Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"But an author writes a play and he or she knows—" Miss Adair was beginning to say to Mr. Rooney with kind patience, when he interrupted her as he rose to take his departure.

"The author oughter write all he knows and let it go at that," he said as he spat on the carpet of the box with no sign of compunction. "The stage-manager can do the rest." And with no form of leave-taking he departed.

"And the American drama has to be filtered through that sort of—of illiteracy?" Miss Adair turned and demanded of Mr. Vandeford.

"The American drama is often written by people who have been too closely associated with books on a library shelf, so that it needs to be filtered through a little gross humanity to get across to—humanity in the gross, which pays to see it. If a scholar writes and produces a play scholars go to see it all right, but all the scholars in America only fill one theater twice, and then what is to become of scholar and wife and children, as well as producer, manager, and theater-owner?" Mr. Vandeford spoke slowly, choosing his words.

"Aren't any of the stage-managers educated gentlemen?" demanded Miss Adair, with an interest that was fast becoming impersonal, for she had the wit to see that in some ways Mr. Vandeford's summary of the situation between author and stage-manager was sound.

"Yes, a few, but not the most successful ones," answered Mr. Vandeford. "I tell you truly that a stage-manager has to be a genius to succeed. He must be a man with a vision and sheer brutality enough to put the vision that he gets from his conception of the play he is producing into twenty other mentalities and make them present the play as a harmonious whole to an audience. He cannot be a respecter of persons while he is pounding, and he must not be interfered with or his vision is obscured and the play loses. Do you see what I mean?"

"Then an author ought to produce his own plays," Miss Adair decided very promptly.

"Yes," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a whimsical smile down into the eager, pale, intensely creative face raised to his. "When an author is born who will study years until he is an expert electrician, other years in great studios until he can paint scenery that is a work of art, delve into old books until he knows costuming of thousands of periods in hundreds of lands and how to sketch it, then gives himself to the studying of stagecraft and the writing of half a hundred plays until he writes one that is really great; after which, if he has the strength and the nerves to produce that play, we will all go to see the great human drama. That is, if he has had time to live with and in the hearts of people so as to supply that gross sympathy with the masses who buy tickets which Rooney got while climbing out of the gutter. God grant he comes some day to America—but you are not he!"

"No, I'm not," admitted Miss Adair, with her eyes smiling back into his whimsically, "but what you say makes me see that the—the producer—you are the whole thing. You get it all—me and Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry together and pound us into—into a play. I make that acknowledgment."

"If you ask the stage-manager he will say that the success of a play is his; the costumer will claim that success; the star knows it is his or hers, and the lead is sure that it is due to the support; the author surely has some claim to draw the huge royalties, and the location of his theater makes the theater-owner know that any play in that theater will go. Yes, the producer will always claim the whole show if it all goes well. If it fails the show then belongs entirely to the producer, who picked it in its manuscript stage, and he is no good as a producer. If he fails a few times hand-running, to the scrap heap with him!"