I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

DAVID BELASCO
“His love of the theater as an institution is, I am sure, as deep and as real as mine.”
(Photo by the Misses Colby, N. Y. From the Messmore Kendall Collection)

To me it has always been of great interest to watch how the type of writer, and the type of play changed and progressed with the change in the character and the standards of our audiences. Only the superficial observer will claim superiority in the plays of 1890 to the plays of 1910, and since 1910 we have had an almost steady growth in the art of the serious dramatist, a growth so important that beside it the smudges of filth spilled by a few unimportant scribblers may very easily be forgotten. The question of dirt in the theater in any case is no longer of any real importance. The extreme frankness of modern society, the freedom with which all sorts of questions are discussed in the home and in all walks of life, has acted as a complete disinfectant. It was an extremely easy thing to shock small coins out of a Puritan community but the man who has skill enough to successfully pander to an over-sophisticated audience usually has sense enough to use that skill to better advantage. The censor in the end will disappear, not wholly because he is no longer needed but because he will be no longer understood.

My grandfather and his family walked to church every Sunday because to drive on the Lord’s Day was a sin. I walk four miles around a golf course every Sunday, and it is probable that my moral standards are as high as his were.

If I am sure of anything at all, I am sure that I am not my brother’s keeper, and, deeply as I resent dirt for dirt’s sake in the theater, I know that the way to end it is not by allowing some one person or some group of persons to set up their own moral or ethical standard and compel the rest of the world to abide by it. The professional moralist soon standardizes his own beliefs just as the professional politician does, and he never has and never can properly represent the shifting taste of the majority. Just what may properly be discussed on the stage or in society varies so greatly with the passing moods of the times that any fixed and rigid rules soon become fixed and rigid absurdities. I distinctly recall the extraordinary difficulty my mother had some forty odd years ago in delicately conveying to us the news that our old dog was soon to have an increase in her family, and in those days a female dog was called a female dog, economized speech being at that time considered to be of less importance than elegance.

I have studied plays all my life and I am sure I don’t know enough about them to be qualified to act as a censor. I am equally sure that it would be very difficult to find any man who knows more about them than I do who would consent to act in that capacity. The temper of our people is further away to-day than it ever was before from all these laws that try to compel us all to live according to the beliefs of a handful of persons who still cling frantically to the old Puritan notion that all one has to do to abolish sin is to forbid it. The thing that should be unlawful in the theater is bad taste, and good taste is the result of education, not of restriction.

Every tendency of our American drama to-day is toward drawing a more cultivated and more sophisticated audience. The demand of this audience is for plays that mean something, and as soon as all the dramatists and all the managers who still seem to be blind to this fact are snugly relegated to the poor house we shall have no more talk of censorship. I have never in my life seen a dirty play that has had one-tenth as much effect upon an audience as many a fine play I could name has had, partly because the mass reaction of every audience is always healthy, and partly because fine plays are written by fine dramatists, and dirty plays are written by incompetent scribblers. The instinctive feeling that it is a fine thing to be a gentleman that comes from sitting through one performance of JOURNEY’S END will go much deeper under any normal skin than any dirty joke heard in an off-color musical show. If I for one moment thought that the theater had anything at all to do with forming the moral tone of a nation, I might have more patience with all this talk of political and national censorship, but I know better. The theater reflects that tone, it does not guide it.

I have the masculine man’s contempt for dirty plays, arising, I suppose, from the fact that masculine men never write them. Dirty plays are always written either by women or by effeminate men, and always have been. There is, of course, a pathological reason for this, but the fact remains that the normal and healthy male is not especially interested in the eavesdropping of the servants’ hall, and, although he may offend by bluntness and lack of taste, he is seldom downright nasty.

I hope that no one who reads these rather rambling notes of mine will think that I have any desire to deny the woman playwright any particle of credit, but I use the word playwright as I use the word actor, to describe any one who devotes themselves to these arts, either man or woman. Sex seems rather unimportant to me beside the fact that one can act or write. Of course some of our fine plays have been written by women, and many of the greatest actors the world has ever known have been of the feminine sex. It would be difficult to name three men who ranked as actors beside Bernhardt, Duse and Charlotte Cushman, and in the theater of to-day I dare any one to make a list of five men who could stand comparison with Mrs. Fiske, Jane Cowl, Pauline Lord, Helen Hayes and Ethel Barrymore.

Through the nineties Charles Frohman produced a long line of well-made English dramas, and the Pinero school of expert craftsmen took the place of the writers of polite melodrama. Charles Kline brought his skill in bringing forward controversial subjects of timely interest and Clyde Fitch arrived with his box of parlor tricks. Edward Sheldon came down from Harvard with about the first authentic message and in him I have always felt the spark of the true dramatist. Eugene Walter in THE EASIEST WAY produced the first important American play unless some of the less widely known of the James A. Hearn plays deserve that rating. Personally I thought MARGUERITE FLEMING a very fine thing. But THE EASIEST WAY was a little after the time I have been writing of and my problem at that moment was to learn a simpler trade.

As it happens, I have lived my personal life rather away from my fellow workers of the theater, not because I haven’t always valued the friendship of actors but because I have been a miser of my time. I have never been much of a club man and nothing at all of a social butterfly. I am sure that the sight of me, pushed into evening clothes by a stern wife and perspiring copiously in an effort to conceal my rage and rebellion, is enough to cast a pall over any social gathering. Even in Hollywood, where dinner guests may be more readily hired than anywhere else on earth, I, if I should lose my credit at my hotel, would undoubtedly starve to death. I have never even been a member of the Lambs Club and, for no other reason than that by not allowing myself to get into the habit of having anything to do but my work, I have naturally gained a good many hours.