San Francisco dramatic review (1899)

December 18, 1909 THE SAX FRANCISCO DRAMATIC REVIEW James J. McCloskey, Old-Timer, Says the Present-Day Actor is a Bad Actor and that His Attempts Are Tame According to James J. McCloskey. old-time actor and playwright, there aren't many actors nowadays. Also the New Theatre up in Central Park West, New York, is really quite a nice little theatre. In addition. Mr. E. H. Sothern seems to be a well meaning young man who should have been born seventy years ago, when the conditions were such that he might have learned how to act. And although as it is he and Miss Marlowe don't do so very badly, still you all should have dropped around to the old Broadway Theatre at Broadway and Worth streets in 1859 and seen Mr. McCloskey and Edward E. Eddy and Mme. Ponisi and Harry Pierson and Alice Grey and a few others do Antony and Cleopatra as it ought to be done and as — take it from Mr. McCloskey — it will never be done again. Mr. McCloskey has been off the stage now for thirty years, but speaks with the authority of one who has acted with Booth, McCullough, Forest and a host of other notables. He is eighty-three years old and lives entirely surrounded by antique play-bills in a fine house in Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. He acted in California, Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand ten years before the civil war broke out, and he now attends the theatre regularly, but, as he says, and sighs, with an enthusiasm abated by time. Anyway, he played with Eddy and Mme. Ponisi in Antony and Cleopatra in 1859 and has views on the play has it has been revived. "I went up to this New Theatre the opening night," he said recently, " and between the acts I wept a little. I had expected that at least the ideal theatre was actually with us, but I can't see that their pretty New Theatre fills the part. "It was just a piece of Broadway moved a little ways up town. The audience was more clothes than appreciation. Enthusiasm was an absentee and the acting was tame. In addition, the piece wasn't put on as if there was tons of money behind it, like they say there is, and — well, I couldn't get a thrill out of it. I went home feeling as though I'd seen a proper little performance given in a Harlem flat where the performers were afraid they'd wake the people's babies in the flat down stairs, and as I rode back to Brooklyn I couldn't help but think how Ed. Eddy would have made the rafters hum and how Mme. Ponisi would have made those people stand on their chairs. "When we played Antony and Cleopatra at the old Broadway, we had stage effects that were stage effects. In the first place we used a version of the play that made the action fast and brought out all the drama there was in the piece, and every man and woman in the cast was a star, if I do say it myself. But more than anything else we had the thing put on the stage the way it wants to be. "You ought to have seen our Nile scene with Cleopatra's barge moving down the river, the slaves fanning her and the Pyramids rearing their ghostly bulk along the shore. There was realism for you! There was suggestion, romance, poetry, everything that people expect for their money and don't get any more. Why, before we presented that piece we rehearsed it four months. That, in a time when actors used to get sore if they were asked to rehearse anything more than twice before an opening performance ! And they were entitled to be sore, too. Two rehearsals were plenty for any actor that knew his business those days. Those were the days of versatility and of versatilitarians. Mourns Old School. "What's become of that school now? Dead as a door nail, defunct as the Cardiff Giant, extinct as the dodo, irresuscitable as John Brown's body. Show me the actor of today who could fall down stairs or off his horse in the afternoon and get out and do his little Hamlet that same night ! Could little 'Willie' Faversham do it Could our friend, James K. Hackett do it? Could our friend, E. H. Sothern, do it? No, not one of them could do it. But I did it and everybody that worked in my time had to do it, or get out of the profession. "Let me tell you, in case you think that about falling down stairs or off a horse is a joke. At the time we were rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra I was playing Dick Turpin in Rookwood in the same old Broadway. In the first act, a few minutes after I came on, I had to fight three villains all the way down a flight of stairs at right stage, kill all three before I got halfway down, and then fall the rest of the way down, weak from loss of blood. And it had to be a natural fall, too, or I'd have got mine from the gallery and pit. In the last act of the same play, my horse, Black Bess, dies of a broken heart and, as she collapsed at the. footlights— she was a trained horse that did it os natural as life— I had to fall off her and take my chances of her rolling on me. I used to get a hundred a week for the part—sixty for the ability to act it and forty for risking my neck. And as often as not we'd give Rookwood in the afternoon and one of the Shakespearian pieces the same night. "Take it another way. I've done character parts with George Fox's company in the Bowery one week, taken off Irishmen and Dutchmen and plantation negroes and what not, and the next week I'd be Iago or Othello or Julius Caesar or some other heavyweight, and have to be as good an Othello as I'd been a Dutchman or t'other way about. "And I'm putting my own case just because it's more familiar to me than other men's cases, and not because I care a hang after thirty years whether people think I ever could act or not. The point I'm trying to make is that you could comb the American stage today from end to end and you couldn't find a