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I cannot remember if it was one of those torrid and terrible nights of August when the chain-gang of New York’s critics was tolled off to the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre for the première of The Torch-Bearers. But I do know that the general atmosphere of oppression—physical, mental, professional—was a little denser than usual. In the first twenty-eight days of August, 1922, managements too daring or too resourceless to wait for September had deluged us with a steady stream of inanity, and here was another dousing in prospect. If it wasn’t the heat, it was certainly the humidity of theatrical August. Unknown play, new producers, author’s name vaguely connected with vaudeville; altogether a production so little esteemed by the booking powers that it had to slip into a few weeks before the Equity Players began their season at this theatre. It could have been a night of Elysian coolness, and still we would have been expecting the worst. It could have been mid-April, and still we should have found an almost ineffable freshness in the breeze of George Kelly’s little comedy.

The cold, historical fact is that at about 9:15 o’clock on the evening of August 29th, 1922, five or six hundred average New Yorkers, two or three hundred friends of the management, and about fifty sophisticated first-nighters were in grave danger of rolling off their seats in hysteria because of The Torch-Bearers.

The intermissions were filled with three questions which more or less concern the reader of the published play. Who was George Kelly? Where did he get the comedy? How would it go?

On August 29th, 1922, George Kelly was a perfectly good Philadelphian in his late twenties who was much better known to vaudeville than to fame. He had written, directed, and played in about a dozen one-act comedies and dramas on Keith and Orpheum time. He had begun by quitting his family’s private tutor to try acting in a playlet by the late Paul Armstrong. Then—with no more preparation, apparently—he had begun to write his own vehicles. A certain drama in France absorbed his attentions for a while. After that more “sketches”—as the vaudeville powers call any effort above vocal or bodily acrobatics—and suddenly a play.

The origin of The Torch-Bearers was simple enough. Kelly wrote the kind of tight, effective short plays that amateur actors and little theatre directors are always looking for. He had a perfectly good Philadelphia family behind him. And so he was being invited to lunch every now and then by the Pampinellis of the cities in which he played. To hear them was enough. They had to live a wider life.

The Torch-Bearers passed a prosperous term on Broadway, and I think it will go far in the little theatres which it satirizes. But upon the opening night I remember much dubious debate about its chances. We had laughed ourselves almost literally sick, and at the end of the second intermission we had not yet seen the rather prosy last act. Yet—conscious of our personal superiority—we wondered.... Brander Matthews and Aristotle would scoff at it, George M. Cohan and Professor Baker would scowl. The Torch-Bearers broke all the rules, and it had no plot. Obviously, by all the rules, it ought to fail.

There may be a good many reasons why it didn’t, and some may lead you far into aesthetic explorations of the present breakdown of dramatic form all over the world. But the reader will find more cogent reasons in the pages that follow this introduction. Personally, I should put it down to the fact that the character-study of the first act and the hokum of the second are irresistible. We have all met our Pampinellis, and we have all seen the lady prompter take a curtain call, or had our mustache fall off in the big scene. We can never resist some characterization on the stage, and as for such hokum as this record of all the mishaps of the amateur actor, ill luck is the heart of broad comedy and when ill luck comes where it is most painful—in personal display—Cassandra herself must smile.

There were other things to make the death-watch wonder whether The Torch Bearers could live. It was satire. Satire is not ordinarily a popular commodity in the theatre. It defeats sympathy, and sympathy is necessary to emotion, and emotion to theatrical success.

Satire has had its great moments, however, in the history of the drama. Aristophanes made merry over the fashions, foibles, and philosophies of Athens. Satire was Molière’s stock in trade. Shaw has done very well by poking a finger at society. Every nation has at least one outstanding theatrical satire to its credit. But for the war, the wise of Paris might still be laughing at the French Academy because of de Flers and de Caillavet’s L’Habit Vert. England has The School for Scandal, as Ireland has The Playboy and John Bull’s Other Island. Germany, though a little heavy in the theatre, can still point to Schnitzler’s Literature.

Just at the moment America is beginning to display a surprising fondness for theatrical satire. Beginning is hardly the word, perhaps, for the first American drama, The Contrast, lampooned society with a large “S”; Fashion, our first play by a woman, spoke out smartly against the smart world, and from Our American Cousin down to date, so many of our playwrights have spoofed the alien and the aristocratic for the benefit of the homespun, that it is only by a hair that I can risk the statement that it is a “surprising fondness” which we now display for satire. America has always enjoyed its irreverent moments in the theatre, but it has seldom gone in for whole plays devoted to almost nothing but lampooning.

In the last three seasons, however, the distinctly satirical play has climbed noticeably in favour. In 1919-20 there was nothing of the kind to be seen on Broadway. In 1920-21 came Porter Emerson Browne’s Mexican melodrama, The Bad Man, with most of its success due to sly digs at both sides of the international line, and George M. Cohan’s joke at the expense of audiences as well as playwrights, The Tavern. Last season, playgoers good-humoredly made a satire out of the deadly serious absurdities of the British melodrama, Bulldog Drummond; the Chauve-Souris twitted Russian drama a little—in Russian; and the firm of Kaufman and Connelly began in Dulcy and To the Ladies! to vend biting wit at the expense of scenario writers and advertisers, efficiency experts and after-dinner speakers.

