The Magdalene is no longer a shadowy ideal with a somewhat buxom body, scantily draped, with indefinite hair and with the lifeless beauty that the old masters paint. Nor is she quite the woman of the scriptures who is presented to one’s mind without that quality which is called local coloring, and with too much of the quality that is ever present with the women in the scriptures—a something between uncleanness and final complete redemption.
No, Mary Magdalene is Mrs. Fiske, a slight woman still in the last throes of youth, with two shoulders which move impatiently, expressing indescribable emotions of aliveness and two lips which perform their office—that of coloring, bewitching, torturing, perfuming, anointing the words that come out of them. Apart from these lips, Mary Magdalene’s face has a wonderfully round and childish look, and her two round eyes at first sight give one an idea of positive innocence. In the Magdalene’s face—and in that of an actor of Mrs. Fiske’s range—these are a beautifully delicate incongruity.
And my friend Annabel Lee has told me that the strongest things are the delicate incongruities—the strongest in all this wide world. Because they make you consider—and considering, you wait.
With such a pair of round, innocent eyes of some grayish color—who can blame Mary Magdalene?
In the latter acts of the play these eyes go one step farther than innocence: they do hunger and thirst after righteousness. And, ah, dear heaven (you thought to yourself), how well they did it! To hunger and thirst after righteousness—not herself, but her eyes. That was this Mary Magdalene’s art.
This Mary Magdalene, though she is indeed in the last throes of youth—without reference to the years she may know—has yet beneath her chin a very charming roundness of flesh which one day obviously will become a double chin. Just now it is enchanting. There are feminine children of seven and eight with round faces, who have just that fullness beneath the chin, and beneath the chin of Mary Magdalene—and added to her eyes—it carries on the idea of innocence and inexperience to a rare good degree. Any other woman actor would have long since massaged this fullness away. Forsooth, perhaps this is the one woman actor who could wear such a thing with beauty.
Mary Magdalene’s hair in its deep redness is scornful and aggressive in the first acts of the play. In the latter acts it assumes a marvelous patheticness. And, if you like, there is a world of patheticness in red hair.
If Mary Magdalene’s hair were of a different color—if the bronze shadows were yellow, or gray, or black, or brown shadows—her lips and her shoulders were in vain.
On the stage Mary Magdalene stands with her back to her audience—she stands, calm and placid, for three or four minutes before the rising and falling curtain, graciously permitting all to admire and feast their eyes upon the red of her hair.