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My First Fifty Years in the Theatre

Part 1
Trying to Break In

Table of Contents

Fifty years seems to be a long time when you talk about it, but the fifty years since I saw my first play produced have rushed by me at such furious pace that if it hadn’t been for my desk calendar I never would have known when one year ended and another year began. No man is ever bored when he is never called upon to do any work other than the work he loves, and time can’t very well hang heavily on a man’s hands when he has found it quite impossible to find the time to do all of the work he has laid out for himself. My first fifty years in the theatre have gone by like a brief but very delightful dream, and now I find myself forced to look forward to the next fifty years to accomplish some of the fine things I have always wanted to do—but never seemed able to get around to. It takes a long time to learn how to write a fine play, but as I have always been an incurable optimist, I have faith enough to believe that if I can get a hundred years of experience behind me I may be able to come nearer to it than I have done in these absurdly brief fifty years. My quarrel with myself, and with the work I have done, is not that I have been what is often scornfully called a “Commercial Playwright” because, quite frankly, that is what I have always intended to be. I was confronted, at an early age, with the usual necessity of making a living, and knowing that I lacked the high talents necessary for the really great dramatist, I decided to learn all that it was possible to learn about all the branches of the theatre and make a careful study of all the work of all the dramatists, past and present, and above all, to watch and to judge the reactions of theatre audiences and to fully understand why they laughed, or cried, or shuddered when they were supposed to laugh, or cry, or shudder—or why they didn’t. Much of this I learned by years of study, but what I blame myself for is that I did not realize that nothing in the changing theatre of the last fifty years has changed as much as have the reactions of a theatre audience. The great Dion Boucicault, who knew far more about how to construct a play than any man I have ever known, once told me that, in the end, if a play was to be a success it must be “written by its audience,” that a good play’s conclusion, sad or happy, must be exactly the same as the composite conclusion of the thousand or more persons who had gathered to see it. When Mr. Boucicault said this I am quite sure that it was true, just as I am sure now that it isn’t true any longer. It isn’t possible today to get a composite reaction out of any gathering of a thousand people, or even to gather a thousand people together under the same roof whose mental, moral, social and ethical standards are in anything like agreement. And if, by some miracle, this could be done, you would discover that they were so blinded by their political prejudices that what seemed white to one section of the audience seemed black to many of the others, not to mention the large section who wanted it to seem red.

Words are, after all, the only things the poor author has to build with, and words don’t seem to mean just what they used to mean, nor do they mean the same thing to everyone who hears them. Gone are the days when “All for Love and the World Well Lost” will meet with a very enthusiastic approval from an audience, and “The Wages of Sin Is Death” is by no means as sure-fire as it used to be. Now no political, moral, social or ethical conclusion of a dramatist can hope to convince a large enough proportion of an audience, to give what Boucicault said a successful play must have, full agreement between the audience and the man who wrote it. This is, of course, the cause of the trouble our writers are having today, and the reason why the “story play” is no longer of much value. That leaves nothing but the play of true character, which is by no means an easy sort of play to write, or the propaganda play of “race prejudice” or “social inequality.” These plays, although easy enough to write, are usually not at all easy to sit through. To me sermons belong in churches and political speeches belong in the lecture hall, or on a soap box, while the theatre audience has a right to demand some amusement, or some excitement, or something that will bring about a mood of hope, or faith, or exaltation, and that’s not an easy one to write, either.

