and also a general chat as to the costumer. She is miles deep planning them already. Before she goes to ’Frisco you and I together will have a talk with her.
“I am on the Fourth Act all the time. It is great—great—GREAT. They can’t beat us—we are the top notches! Furst is going insane with pleasure over his share of the work. He loves it and is so infatuated that he is good for nothing else at present. In fact, everybody who has anything to do with the play is wild over it. I shall be back on Monday. What day after that can you come over? We will get in some big licks with Buckland, as I want to start him on the properties, etc., as soon as possible. God give us health and strength to knock out the great play!
“Faithfully,
“David.”
(John Luther Long to David Belasco.)
“Gosh! but that letter is full of good news, Goliath dear! When the scenery and costumes begin to materialize it looks as if the brain-squeezing would really amount to something. I shall have the Fourth ready for you by the middle of next week. Let me know a few days in advance of the time you want it, so that it can be copied. I am leaving a few little things to look up, but they are not important: such as drums—whether they had them in the legions; and, if so, what were their forms: and the Roman military salute. But I am practically done with the act. I’d like to see the models for the First. Perhaps I can, soon. I am feeling O.K. Equal to all the work two hands and one head can do. Don’t bother about Frohman. We’ve got him beaten! This Fourth Act, as I get into it, is wonderful! Send on the Epilogue whenever you are ready with it. I am doing nothing but the Fourth and shall not, till I send it on to you.
“Hail, Luna of Adrea!”
“J. L. L.”
MRS. CARTER AND THE TRAGEDY OF “ADREA.”
The tragedy of “Adrea,” by Belasco and Long, is a composition of exceptional imaginative scope and of great dramatic power. Its scene is a royal court of a conjectural kingdom, situated on an imaginary island in, perhaps, the Adriatic Sea. Its time is named as about the fifth century of the Christian era,—a time well chosen for poetic and romantic purposes; for the vast Roman Empire had then become extinguished in Western Europe and was slowly crumbling to pieces in the East, and minor monarchies can credibly be supposed to have flourished in such an era of transition and a martial chieftain out of Noricum to have dallied with the daughters of a Roman Prince. It is a play without historic basis; an authentic creation of the inventive brain; a vigorous and splendid work of art, moving freely in a broad field. It deals with great themes,—great passions, crimes, and sorrows; great and terrible punishments of sin, and the spectacle of great character made sublime by grief. Much of its movement proceeds in the open air: some of it beneath the vault of night; and its web involves the terrors of tempest and the mystery and dread of spectres from the realm of death. The form and color of it are modern,—a form and color of rosy amplitude and voluptuous luxuriance; but the feeling that pervades it is the ominous feeling of the old Greek tragedies of fate and doom. Its defect is excess—an excess of persons, objects, pictures, emotions, and words; the superflux that proceeds from intensely passionate feeling in the conception of the story and especially in the conception and development of its central character. An affluence of fancy is, however, more grateful than the frigid sense of want. This is a synopsis of it: