Jed Harris seems to me to be a truly remarkable editor. I have never seen him direct a play, but I have talked plays with him, and if I am any judge of plays he knows a lot about them. He has gone far already for so young a man, but he will go further.
Reuben Marmoulain and Chester Erskine are among the new men. Both of them have something.
There are other good directors, of course. Just at present I have been writing only of the men I knew.
The theater of the nineties, even the first class theater, was very different from what it is to-day and the difference, of course, was due to the difference in our audiences. The stage always reflects the times and one could easily enough get a mental picture of any period or of any civilization by a careful study of ten or a dozen successful dramas and comedies of the day.
America during these years was still dominated by a Puritan tradition and its drama was based upon a stern Puritan creed and an almost equally uncomfortable sentimentality. It must be remembered also that at this time our “melting pot” joke was at its very funniest and every year hundreds of thousands of foreign born flung themselves upon our hospitable, if somewhat undiscriminating, shores and each year a good number of these were joined to our audiences.
The demand was for good acting also rather than for good plays, just as it is now in the “talkies.” It is, I think, only when the drama has grown to maturity that the focus shifts from the player to the play.
Bronson Howard was the favorite playwright of New York when I arrived there, although the growing success of young Augustus Thomas threatened his supremacy. Edward Harrigan was very popular, both as an actor and a writer, and deservedly so. The spirit of America has always seemed to me to have been best reflected by three men, who followed one another and kept alive a true spirit of the folk play, writing of men and women, of happenings and emotions of the everyday life around them: William Harrigan, Charles Hoyt and George Cohan. These three have left very deep footprints and in the case of George Cohan at least much more than that. The peculiar comedy style of all of our American playwrights of to-day was directly founded on his droll staccato and even the very modern wise-crack has descended from his careless impudence.
“When I first came to New York William Winter was by far the outstanding critic.”
(From a photograph taken in 1891. Courtesy of The Players)