On looking back over all these years I see many things I did that I shouldn’t have done, and many things I should have done that I didn’t do, but as I started these confessions by stating that I have never aspired to be named as one of the great, I will make the even more shameful confession that to me these fifty years have been well spent, and that I have used my very moderate talents to, on the whole, a fairly satisfactory end. At least I have lived in comfort and decency, and had far more than one man’s share of happiness, and, as the years went past me, I have been rewarded by various expressions of confidence from the men and the women with whom I have been working. I was the last president of the old Society of Dramatists and Composers, that was founded many years ago by Bronson Howard, and I was the first president of the Dramatists Guild and later president of the Authors League of America. In 1923 my play “Icebound” won for me the Pulitzer Prize, and my election as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

These honors were, no doubt, more than I deserved, which is probably one reason why I value them so highly. I entered Harvard in 1889 and for some odd reason I studied practically nothing that could be of much practical use to a writer of plays, most of my courses having to do with geology and paleontology. When I left college in 1894 I worked for a little more than a year in a coal mine in the Cumberland Mountains. One year being rather more than enough of that I made a straight dive for the theatre and arrived in New York with no friends, and no influence at all, and with twelve dollars in my pocket. All I had was a firm decision to make a place for myself, which was just about as difficult a thing to do then as it would be to do today. The greatest difficulty confronting a dramatist then, just as it is now, is that he faces either a feast or a famine; the writer of a successful play makes a lot of money, far more today than it was possible fifty years ago—but then, and now, the writer of a failure makes absolutely nothing. The only way a young writer, without financial backing, can live long enough to learn what a play really is, and how to write one, is for him to find a job, in, or at least in the atmosphere of, the theatre, until at least some of its mysteries become clear to him. Little as I knew back there in the middle nineties I knew that, and I had made up my mind, as I have said before, to learn something of every part of the show business, and this I did, helped at first by the kindly advice of A. M. Palmer, one of the great managers of that day. Mr. Palmer made a place for me as an actor of small parts and assistant stage manager of one of his companies of which Madam Januscheck was the star. Madam Januscheck was a really brilliant actress, one of the truly great, and the season I spent in her company was a valuable experience. In her support were some of the best known players of the day—William H. Thompson, George C. Bonniface, Joseph Whiting, Blanche Walsh, Katherine Grey, Orrin Johnson, Annie Yeamans, Jenny Yeamans and Sally Cohan. I was young then and a willing and eager listener, which is all that is necessary to win the affection of old actors. I was really an amazingly bad actor and my salary of twelve dollars a week was not enough, even in those days, for anything beyond a rather Spartan scale of existence, but everything was quite all right with me. I was getting what I wanted, the chance to study the methods of a great actress and to understand, in part at least, why an audience surrendered itself so willingly to her art. That season I began to write plays, but I was fated to hold many positions in the theatre before I could get my plays produced and dared to depend on them as a means of livelihood. I worked as an actor, stage manager, press agent, company manager, advance agent, stage director and in the box office of a theatre and at last, just fifty years ago, I saw the first production of a play of which I was the author. The play was a “Romantic Historical Comedy” called “For the White Rose.” Years ago I lost the only manuscript I had and only two things about it seem now to be clear in my memory, these being that I knew practically nothing about the “War of the Roses” and very much less about how to write a play. It really is a very difficult form of writing and, in spite of the fact that I have had many more plays produced than any man who has ever lived, I am frequently made aware of the fact that there are still a good many things about it that have escaped me. This habit I have fallen into of judging myself has been made necessary by the fact that there really isn’t anyone else to judge a playwright. All the other arts have their acknowledged masters; the painter, the musician and the sculptor and the novelist can go for a word of advice or caution to one of these masters, but the dramatist must always be a lone wolf. There are not, or at least there shouldn’t be, any set rules for the writing of a play, and any of the hundreds of rules a beginner must learn are never of the slightest use to him until he has forgotten them. As a matter of fact, I have never yet met anyone capable of judging a play until he has seen it before an audience, an unproduced play being only an embryo that has no life until its audience is joined with it. Then of course it never is of much use for a young playwright to go for advice or encouragement to any of his brother dramatists. We dramatists find it rather difficult to work up much enthusiasm for any plays other than our own. This apparently ungracious reaction is sometimes spoken of as stupid and narrow and selfish, but really it isn’t. It is simply a spasm of our defensive mechanism and entirely instinctive. No one ventures to condemn a mother for thinking her own baby is pretty good.