From another town—Lowell—I wrote: “A newspaper man from Tyrone lamented last night the Playboy fight. He said all nationalities here are very sensitive. The Swedes had a play taken off that represented some Swedish women drinking. The French Canadians, he says, are as touchy as the Irish. He said that in consequence of this sensitiveness, in the police reports the nationality of those brought up before the court is not given. I looked in the Lowell newspaper next day, and I saw that this was true. One José Viatchka was brought up charged with the theft of two yards of cloth. She was found guilty and her nationality was not given. Allan Carter made his second appearance for drunkenness. Being an American citizen, even his dwelling place, Canaan, N. H., was not kept secret. Thomas Kilkelly and Daniel O’Leary were fined for drunkenness. I felt very glad that their nationality was not given!”
Yale like Harvard demanded The Playboy, and we put it on for one night at New Haven. Synge’s plays and others on our list are being used in the course of English literature there, and professors and students wanted to see them. We were there for Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of November. On the first night we put on other plays. Next day there was a matinée and we gave Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Blanco Posnet and my own Image. I left before the matinée was over for Northampton, as I was to lecture that night at Smith College. Next day I was astonished to see a paragraph in a New Haven paper, saying that the Mayor, having been asked to forbid the performance of The Playboy, had sent his censor, the Chief of Police, Mr. Cowles, to attend a rehearsal of it; that several passages had been objected to by him and that the manager had in consequence suppressed them, and it had been given at the evening performance without the offending passages. I was astounded. I knew the report could not be correct, must be wholly incorrect, and yet one knows there is never smoke without even a sod of turf. The players, who arrived at Northampton that morning, were equally puzzled. There had been no rehearsal, and the play had been given as ever before. I wired to a friend, the head of the University Press at Yale, to investigate the matter. The explanation came: “Chief Cowles,” as the papers called him, had attended, not a rehearsal but the matinée. He was said to have objected to certain passages, though he had not sent word of this to any of our people. The passages he objected to were not spoken at the evening performance of The Playboy, because the play in which they are spoken was Blanco Posnet. Yale laughed over this till we could almost hear the echoes, indeed the echoes appeared in the next day’s papers. The Gaelic American, however, announced that in New Haven one of our plays “was allowed to be presented only after careful excision of obscene passages.”
Washington was the next place where The Playboy was to appear. I wrote home from there on November 12th: “Liebler’s Manager wired for me to come on here and skip Albany. To-day two or three priests preached against us, and a pamphlet has been given away at the chapel doors denouncing us. I think it would be a good thing to put it up in the Hall of the Abbey framed for Dublin people to see. The worst news is that the players have arrived without Sinclair. He had a fall down six steps when coming down to the stage at Albany and hurt his back. The doctor said it was only the muscles that were hurt and that he would be all right to-day, but he has wired to-day that he cannot move. A bad performance would worry me more than the pamphlet.
“These are some of its paragraphs:
“‘The attention of fair-minded Washingtonians is called to a most malignant travesty of Irish life and religion about to be presented upon the stage of a local theatre by the “Irish Players.” This travelling Company is advertised as “coming from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.” True, but they came from Dublin, followed by the hisses and indignation of an outraged populace!
“‘A storm of bitter protest has been raised in every city in which they have presented their false and revolting pictures of Irish life. Dublin people never accepted the plays. They virtually kicked them from the stage. England gave them no reception.’
“Then they quote ‘a Boston critic’ (this is Dr. Gallagher, who wrote that letter to the Boston papers):
“‘“Nothing but hell-inspired ingenuity and a satanic hatred of the Irish people and their religion could suggest, construct, and influence the production of such plays. On God’s earth the beastly creatures of the plays never existed.”
“‘Such are the productions which, hissed from Dublin, hawked around England by the “Irish Players” for the delectation of those who wished to see Irishmen shown unfit for self-government, are now offered to the people of Washington. Will Washington tolerate the lie?