“Yours faithfully,
“David Belasco.”

“THE PHANTOM RIVAL.”

“The Phantom Rival,” adapted by Leo Ditrichstein from an Austrian original by Ferenc Molnar, postulates that a woman idealizes the man whom she first loves and never forgets him; and, by presenting her extravagant notions about him in a dream and then showing,—in an individual case,—that he turns out to be a commonplace person, implies that the ideals founded in youth and cherished by females in after life are mistakes and absurd. It may be so. It probably is true that all ideals of human perfection are unsound and even ridiculous. It certainly is true that the longer we live and the more we see of human nature the more disappointed we are, in ourselves as well as in others, till we come at last to believe, as Lockhart wrote:

“That nothing’s new and nothing’s true
And nothing signifies!”

The “visible dream” is an old device of the theatre and a good one. It was exceedingly well managed in this play—the only blemish, indeed, being a certain effect of monotony which, being inherent in the dramatic fabric, was ineradicable in the stage exhibition of it. The principal persons in this drama, which centres around “the dream,” are an American woman, Mrs. Marshall, and an Austrian, named Sascha Taticheff. In youth they dwelt in the same Brooklyn boarding house. Propinquity had a usual consequence. The girl, romantic, admired the youth and became fond of him. The youth was flattered and reciprocated. Then, suddenly, he went away, called back to his native land, taking a sentimental farewell and writing a letter filled with ardent vaporings. Years have passed. The girl has met and loved and married a successful American lawyer; they dwell together; they would be happy, in a staid, conventional way, were it not for the preposterous, boorish jealousy of the husband. He suspects his wife of having had an earlier lover and he tortures himself and her because of this suspicion, this paltry jealousy of “the phantom rival” of a youthful attachment. And then, by chance, in a public restaurant, Taticheff and Mrs. Marshall, who is with her husband, meet again. Scarce able to recall each other, they exchange formal bows. Having returned to their home Marshall badgers his wife about the stranger in the restaurant until, exasperated, she admits that she once knew Taticheff and was fond of him; and, finally, she surrenders to her husband, who reads it, the farewell letter of her youthful sweetheart. The sentimental folly of that screed so amuses Marshall that he declares himself cured of his jealousy, speaks of the writer with contempt, and, laughing heartily, goes out to a business conference. The wife, incensed by this cavalier attitude toward the object of her girlhood affection, rereads his perfervid protestations: then, falling asleep, she has a dream in which her Sascha returns to her, at a fashionable ball, in, successively, the different characters suggested by his letter:—first, as an all-conquering military hero; then as a world-dominating statesman; next as a peerless singer, the idol of two hemispheres; finally,—after she has been turned out of doors by an indignant hostess because of the scandal of her conduct with her multiform lover,—in the guise of a wretched, one-armed street-beggar, upon whom her husband makes a furious assault, whereupon, shrieking, she awakes. Then, her husband returning with the actual Sascha (who proves to be subordinately concerned with the business which Marshall has in hand), she is left alone with him. The interview that then occurs between them is much the cleverest passage in the play. The woman, rather forlornly, tries to discover in the man before her some trace of the romantic glamour with which she had fancifully invested him, but finds only a plebeian dullard, stupidly embarrassed, inveterately selfish and petty, and much interested in her husband’s brandy. At last, when she is relieved of his tiresome presence, she drops his long-cherished letters into the fire and joins her husband in his contemptuous amusement at her sentimental memories and the sorry figure of his “phantom rival.”—Belasco’s preservation of an unreal, dream-like atmosphere throughout the dream scenes of this play was perfect. And, of the kind, nothing so good as the acting of Miss Laura Hope Crews and Mr. Ditrichstein in the last scene of it has been visible on our Stage for many years. “The Phantom Rival” was first produced, September 28, 1914, at Ford’s Opera House, Baltimore: on October 6, it was presented at the Belasco Theatre, New York. This was the original cast:

Sascha Taticheff Leo Ditrichstein.
Frank Marshall Malcolm Williams.
Dover Frank Westerton.
Earle Lee Millar.
Farnald John Bedouin.
Oscar John McNamee.
Waiters——Louis Pioselli.
Frank E. Morris.
Louise, Mrs. Marshall Laura Hope Crews.
Mrs. Van Ness Lila Barclay.
Nurse Anna McNaughton.
Maid Ethel Marie Sasse.

“THE BOOMERANG.”

It was an opinion of the philosophic Bacon that women “will sooner follow you by slighting than by too much wooing.” That is an opinion shared by many and one which observation perceives to be grounded on fact: some women will. It is the basic idea underlying the play by Messrs. Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes, called “The Boomerang,” which Belasco produced at his New York theatre, August 10, 1915,—and which, slender as it is, has proved one of the most richly remunerative of all his ventures. In that play a youth, Budd Woodbridge by name, loves a girl, Grace Tyler, so unreservedly that she finds him wearisome and is inclined to repel his devotion and bestow her affections upon another youth. Young Woodbridge so peaks and pines under his mistress’ disdain and the pangs of juvenile jealousy that his mother fears that he is passing into a decline and insists on his consulting a physician. That physician, Dr. Gerald Sumner, finds the young man depressed, irritable, and in extreme nervous distress. He questions him shrewdly and soon ascertains the nature of the distemper for which he is desired to prescribe. He rather cynically undertakes to cure the youth and his directions are obeyed. His patient is sent home and put to bed; a daily hypodermic injection is ordered of a mysterious, vivifying serum (in fact, water), and a young woman nurse, beautiful and peculiarly kind and sympathetic, is employed to administer the injection and to amuse and cheer the unhappy sufferer, who is obediently responsive to her angelic ministration. The capricious Miss Tyler, seeing her adorer apparently succumbing to the fascinations of the lovely nurse and finding herself rather slighted off, discovers that she cannot live without him and Woodbridge’s amatory anguish is soon in a fair way to be assuaged. The relevancy of the title of this farce, “The Boomerang,” is revealed in a dictionary comment on that implement of Antipodal warfare which declares that: “in inexperienced hands the boomerang recoils upon the thrower, sometimes with very serious results.” This is illustrated by the fate of Dr. Sumner, who, having been scornful on the subject of love and jealousy, becomes violently enamoured of the charming nurse and for a time suffers much because of her affectionate tendance upon his patient,—until, at last, he learns that her regard is really fixed upon himself.

This play was designated as a “comedy,”—and, if Dr. Johnson’s definition of a comedy as something to make people laugh be accepted, that definition is plausible. The piece is, in fact, a farce and, in my judgment, rather a slight one; but it was so exquisitely stage-managed and so admirably acted that it passed for being something far more substantial and worthy than, intrinsically, it is. With the view that it is slight and merely ephemeral Belasco emphatically disagrees. “I maintain,” he has declared to me, “that ‘The Boomerang’ has a vital theme, of universal appeal, no matter how much you may ridicule it: I mean Calf Love. Everybody has had it—and, while it lasts, it’s terrible. No matter how much we may laugh at the boys and girls suffering from juvenile love and jealousy, we sympathize with them, too. That’s why everybody in the country wants to see our little play—why men and women have stood in line all night (as they have done in many places) to buy tickets for the performance. I believed in the little piece from the very first. I wish I knew where to get another as good!”

One of many scores of letters received by Belasco, commendatory of this play and its exemplary presentment, came from perhaps the most generous of contemporary patrons of the Theatre and it may appropriately be quoted here: