If you have followed so far, patient peruser, you probably will join me in the conclusion that the society play is nothing on earth but melodrama in a frock coat. The effectiveness of the play depends upon the completeness of the disguise; with the dramatic tailor rests the question whether you sniff or sniffle. Undraped melodrama treating of fashionable folk is the funniest entertainment in the world, excepting "Charley"s Aunt." Fine evenings, when my brain cells were closed for repairs and I was weary of musical comedy, I used to go over to Eighth Avenue and see "Why Women Sin" and "A Working Girl"s Wrongs." I found that our cla.s.s is responsible alike for the sins and the wrongs; that gentility is a thing to move virtuous burglars, comic green grocers and other honest men and women to a pa.s.sion of righteous indignation.
"I was ne"er so thrummed since I was gentleman", wrote Thomas Dekker in an ancient comedy of unprintable t.i.tle, and it is my opinion that he penned the line after seeing his kind through the astigmatic gla.s.ses of Theodore Kremer. Small wonder, indeed! On Eighth Avenue, in the old days, everyone sufficiently prosperous to be opposed to an income tax wore a silk hat and lived in a "mansion." Apparently "mansions" were not places in which privacy was to be had, since the Eighth Avenue millionaire invariably came out into the street when he wanted to exhibit "the papers." Eighth Avenue millionaires always were white-haired, drank cold tea and soda, plotted "dirty work", and had closets so full of skeletons that any physician might have mistaken them for anatomical museums. "Little children", I used to say to the progeny of a friend of mine, "when you grow up be careful not to be an Eighth Avenue millionaire."
The smart set have rather a hard time of it on any stage, and, for that matter, so does the author who dallies with the subject. If there is one thing in which the dramatic _grand monde_ are lucky it is their servants. Nowhere else under the blue canopy of heaven are such perfectly trained menials as one sees through the proscenium arch.
They would make the fortune of any of those agencies misnamed "intelligence bureaus."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "_Why women sin_"]
I already have commented on the difficulties of the man who writes drawing room drama. I have said that, if he has a stirring story to tell, he must disguise it. On the other hand, if it be his ambition to compose comedies of manners, like "The Liars", he must master the very fine art of interesting an audience for two hours without actually doing anything; of making a vacuum shimmer. The people in such society plays must talk like ordinary people who have been seeing society plays. Their dialogue must be cynical and clever, and just a bit what a witty Frenchman called "_sans chemise_." A society play excellently exemplifies the truth of the adage: "Nothing _risque_; nothing gained." Should the conversation be truly bright the critics may be counted upon to observe that real people never talk that way; but it is better to beard the critics than to bore the audience. If I may add to a line from "Clothes": "h.e.l.l and the stage drawing room are two places where there are no stupid people."
It is no easy matter for the average playwright to reproduce the atmosphere of Fifth Avenue. Many of the nabobs one glimpses in the theatre fall about three hundred and sixty short of the "four hundred." Every second comedy of manners we see is a comedy of very bad manners. Men born with gold spoons in their mouths find it hard to articulate, and few of our fashionable families produce dramatists who "speak in a voice that fills the nation." Only the most successful of the craft get an opportunity to study society at first hand. Perhaps that is fortunate. "The drawback to realism", says Wilton Lackaye, "is the fate of the realist. If he goes into the slums he becomes base; if he goes into society he becomes soprano." The average social lion being the sort of man one could push over, we ought to be glad of the barrier between the pen, which only writes, and money, which talks.
Vigor and virility are more essential to good drama than absolutely faithful atmosphere. All other things being equal, the individual who would make the best pugilist would make the best playwright.
A good many of our society plays are marred by _gaucheries_ of a serious nature. Glance over your mental list of tea-cup pieces. Clyde Fitch, who rarely offended in this respect, had one woman giving orders to the servants of another woman in "The Truth." Jack Neville, in the Elsie de Wolfe performance of "The Way of the World", whistled merrily while waiting in her parlor for his hostess. True, he didn"t whistle very noisily, but that palliation only makes one think of the retort courteous supposed to have been made by a well-bred woman after she had complained of a gentleman who whistled in her ball room. "It was very low", plead the gentleman. "It _was_", answered the lady; "_very_ low."
