I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

During my time as a dramatist, during which I have written between two and three hundred plays, I have had, if we figure twelve characters to a play, somewhere around three thousand actors to play these parts. Naturally I have known all these men and women well and, as I have seen practically every drama, farce and comedy of any importance at all that has been produced during all these thirty-five years, I may claim fairly enough an acquaintance with our American players.

To me there have been a lot of good actors in the world and one mighty one—unfortunately not an American and more unfortunately already an old woman when I first saw her—but Sarah Bernhardt had the power to do something to me that no one else could ever do. I had no critical judgment of her at all. She spoke, and I listened and believed. Edwin Booth still seems to me to be the greatest of the others, although a long way behind the “Divine Sarah.” I saw Booth first as Hamlet during my second year at Harvard in the winter of 1890. I saw him later with Modjeska and Otis Skinner in several plays and with Lawrence Barrett the following year in OTHELLO. He was as simple and as true in his acting as any of our fine actors of to-day, although the method of his time was declamatory and artificial. I dimly recall the elder Salvini in some version of Dr. Bird’s THE GLADIATOR, but I was too young at the time to carry away any more definite impression than that he had the loudest voice I had ever heard. Jefferson had great skill and a wonderful personality and his “Rip,” the model for the Lightnin’ Bills, the Old Soaks and all of their lovable disreputable brotherhood, remains towering above them all.

Richard Mansfield I thought very like the little girl who had a little curl—when he was bad he was awful. In some of her parts, especially in THE TAMING OF THE SHREW and in a lightweight, imported comedy called THE LOVE CHASE, I have never seen Ada Rehan’s equal. Janauschek had a real tragic power, and at her best Modjeska was superb. Just how to place Maude Adams I have never known, but I do know that she has charmed and fascinated me so often that I think it only fair to give her the credit of listing her with the great.

If no names in our theater to-day stand quite so high as these, I think it is the writer’s fault rather than the actors’, or possibly the fault of the audiences who have turned away from the romantic play to the grim and reticent drabness of the naturalistic drama. The glamor and the sweep of the old declamatory school naturally furnished the actor with a better chance to score than he has to-day. Then, of course, the great passions of the romances of thirty years ago find no response in our audiences. Life is quite as amazing as it ever was but by no means as mysterious. We have dissected and psychoanalyzed ourselves and one another past the point where we stand in awe of any one’s “darkened soul” and advise calomel. Then too our audiences are different; even thirty years ago thousands of our people thought the theater a place of evil and were convinced that anything that represented romance or the glamorous was sinful. The death of this notion was a very healthy symptom and the start toward a sane understanding of life.

As any man of the world knows, the diversions usually listed as sins gained their following very largely from the free spirits who searched for forbidden things, the prescribed pleasures being of rather dubious enchantment. The fact that these stock sins are usually shabby, ugly and dull was kept a profound secret. If we could convince our young people that as a usual thing it is more fun to be decent than it is to go poking about in dark places we would make as great a step forward in our morals as we have in our drama. After all in both it’s simply a case of frankness and honesty.

These were the years of the complete control of the theater by the famous syndicate, Klaw and Erlanger, the Frohmans, Rich and Harris, Hayman, Nixon and Zimmerman. No longer were we vagabonds and strolling players. The out of town manager who used to spend his summer standing on a corner on Fourteenth Street, where his shabby silk hat was his only office, now had his attractions booked for him by the Klaw and Erlanger Agency. The syndicate, successful from the first, soon secured control of practically all of the first class houses in the country and a once careless, slipshod business became regulated. Thanks to the syndicate and to Lee Shubert, who alone and unaided challenged this great organization to battle and fought them so stiff a draw that for years the spoils were divided between them, authors now began to eat as regularly as ordinary mortals, and the high-powered motor cars so common to playwrights to-day can trace their being to this source.

There is no doubt at all that these two great forces in the theater are responsible for making a business of what had before their time been a sort of gypsy’s occupation, but unfortunately the fates are rarely prodigal and the men gifted with the ability to organize an art have never yet known what to do with it after it is organized. They always remind me of the cowboy who fought the bear and after getting him down had to call for help because he was afraid to let go. As a matter of fact I have wondered of late if there wasn’t such a thing as being too successful in organization. I have given a lot of time to the welding together of our Dramatists’ Guild, just as many other playwrights have, and now we are extremely well organized, with nobody to fight.

The Actors’ Equity is all powerful after years of honest effort, but more actors are out of work than ever before. It’s a fine thing for the actor and the writer to be able to enforce fair conditions of employment, but unfortunately we can’t force the employment itself. A good job under fair conditions is a great thing, but no job at all isn’t so good. It may be worth a thought in passing that if we of the two creative groups in the theater had been as active in working for the theater itself as we were in fighting for the power of our individual groups, we might at this writing be better off. Even yet we might, by a sacrifice of some of the power we have gained, help to bring back strength to the business that must flourish if we are to flourish. We need have no fear of the old tyrannies; they have gone forever. When actors and authors meet their old antagonists, the managers, to-day, they meet on equal ground and, as my old comrade Gene Buck puts it: “All false whiskers are off, and everybody comes out from behind the bushes.”

The complete control of the drama in America by the business men of the theater started at about the time I entered the lists and continued for about twenty years. Under their rule prosperity came to us and lasted up to the time when the public became tired of a drama that soon became a factory product, as was the natural result of a system that put the business man in control of the creative artist. I have seen this happen so many times, in so many forms of the amusement business, that it has grown to be an old story to me.

I am old enough to remember the group of managers who were the leading producers just before the time of the “syndicate” and I know the difference in their methods and ideals. Daly, A. M. Palmer, Daniel and Charles Frohman, and the great stars like Booth, Jefferson, Modjeska, Fannie Davenport and a few others had a real following both in New York and on the road; each one of them represented something. The public knew what to expect if they went to Daly’s Theatre, or to Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum on Fourth Avenue, just as they knew what to expect of Edwin Booth or Joe Jefferson. If A. M. Palmer made a production one knew very well the sort of entertainment that would be offered. From Hoyt or from Harrigan you knew the type of play that would be presented and took it or left it as your taste decided.