man who could play half a dozen parts the same week." Discourses on Hamlet. Like most veteran actors. Mr. McCloskey has views on h( part of Hamlet should be played and was glad to give them yesterday. "The trouble with most earnest young men who attempt Hamlet," he said, " is that they make too many motions. They strain at gnats instead of playing Hamlet as though he were a human being. The part of Hamlet amounts to nothing more nor less than a command of all the trick work known to the stage. The one man I know who could play it to perfection was a little fellow named 'Eddie' Raynor, an Englishman who died several years ago without ever becoming what they call 'great' in the business today. He was past master of every trick and quirk and mannerism you ever heard of, and he had borrowed them all from the different actors of the time. He just went through the part, turning off one effective trick alter another, and everybody took it for subtlety, while 'Eddie' laughed in his sleeve. He knew what he was about. He saw through it that Shakespeare wrote the play because the people of Shakespeare's time were getting tired of straightaway stuff and wanted a little mystery stuff, and he gave it to them. "If Shakespeare were alive today he wouldn't be able to explain his own Hamlet to save his life. 'Eddie' Raynor was a great Hamlet because he didn't try to take the part too seriously. He had gropped Shakespeare's idea and he let his audiences have it that way, and the audiences were happy because they thought they were getting something deep. However, to get back to this New Theatre performance of Antony and Cleopatra again — well, never mind. What's the use?" The Western Play That dramatic production of uncertain realization, the great American play, a thing for which managers, actors and the general public have all been waiting for these many years, is still well within the nebula of the intangible, distant future. That there is such a thing as an American play, however, that is capable of reflecting American life, feeling and ideals, and whose technical perfection is comparable to the best that European culture can produce, is now beyond cavil. The time has gone by when those venerable and respected, though obviously crude dramas, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ten Nights in a Barroom, represents the best products of our native writers for the stage. In his thoughtful book. The Playhouse and the Stage, Percy Mackayc points out that the drama of the new world has of necessity been crude and unformed because of its environment. In the old world the various media for expressing life in terms of ?rt have existed and continued uninterrupted for centuries. Here men have been forced from the very nature of things to deal so entirely with the concrete that they have had no time to develop artistically. It is only now that we, as a people, are beginning to find ourselves, artistically. Clearing forests and building cities leaves little time to devote to the more subtle expressions of life, save in an attempt to find amusement in them. Such plays as The Witching Hour. Salvation Nell and The Lion and the Mouse indicate that we are experiencing a change in this respect. True, the love interest is still dominant, in fact, the one theme of the theatrical productions in the United States. But that we have found out that such an interest is capable of dramatic technique of the highest order is a decided step in advance of what most of us can easily remember. It is interesting to note, however, that as yet the West has received comparatively little attention from the dramatists. It is true that such plays as Arizona, the Rose of the Rancho and The Girl of the Golden West and The Virginian have proved themselves to be wonderfully successful year in and year out. Even so, such bills as these represent but a small part of the life of the great empire that lies between the Mississippi and the Pacific. While such plays undoubtedly have merit they follow the dramatic fashions. There are styles in plays just as there are in hats, cravats and automobiles. Just now to write a play that the average manager is not afraid of and the average audience knows is Western, it must be filled with gun plays, "chaps," strange oaths and the picturesque dialogue, the like of which was never heard on sea and land, and which passes for the customary mutual discourse in the land where the sun goes down. The great West has its vexing questions. The people of the Pacific Slope have their problems to meet — problems which are peculiarly their own. yet which arc intimately related to the great movement of American development. There is an abundant field here for the dramatist. The harvest is white. It is a mine that has been but superficially touched. Some time some one, with the courage of his convictions, one great enough to sec the possibilities that are before him, will depict in form suitable for the stage the everyday life about us. It may deal with the plains, or it may deal with the life of the growing cities of the far West. Such a writer will neither consider nor care whether he is writing after the designs of the dramatic fashion plates, but that writer and that play will not only reveal us to ourselves and to the world, but he and the child of his brain will take permanent places high in the annals of the American drama. Olga Nethersole has a new and brilliantly successful play, The Writing on the Wall, which deals with the Trinity corporation affairs in connection with the slum properties. The front of the new Columbia Theatre is unquestionably one of the most beautiful works of the builders' art now existing in San Francisco, and is regarded as the finest of any theatre in America. The interior is rapidly shaping into completion.