THE PRACTICAL HISTORY OF A PLAY.
"THE play, the play's the thing!"—not whereby, as moody Hamlet hath it, to catch the conscience of the king, but as a possible means of emancipation from the galling and unprofitable conditions of a literary career. A book which embodies months of research, the refined outcome of scholarly labor and reflective observation, may secure a definite and honorable place for its author, but it is not likely to yield as much in a pecuniary way as the salary of a good clerk. Even a successful novel which strikes the popular fancy and circulates through many editions is only a matter of a few hundred dollars. We look over the whole field of bookmaking and periodical-writing without discovering one practitioner of average ability, any man with every requisite but genius itself, who, though diligent and adaptative to circumstances, can find in the general work of his profession the income of an average doctor or lawyer. There is a veteran whom we are reminded of, each of whose books has had a sale of more than five thousand copies, while some of them have exceeded fifty thousand—which is nearly forty-nine times more than many volumes reach—and we know that he, with this exceptional success and by the industry of a lifetime, has not accumulated the smallest fortune, though he has been fertile and has lived within five thousand dollars a year. The ground is overcrowded, the struggle for place is exhausting, and the man who is wholly dependent on his profession for bread and butter finds himself elbowed and pushed against, not only by competitors of his own class, but also by many to whom literature is a recreation, a source of distinction, or collateral to some other business, and not the obdurate necessity it is to him.
The literary gift is too often a faculty which exists by itself, and is not conjoined with versatility. Weary though he may be, the author has no alternative, and must drag along in his profession, feeling that he were better out of it, and yet that he is useless for anything else. His future is held in the Acherontic depths of his ink-pot, and all he is capable of winning is in solution there. He thinks of the theatre in his despair, and may find comfort in the reflection that one substantially-successful play brings its author more money than a poet or historian receives for all the masterpieces of his life. Harry Esmond mentions with pride somewhere in his history that a play of his writing had the honor of being represented two or three times; and in the colonel's day dramatic literature was scarcely more profitable than other kinds of writing. Now, however, a new play, produced at a metropolitan theatre with the elaborate mounting and excellent acting that are customary, is considered a positive failure if it is withdrawn at the end of a month, and it is not unusual to see two or three pieces filling the whole season. The metropolitan successes are also wanted by managers in other cities; and from one manuscript, about one-third the length of an ordinary novelette, the author may derive twenty thousand dollars or more in two or three years.
The play holds out the one possibility of a fortune which literature without transcendent genius offers, and though the chances of winning are known to be few, the prize is so splendid that it is tried for by men of every intellectual calibre. The poet, the essayist, the novelist, the newspaper editor, the newspaper critic and the newspaper reporter, the scholar and the airy raconteur, have all written something for the theatre, and visions of the auditorium filled with a well-dressed, perfumed, smiling throng, of the lights, the applause and the excitement, have given speed to their pens. Beyond its profitableness the drama has another and powerful fascination for its author. Presupposing that it is competently acted and mounted with the exquisite taste and completeness of detail that we see at such theatres as the Union Square in New York, the manuscript is touched as by a magician's wand and from a collocation of words becomes a living, visible world, and a beatific, almost deifying, consciousness of creation fills the author as he contemplates the embodied offspring of his brain.
The poet, the essayist and the others have written their plays, inspired and accelerated by dreams of a sweeter success than they have known before, and if the reader should ask what has become of them we might answer by begging him to consult the theatrical records and find out how many new plays by American authors have been produced during the past ten years. The end, if not the history, of nearly all of them is the same. They have been received by the managers with a degree of attention measured and varied according to the positions and influences of the persons submitting them. Some of the authors have written to theatres praying for a hearing, and have waited in vain for an answer; others have succeeded in getting their manuscripts into some manager's hands, and have been promised a decision which has been put off from month to month, until at the end of a year or so they have been glad to recover their work, though it has not been read; a few have had their plays accepted, and are only sanguine at the beginning of each season to become disheartened before its close as this or that success of London or Paris has occupied the theatre and deferred the production of their own work, which is effectually entombed in an office-safe: these live on wearily, ever in sight of a desired object to which they never come nearer; and, finally, there are a limited number who, impatient of the delays or rejected at houses where alone production would be worth while, have withdrawn their plays and given them to secondary managers or "stars"—a course fatal to both pecuniary and artistic success.
