Lecturers on play construction—Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard, David Carb, Philip Barry, Edward Sheldon, Percy Mackaye, Robert Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Owen Davis.
Lecturers on the art of acting, etc.—John Mason Brown, Walter Hampden, Elliot Cabot, Robert Middlemass, Osgood Perkins.
There is a list for you! All Harvard men and all men who have done real work. I can remember when I was one of three Harvard men in the game. Now we are getting our new blood from all the great universities. Walter Eaton told us at one of our meetings that he had listed over five hundred universities and high schools in the country that were giving special courses in the Arts of the theater! Does that look like a dying institution? Five hundred schools turning out each year a flock of boys and girls who, if they have learned nothing else, have learned to love the theater.
To me that doesn’t spell the end of the theater, it means the beginning, and I am eager to try to teach our own little group all I can before they get started on their own and get so far ahead of me that I shall have to turn about and study their methods.
This school, with its staff of real workers, seems to me to be about the most practical place of instruction established since the day when the boy in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was told to spell w-i-n-d-e-r, and then go and wash it. I know what meeting and talking to such a list of men would have meant to me thirty-five years ago. Among the warm spots in my memory are meetings I had years ago with Dion Boucicault, A. M. Palmer, Daly and Percy Mackaye’s famous father, and these men weren’t trying to teach me anything, they were trying to get rid of me as quickly as they could.
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CHAPTER VII ◆ THE DRAMATIST’S PROFESSION
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As time went on I found myself fully versed in all of the troubles that beset a dramatist and armed against all of them but one. I had learned a good substitute for patiently waiting for a production by turning out so many plays that one of them was always on the fire. I had learned, in a measure, to comfort myself for the present failure with the thought of a coming success, but no philosophy of mine has ever taught me what could possibly be done with a dramatist on the opening night of one of his plays. I have, I think, tried everything, and all that I can be sure of is that the last way of passing that dreadful ordeal was very much the worst way I had ever experimented with.
Twenty years ago it was the custom to drag a terrified author before the curtain at the end of the performance and entice him into telling the audience how glad he was that they liked his play, and how grateful he was to the manager, the director, the actors, stage hands, ushers and stage-door-keeper. This gracious speech being received with some applause, the poor author went home thrilled by this assurance of overwhelming success, and woke up the next morning to read that his play was probably the worst catastrophe of a direful season. This custom of writers being part of the first night show has gone out—not, I think, that the authors wouldn’t still be willing to oblige, but because the managers learned that most of the shows were bad enough without any added attraction.
Some of our more dignified authors a generation ago used to sit in the stage box in full view of the audience, but they grew strong men in those days, and I doubt if there is a playwright alive bold enough to follow their example. I have tried sitting in the gallery, staying at home, standing at the back of the theater after the house lights were lowered, hanging around the stage alley, going to a picture show, drinking too many cocktails, and walking around Central Park, but so far I haven’t found a way that wasn’t awful. This night is the climax of six weeks of hard work, to say nothing of all the effort put into the writing of the play; it means a fortune or nothing, fame or something that is almost disgrace, and the poor wretch can do nothing. A forgetful actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.