Cynthia, in the comedy of that name, received her husband while the hairdresser and the manicure were employed with her. d.i.c.k Crawford, in "Caught in the Rain", tips a servant in the home of his friend, Mr.
Mason. Everybody who visits Montgomery Brewster in the first act of "Brewster"s Millions" comments most vulgarly on that hero"s newly acquired wealth. Richard Burbank in "Clothes" mistakes Miss Sherwood"s piano for a hat rack, while that lady permits herself to be led away from a dance without bidding farewell to her hostess. In "The House of Mirth", a sandless-souled hero, named Lawrence Selden, literally thrust himself past a protesting servant and into the rooms of Augustus Trenor. The young woman impersonated by Edna May in "The Catch of the Season" was given tiffen consisting of a hunk of bread an inch thick and tea in a cup that bore all the ear-marks of belonging to that family of unbreakable things that are used in the second cabin of ocean liners. These, of course, are "trifles light as air", but what shall be said of Charles Richman in dress clothes and light boots in "Mrs. Dane"s Defence", of Margaret Dale in decollette and walking hat in "Delancy", and of Mrs. Fiske"s laying her handkerchief on the luncheon table in "Becky Sharp?" Above all, what shall be said of the gentleman in "The Triangle" who stabbed his better half with a carving knife at dinner. I may be ignorant of what I seek to teach and quite wrong about these other _faux pas_, but _that_ certainly cannot be condemned too forcibly. It simply isn"t done!
"Popularity", George Cohan"s play that afterward became "The Man Who Owns Broadway", was a perfect mine of ill breeding. In the first place, the Fuller drawing room, as shown, was a flaring red, with a piano on which the manufacturer"s name was painted in letters two inches high. During the evening there were several callers, whom the Fullers left quite alone for a period of fifteen minutes. The butler atoned for this rudeness by shaking hands with one of the guests, a young gentleman unfortunately crossed in love, and expressing sympathy for him. The young gentleman said he was much obliged. The climax of this singular exhibition was reached when a "matinee idol", dropping in without invitation on Papa Fuller, whom he had never met, lit a cigar, instructed the sympathetic butler to bring him spirituous liquor, and told his host a few things about gentlemen in general and the host himself in particular.
The familiarity of the butler in "Popularity" was as nothing to the behavior of the servants in "Forty-five Minutes From Broadway", where several menials seemed to subscribe heartily to Paul Blouet"s dictum that "America is a country in which every man is as good as his neighbor and a d.a.m.ned sight better." The mother in the noisy farce of "Julie Bonbon" who objected to having her son marry a milliner might have improved her own manners in any millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. A chambermaid in "Susan in Search of a Husband" introduced to each other two guests of her hotel; Vida Phillimore in "The New York Idea"
received in her boudoir a n.o.bleman who had been presented to her only the day before; Mrs. O"Mara addressed her daughter and ignored the visitor who was chatting with her in "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." The reception room revealed in "The Daughters of Men" looked like the interior of a jewel box, and served as the abiding place of a wonderful collection of amusingly stiff-backed men and women, representing the smart set as, at that time, it was imagined by Charles Klein.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "_It simply isn"t done!_"]
Fortunately, errors of taste in staging society plays become fewer and less conspicuous every day. They are practically obsolete now in theaters like the Empire, the Lyceum, the Hudson, and the Belasco.
With them has gone the time in which every fashionable apartment was furnished in exactly the same way and had doors in exactly the same place. The producer who "dresses" a stage today buys precisely as though he had a commission to "dress" the home of a wealthy and intelligent client. Under these circ.u.mstances, it is particularly fortunate that the comedy of manners and the drama of the drawing room have come to stay. Cultured people are pleasant companions in everyday life, and doubly pleasant when they have been idealized and super-refined for library or theater. We may be glad of the evident fact that plays may come and plays may go, but the society play goes on forever.