk the statement that it is a “surprising fondness” which we now display for satire. America has always enjoyed its irreverent moments in the theatre, but it has seldom gone in for whole plays devoted to almost nothing but lampooning.
In the last three seasons, however, the distinctly satirical play has climbed noticeably in favour. In 1919-20 there was nothing of the kind to be seen on Broadway. In 1920-21 came Porter Emerson Browne’s Mexican melodrama, The Bad Man, with most of its success due to sly digs at both sides of the international line, and George M. Cohan’s joke at the expense of audiences as well as playwrights, The Tavern. Last season, playgoers good-humoredly made a satire out of the deadly serious absurdities of the British melodrama, Bulldog Drummond; the Chauve-Souris twitted Russian drama a little—in Russian; and the firm of Kaufman and Connelly began in Dulcy and To the Ladies! to vend biting wit at the expense of scenario writers and advertisers, efficiency experts and after-dinner speakers.
This season a perfect flood of satire broke upon us, most of it very good indeed, and some of it destined to be successful with a large public. Besides The Torch-Bearers, there have been R. U. R., grim sarcasm upon labour and capital, and a new bill of the Chauve-Souris, the Kaufman-Connelly version of Henry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies, Six Characters in Search of an Author, from the Italian, and The World We Live In, the insect comedy from the Czecho-Slovak.
The future of The Torch-Bearers, now that its Broadway career is over, brings us up against the little theatre movement. I am very much in favor of that odd and amazing phenomenon. I believe a great deal of the promise of the American stage outside New York and a surprising amount of its present accomplishment in that metropolis, is due to the uncontrollable desire of people not so very unlike Mrs. Pampinelli to produce plays. Kelly’s satire touches the lower fringes of what Mrs. P. calls “the movement,” but it might be directed at Maurice Browne, Sam Hume, and Irving Pichel and the little theatre would still go on, and The Torch-Bearers would become—as I am sure it will—one of the most popular pieces in the repertory of the amateur actor. Many a Mrs. Pampinelli, safe in the sense of her own self-importance, will do for The Torch-Bearers all that Mrs. P. did—which is, as Kelly observes, to “tell the players where to go on the stage, so they won’t be running into each other.”