After many vicissitudes all the manuscripts usually come home to their parents, who do not repeat their experiments, but, looking back on their dead ambition, shake their heads with an air of great sagacity when play-writing is mentioned and point ominously to a pile of leaves in some corner of their desks. Years ago, when we told a literary veteran who had written tragedies and other trifles for the Bowery in its palmy days that we were engaged upon a drama of our own, he vehemently protested against the folly. "Don't do it!" he cried. "They will tear your heart out," referring to the managers, who certainly deserve small credit for the way they treat the literary men who submit work to them. Nevertheless, in all the leading theatres there is in some part of the building an office, usually undiscoverable by the uninitiated, where plays are actually read and sometimes accepted. It is a small apartment guarded by an attendant, who instinctively knows to whom the manager is "at home" and to whom he is not—who has a welcoming smile for the critic of the big newspaper and an impatient shrug of disparagement for the author who calls for the twentieth time to see if his play has been read. There is a bunch of programmes hanging from a nail in the wall, and there are proofs of lithographic window-sheets and posters strewn upon the desks and chairs. The newspapers are filed, and copies of the latest editions are so profuse that the effect is more journalistic than theatrical. But the conversation is assiduously "professional," and there is a somewhat unusual familiarity of address among the persons present, who call one another by their Christian names. Sometimes an actor or actress attached to the theatre looks in, or a playwright who is in favor, or a provincial manager, or a fashionable "man about town" who in some occult way has obtained the entrée of the managerial sanctum. It strikes one that for an overburdened business-man the manager is very affable and patient. This is only during his moments of leisure, however, and when a play has to be discussed, the characters to be "cast" or engagements to be made none but members of the staff are admitted.
Not more than a dozen original plays by Americans have been produced at the three principal theatres of New York during the last six years. The most notable of these have been Pique, by Mr. Angustin Daly, who was his own manager; The Banker's Daughter, by Mr. Bronson Howard in collaboration with Mr. A. R. Cazauran, the former an experienced playwright, and the latter assistant manager of the theatre at which it was produced; The False Friend, by Mr. Edgar Fawcett, an established literary man; and Conscience, in collaboration, by Mr. A.E. Lancaster, a critic of distinction. It is worth observation that in each instance the author was in some measure intimate with the theatre and possessed some knowledge of stage-effect, the requirements and exigences of the companies for which he was writing. Literary ability alone will not make an acting play, even when it is wedded to the constructive faculty and dramatic instinct; and we often see a novelist whose characters are forcibly contrasted and whose climaxes are thrilling failing in stage-work, because he makes the fatal mistake of supposing that it can be done by the same methods as his stories. In a novel the author may be explanatory and analytical, telling how, why and wherefore, while in the play he must be concise, suggestive and synthetical, making his characters define themselves by emotion and action rather than by words.
What we have said, perhaps, shows how many things a candidate for dramatic honors requires to succeed. He must have literary ability of course, and not only must he have a nervous style, but he must be able to invent a plot of sustained interest and strong situations, and possess the faculty of prevising the effect what he is writing will have when seen by an audience under very different circumstances and in very different surroundings from those of his study.
But neither the difficulties nor the limitations of the market frighten away the aspirants. One theatre receives more than two hundred manuscripts a year, some from persons of education and literary training, from whom acceptable work might come, but many of them from men and women who are wholly disqualified for any sort of literature by the completeness of their ignorance. Border dramas, with five or six scenes to an act, are submitted to establishments where only elegant comedies and emotional dramas are produced, each with one scene to the act; high-flown tragedies in blank verse come begging at the doors of the theatre where airy musical pieces are a staple; and plays with all parts subordinated to that of a "star" are sent in to houses which depend on their stock companies and the carefully-balanced distribution of characters. It is not alone orthography and syntax that many of the people who write plays are deficient in: they lack the simple common sense which directs the man with chickens for sale to the poulterer and the farmer with potatoes to the grocer's. Perhaps this is why the manager makes a wry face when a new play by an unknown hand is mentioned to him. Such a mass of impracticable stuff is submitted to him that he loses heart and faith in turning it over. But generally it is turned over, and if among all the chaff one grain of wheat is found there is rejoicing, and the author finds himself elect.
The reader is usually a member of the executive staff of the theatre, who selects from all the manuscripts sent in those that are at all feasible, which are then read by the manager or assistant manager, and either rejected or held for future consideration. A few strong situations, a novel character or a brilliant piece of dialogue, though set in unequal surroundings, will often delay the final judgment, for the manager is as apprehensive of throwing away a good thing as of accepting a poor one, and if he sees a gleam of power he is reluctant to decide upon it without cogitation. He mentally revolves the question to see it from every point, and wonders if after some "fixing up" the play might not prosper. Should it prosper, it would be much more profitable to him than to the author: should it fail, it would involve a loss of several thousand dollars and injure the reputation of his theatre. While he is debating the matter, which is a serious one to him, a piece may be filling his house and he may have already selected the play to follow it. He looks over the new work at his leisure, and invites the criticism of his principal assistants; he considers its feasibility in reference to the peculiarities of his company, and if there are parts which his actors cannot fill he inquires whether others are disengaged who could fill them; he considers it in reference to the scenic capacity of his house, and the very size of his auditorium has some influence upon him, for what tells on a small stage often fails on a larger one. He is cautious, and dismisses the subject for a few weeks, perhaps to think it over again at odd moments—at his club, over his dinner, in his coupé or at his office. Meanwhile the play is lying on his desk or in the safe, and an outraged author is consuming himself with disappointment and bitterness, demanding an answer from day to day and being put off so often that at last he insults the manager and reclaims his manuscript.