SOME FEMININE STARS
By Alan Dale
Advertised personalities. Enormous sums squandered on theatrical impossibilities. Amelia Bingham’s pluck and restlessness. “Nancy Stair” rather tiresome. Lesser lights in star-dom.
Three thin, anæmic, bedraggled plays, each with a heralded, exultant feminine “star” skewered to its bloodless pulp, dropped into this metropolis just ahead of the reluctant crocus. Three highly advertised “personalities” tried to weather out a veritable emaciation of drama, and the result was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Slowly but surely is knowledge being forced upon the deluded manager, and he is learning to appreciate the vital truth of the much battered Shakespearian quotation, “The play’s the thing.” No trumped-up interest in one particular puppet will take the place of the drama itself. This is a pity. It is easier to create a marionette than it is to construct a play.
The three highly advertised “personalities” that reached us at crocus time were owned and engineered by Miss Amelia Bingham, Miss Mary Mannering and Miss Virginia Harned. I mention them in the order in which they appeared, which is not necessarily that of superior merit. They came in at the fag end of a tired season, dragging a load of pitiful dramatic bones. Hope ran high, but fell in sheer despondency. In spite of the fact that the poet prefers to picture hope as springing, I think that in this case it may be better portrayed as running. There is a sensation of panic in the race.
Miss Bingham came to town with a very swollen “comedy-drama,” called “Mademoiselle Marni,” from the pen of a “monsoor,” programmed as Henri Dumay—said to be an American “monsoor” at that. This actress affects French plays for reasons that have never been explained, and that certainly do not appear. As a “star,” she is of course entitled to treat herself to any luxury that may seem to tempt her histrionic appetite, and the Gallic siren evidently appeals to her. It is not likely that there will be international complications, although the provocation must at times be keen.
“Mademoiselle Marni” was one of those impossible chromos that might have been designed for the mere purpose of giving one’s sense of humor a chance to ventilate itself. In the serious theater-goer—and one is bound to consider him—it awoke amazement. How is it that at rehearsal a dozen presumably sane people can “pass” such an effort, he must have asked himself? Why is it that in a theatrical venture that costs a great deal of money, there are no misgivings? The serious theater-goer is never able to answer these questions.
It is almost proverbial that the most hopeless sort of theatrical enterprise—if conventional—never languishes for lack of funds. Try and start a solid business scheme, in which you can calculate results in black and white, and the difficulties and discouragements will be almost insuperable. Endeavor to obtain money for an invention or innovation that has success written across it in luminous letters, and you will “strike a snag,” as the rude phrase goes, with marvelous celerity. But a bad play—one that to the unsophisticated theater-usher or to the manager’s scrubwoman must perforce appear as such—experiences no such fate. This is one of the marvels of theaterdom.
In the case of “Mademoiselle Marni” Miss Bingham herself must have spent an enormous sum that she would probably have hesitated to invest in some enterprise sane or possible. The play was a turgid coagulation of illogical episodes lacking in all plausibility. This particular actress is generally happy when she can select for herself a character that is beloved by all the masculine members of the cast. Apparently, she “sees” herself in this rôle. She likes to appear as the personification of all the virtues, self-sacrificing and otherwise, and this idiosyncrasy is, of course, frequently fatal to sustained interest. We do not care for these sensational paragons.