I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

The most interesting of these activities was the attempt to establish a National Theatre as it was called, and although the plan failed, I have always thought the failure was unnecessary. The committee to organize this National Theatre was selected from the best men of the theater, the fine arts departments of the leading eastern universities and the leading social and financial groups of New York. We were to produce one play a year with special attention to manners and diction and show this play at moderate prices in all of the larger cities of the country.

At the first meeting at the Astor Hotel, Augustus Thomas was selected as chairman and from the start most of the active work fell upon his broad shoulders. Augustus Thomas is by far the best presiding officer I have ever known, and for years it has been my fate to be obliged to follow him as chairman, president or mouthpiece of countless societies and committees; but on this occasion I was content to remain in the background. I seem to be of use only when there is a very practical issue, and the National Theatre was a rather altruistic, rather visionary scheme that seemed to me to be a little out of my range. To me the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has equaled him. Aside from his ability as a writer, he is a man of real eloquence and of commanding presence, and his control of any meeting over which he presides always makes me blush at the thought of my own abrupt and rather arbitrary methods.

Upon this occasion, in spite of the great names on the committee, Mr. Thomas was given full charge, and it was decided that the first play to be produced by the National Theatre should be AS YOU LIKE IT, a decision I heard announced with dire misgivings as I have always thought it a particularly dull and silly play. I was naturally afraid, however, to announce any such radical views in that exalted company. A cast was engaged and the production opened in due time before a brilliant audience in Washington.

It is an unfortunate fact that even the plays of Shakespeare that have retained their vitality can only be efficiently done by players who have been trained to play them, and in this particular case the performance was not anything to rave over. In fact the curtain fell on the first performance with that dull thud that always announces failure, and the audience was cold and unresponsive.

Mrs. Thomas, who had been with her husband through many of his own first nights, and who had been trained, as all wives of playwrights are, to give help and comfort to the stricken, hurried backstage as the curtain fell and found her husband sitting sadly amidst the scenery of Shakespeare’s famous masterpiece with his head bowed and a look of deep dejection on his face. Her maternal instinct fully aroused by her man’s agony, she stepped tenderly to his side and putting her arm gently over his shoulder she murmured bravely: “Never mind, Gus, thank God you didn’t write it.”

There was no reason that I could see why the first attempt of the National Theatre should have ended its existence, but the fact remains that from that day to this I have heard no more about it and I turned back to my own work with some feeling of thankfulness. After all, if a man must be mixed up in a failure, why shouldn’t he have the fun of being responsible for all of it? and, since a man with a mind trained to full activity must focus his thoughts on something, isn’t it better after all that the something should be the activity he knows the most about?

I don’t in the least know how long a writer is supposed to last. It may well be that my thirty odd years have been the greater part of my share although I am sure I should enjoy making it an even hundred, but I do know that to keep up with the parade to-day a writing man must keep his eyes wide open and his fingers on the pulse of the public. This is many times more true to-day than it was in the years before the war, but even then the critical sense of the public was growing rapidly.

In the old days a playwright’s plots and characters were accepted about as automatically as the church creeds of the time were accepted, and for about the same reason; the habit of the average citizen of thinking things out for himself had not yet grown to its present stimulating proportion. If both the church and the stage of to-day are placed in a position where they must fight for their life, surely nothing that is fine in either of them is in danger. With the bunk gone the truth will be twice as powerful.

It has always seemed to me to have been Ibsen who sounded the first note of modern characterization in the drama. Good dramatists have always drawn good characters, but the accent upon the character and the character’s propelling force upon the narrative was quite different. Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Rip, Caleb Plummer, Duston Kirk and hundreds of others were finely drawn characters, but Ibsen’s Nora not only lived and moved but she moved the play with her and her emotional progress marked the progress of the drama.

After the production of THE NERVOUS WRECK I tried very hard to write the play I earnestly wanted to write, but I couldn’t get it. THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were true plays from my point of view, honest attempts to do the best work I knew how to do. But I had a feeling that the American drama should express a more optimistic note, that it was, or ought to be, possible to write of life as truly as plays of that class were trying to write about it, and yet express the fundamental difference between our lives and the lives of the people of Middle Europe, whose dramatists had given birth to the new school of naturalistic play writing.