Famous Prima Donnas

by Lewis Clinton Strang

MARIE DRESSLER

MARIE DRESSLER.

One cannot see Marie Dressler on the stage without being convinced that she is acting no one in the world but herself. Such, I believe, is the actual condition of affairs, although there are sometimes strange paradoxes in theatrical life. It would not be altogether extraordinary for the rollicking tomboy of the stage to be in private life the most retired and the most dignified person imaginable, a woman with spinster written all over her face and reeking in domesticity, with a decided fondness for tea, toast, and tidies.

However, that is not the case with Marie Dressler. She has a mental quirk that keeps the incongruous side of life in her view practically all the time. She cannot help pricking constantly the bubble of mirth any more than she can help breathing. Her humor is just the kind that one would naturally expect to find as a companion to her overflowing physique,—ponderous, weighty, and a bit crude, perhaps, but spontaneous, real, and thoroughly good-natured. She never stabs with the keen shaft of cynical wit, and she does no business in the epigram market. Her specialty is incongruity, for Marie Dressler is a burlesquer in thought, word, and deed, and being a burlesquer she is of necessity absolutely without illusions. When one is so susceptible to the oddities, the inconsistencies, and the tragic pettiness of human affairs as she is, it is a toss-up whether or not his settled condition of mind, after a fair experience with the world, be one of gloomy pessimism or irresponsible optimism. Had Miss Dressler been by nature cold, suspicious, and inherently selfish, had she been unsympathetic and without the milk of human kindness, her instinct for incongruity would surely have turned her toward misanthropy. Her disposition, however, was rollicking, jovial, and fun-loving. She was naturally impulsive, generous, and warm-hearted. Consequently, life, even in its smallnesses and its meannesses, made her laugh. With the humorist's whimsical temperament she united also the happy faculty of being able to communicate to others by means of the theatre her comical view of things. Choosing to do this through the force of her own personality rather than by infusing her personality into a dramatist's conception, she became a droll, a professional jester.

Miss Dressler's best-known and most characteristic work on the stage was done in the rôle of the boisterous music-hall singer, Flo Honeydew, in "The Lady Slavey." It was hardly a case of acting,—better call it a case of letting herself go. Marie Dressler without subterfuge presented herself in the guise of the unconventional Miss Honeydew. She seemed a big, overgrown girl and a thoroughly mischievous romp with the agility of a circus performer and the physical elasticity of a professional contortionist.

To call her graceful would be an unpardonable accusation. Possibly she might have been graceful had she chosen to be; but what she was after principally was energy, and she got it,—whole car-loads of it. Her comic resource was inexhaustible, her animal spirits were irrepressible, and her audacity approached the sublime.

Yet, amid all her amazing unconventionality and her astonishing athletic feats, one found, if he met her on her own plane of impersonal jollity, neither vulgarity nor suggestiveness. Her mental attitude toward her audience was absolutely clean and straightforward. She was not a woman cutting up antics and indulging in unseemly pranks, but a royal good fellow with an infinite variety of jest.

With nothing especially tangible to offer as evidence, I have a suspicion that Marie Dressler, if she could escape from her reputation as a burlesquer, might act a "straight" part not at all badly. It is only a fine line between burlesque and legitimate acting, only a triflingly different mental attitude, which results in travesty instead of seriousness. Of course, the burlesque must be set forth with the proper amount of exaggeration to give point to the take-off, but that is only a matter of technique. Artificiality in actors and insincerity in dramatists very often result in unconscious burlesque. The melodramatic school is particularly prone to this most inartistic of blunders, and many a good laugh has followed lines that were supposed to be charged with the most highly colored sentiments and situations that were intended to be dramatically strong and impressive. One at all familiar with Miss Dressler's methods cannot have failed to notice her trick of beginning a speech with profound and even convincing seriousness and ending it in ridiculous contrast with a sudden drop from the dramatic to the commonplace. In spite of the fact that one knows for a certainty that she is fooling him, she succeeds invariably in making the first part of her sentence seem honest and sincere.

Now, I do not believe that she could hit just the right key every time in these startling and laughter-provoking contrasts, if she did not have to an unusual extent the instinct for dramatic effect, which is so large a part of the equipment of the legitimate actor. However, I hope that she will never make the experiment. There are already enough serious actors of ordinary calibre, while the genuine burlesquer of Marie Dressler quality is rare indeed.