Actorviews (1923)

122 Actorviews play this Jewish mother on the stage. Now the truth is I read the story when it was first published and was, you might say, the first one to act it. I cut it down to a dramatic reading twenty-five minutes in length, rehearsed it, and would have read it at an Actors’ Fund benefit if the twenty-five minutes hadn’t been too long. As it was, I’d read it at a dozen dinners when Fannie Hurst called me up and asked me to look at a play she’d just finished. I told her the only play she could interest me in was ‘Humoresque.’ “ ‘I’ve seen you play lots of things and you’re a good actress,’ said Fannie, ‘but I’ll be frank with you — I’ve yet to see the first Christian who can perfectly counterfeit the Jewish accent.’ “ ‘Maybe there’s something in that,’ I said, ‘but what do you say if I go over and read Mrs. Kantor to you?’ “Fannie took a chance. I found her with a manager’s check for a thousand dollars and a contract wanting only her signature. ‘Don’t sign, Fannie, till I speak my piece,’ I said, and read her my twenty-fiveminute abridgment of her story. Her answer was to inclose the check with the contract in the return envelope. ‘Humoresque’ was mine.” “Why do you want to do it — just a feat of versatility?” “No ; hardly that at all. I want to play an oldish woman while I’m still young enough to play girls; before older parts are forced on me. But it’s not that, either. The real reason is the sense of beauty that I find in the character and in the play. In that woman there is something of the beauty that Rembrandt saw among the lowly, and I want to try to realize it on the stage. What’re you thinking of so solemnly?” “Oh, another kind of beauty — and I’m wondering