This season a perfect flood of satire broke upon us, most of it very good indeed, and some of it destined to be successful with a large public. Besides The Torch-Bearers, there have been R. U. R., grim sarcasm upon labour and capital, and a new bill of the Chauve-Souris, the Kaufman-Connelly version of Henry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies, Six Characters in Search of an Author, from the Italian, and The World We Live In, the insect comedy from the Czecho-Slovak.

The future of The Torch-Bearers, now that its Broadway career is over, brings us up against the little theatre movement. I am very much in favor of that odd and amazing phenomenon. I believe a great deal of the promise of the American stage outside New York and a surprising amount of its present accomplishment in that metropolis, is due to the uncontrollable desire of people not so very unlike Mrs. Pampinelli to produce plays. Kelly’s satire touches the lower fringes of what Mrs. P. calls “the movement,” but it might be directed at Maurice Browne, Sam Hume, and Irving Pichel and the little theatre would still go on, and The Torch-Bearers would become—as I am sure it will—one of the most popular pieces in the repertory of the amateur actor. Many a Mrs. Pampinelli, safe in the sense of her own self-importance, will do for The Torch-Bearers all that Mrs. P. did—which is, as Kelly observes, to “tell the players where to go on the stage, so they won’t be running into each other.”

But there is art in this play—not mere observation—and I am afraid none of the Pampinellis who are to be concerned with its future will ever quite equal the person that the author and Alison Skipworth, the actress, created between them. I do not look for any moment so extraordinary as when Mrs. Pampinelli, discussing the fatalities invariably connected with these amateur performances, reaches her peroration: “We are not dismayed; we have the lessons of history to fortify us: for whenever the torch of essential culture has been raised, (she raises the lead-pencil as though it were a torch) there has unfailingly been the concomitant exactment of a human life.” For one cannot expect to find a cuckoo-clock always present with its sapient comment at such a moment.

The reader will find the cuckoo-clock, the satire, and the hokum for himself. He will also detect, I think, a strain of divine and devilish madness in Kelly which promises something of genius for the American drama. The reader may note, too, in Kelly’s script the kind of practical qualification for the theatre of which Mr. Ritter speaks feelingly on page 56. This qualification has produced extraordinarily effective humor and something else. This is a sense for stage management. It makes Kelly a rare and precious figure in our theatre, and gives you a script to read—or to produce—that is liberally supplied with every bit of business and direction necessary for putting on the play—either in the Cohoes Little Theatre or your own imagination.

Kenneth Macgowan.

Pelham Manor, N. Y., February 25, 1923.

NOTE: The drawing-room at Ritter’s, in which the first and last acts are laid, is a comfortable-looking room, suggestive of good circumstance. Toward the back there is a fancy wooden partition separating the hallway from the room proper. This partition begins rather high up on the side walls and curves deeply down to two ornamental columns, five feet high and set about five feet apart, forming the entrance from the hallway to the room. Straight out through this entrance, and paralleling the partition, is the staircase, running up to the left and through an arched doorway. The foot of the staircase is just to the right of the center-door; and then the hallway continues on out to the front door. On the left, there is a passageway between the staircase and the partition, running through an arched doorway to the body of the house. In the room proper, breaking the angle of the right wall and the partition, is a door, opening out, and below this door, a casement-window. On the left, breaking the angle of the left wall and the partition, is the mantelpiece, and below it a door, opening out. Just inside the partition, on either side of the center-door, is a built-in seat.

The entire room and hallway is done in a scheme of silver and the lighter shades of green. All the woodwork and furniture, including the piano and mantelpiece, is finished in silver-green, and the walls and ceiling are in blended tones of orchid, gray and green, decorated with tapestried panel-effects. The carpet is gray-green, and the vases and clock on the mantelpiece, as well as the little cuckoo-clock over the door at the left, are green. The drapes on the casement-window and the doorways, at the head of the stairs and in the left hallway, are in rose-colored brocaded satin; and the pads on the partition-seats are covered with the same material. The piano-throw is a garishly subdued blend of old-rose, Nile green and canary-colored silk.

Right out between the little wooden columns of the center-door, set flat against the staircase, is a small console-table, holding a most beautiful rose-colored vase filled with wisteria; and on the piano there is a similar vase filled with white and yellow blossoms. On either side of the console-table there is a tall torchiere with a rose-colored shade; and the shades on the wall-lights, and the one on the lovely rose-colored vase-lamp on the table down at the right below the casement-window, are all rose-colored.

There’s a brilliant array of cushions about the room, all shapes and sizes, and every color of the rainbow,—and many books and magazines. The piano, up at the right, is littered with music, cigarettes, in a fancy container, flowers and candy—in a pretty box made of pink satin.

The two arm-chairs in the room, one just to the left of the table below the window, and the other at the left side of the table over at the left, are over-stuffed in green-and-silver brocade.

There is a small table below the piano, with a light little chair beside it, the left side, and there is a similar chair over at the extreme left, below the door.

The keyboard of the piano parallels the right wall, with enough room, of course, between the piano-stool and wall to permit of easy use of the door. There must also be room enough above the piano for a passageway between it and the partition-seat.

The rights and lefts employed in the foregoing descriptions are, of course, the player’s rights and lefts.