Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ He is not trying to aid or instruct the playwright or the actor. He is not primarily eager to be merciful or even just to them. He is earning his living, rather at their expense; it is necessary that he should not be dull; and the sharper he is,—and the more they suffer,—the broader the grin that rewards him. The sensitive may find him cruel. The theater is no place for the sensitive. ”

“ Perhaps not, but his audiences would know one if they found it in a play, and they would be likely to reject it. Mohler is in power in the American theater because the dollars of the majority have elected him. He is voted for every night; and every night the votes are counted, and he is sustained.
And there is this that Scollard overlooks: the drama communicates emotions better than it conveys ideas, because the psychology of an audience is a mob psychology, and laughter is infectious for it, and emotions vibrate through it in communicable thrills. Ideas have no such power of currency. ”

“ Almost all our American theatrical magnates have come to magnitude by way of the box-office. They are business men first and theatrical managers after; they have the blunt simplicity and unsophisticated assurance of the commercial mind. They have fought their way up from subservient poverty as a soldier rises from the ranks, and they expect subservience from all whom they command—authors and actors, office staffs and stage-directors. They are not cultivated, any more than Scollard is rich; for they have not been acquiring culture, but money ”

“ The drama is not their fittest medium. And Mohler and his Broadway competitors have learned that lesson. They have learned that the large American audience wants emotion, not thought. They reduce emotion to its lowest terms of popularity, produce farces and melodramas, and grow rich; while the producer of intellectual plays, struggling under a burden of New York rent and Broadway salaries and the deadly cost of advertising, is slowly crushed down into bankruptcy, despite the good-will of the minority, the patronage of drama leagues, and even the endowments of the philanthropic. ”

“ He has visualized his adventures in American drama with an eye and an art of narrative as impersonal as the camera,—and as cruel to many decent public appearances that have hitherto been shown only in pose,—but though he carries an air of meek detachment in court, he knows that he is giving testimony that is shocking, and while he pretends not to judge, but to leave the verdict to the reader, he is really making a critical plea in self-defense, and his criticism is a misjudgment because it is not sympathetic. ”

“ Mohler, as a typical Broadway manager, is not culturally erudite and ornamental, but he is not ignorant—not in his own line. He has succeeded because he is shrewd. It is none but the foolish who believe that poker and the theatrical gamble are wholly games of chance. And if Mohler is arrogant, it is only to those with whom arrogance is effective. Scollard fails to consider that he is not the first author whom Mohler has had to handle. ”

“ It is the audience that makes the American critic, as it is the audience that makes the American manager, the American actor, and the American play. When we have an audience that will be more interested in the art of an actor than in his personality, we shall have more actors who think of the characters they have to impersonate and not of the effect on the audience of their impersonating such a character. When we have a larger public that wishes to think in the theater, we shall have more managers producing thoughtful plays, and more thoughtful critics to review them. ”

“ Similarly, when Mohler turns over Scollard and his manuscript to the tender consideration of a star, Mohler does not do it because he prefers the star system of the American stage to play-producing with a balanced cast. Stars are hard to manage, and Mohler's life would be happier if he did not have to worry with them. He does it because the star system is more profitable. And it is more profitable because our audiences are drawn by personality more than by art. With us, art is for "character actors," and there are as many clever ones on our stage as on any other ”

“ Even in New York, that "rube town" of the world, there are signs that such an audience can be found and profitably exploited. Despite Scollard and all the difficulties that he exposes, there is nothing plays to produce, and more thoughtful wrong with the American stage that is not chiefly the fault of the American public; and as soon as the American public becomes capable of rewarding intellectual masterpieces of dramatic art, no doubt Scollard will produce them. ”

“ He does not even recollect that Aubrey cannot be altogether a fool, since he is a business success, and therefore necessarily able to take care of himself with such shrewd bargainers as Mohler. And when Aubrey has accepted the part and signed his contract with Mohler and put the play into rehearsal, Scollard is naïvely surprised to find his star apparently nursing a grudge against him that goes from indifference to offensiveness, and bursts out at last in a flaming quarrel. ”

“ To the average American actor, as to the average American manager, the average American author is an impractical egotist who writes a fairly presentable play, and then fights against improving it to meet the prejudices of the public or to accommodate the limitations of the cast. ”

“ Mohler insisted, and Scollard winced. Well, if new ideas were profitable in the American theater, who would welcome them with a hand more open for profit than Max Mohler's? He is financing dramatic entertainment for an audience that seeks intellectual exercise at the end of its day's work about as eagerly as day laborers seek a gymnasium of an evening to disport themselves on the horizontal bars. It costs ten thousand dollars to bring an average play to trial in New York, and it must play to six thousand dollars a week to meet its New York expenses. ”

“ Even Bernard Shaw's audiences come to laugh and remain to misunderstand. Emotions can be theatrically depicted by the players with their gestures, their facial expressions, the tones of their voices, but ideas have to go by word alone. They do not go so well. ”

“ The author does the same. And the man who would direct successfully has to be as obstinate and subtle, as impatient and long-suffering, as domineering when he can dominate, and as suave when he must persuade. That is one reason why there are so few successful plays, so few successful stage-directors, so few successful playwrights. ”

“ It is not an accident that the Century Theater may become a vaudeville house. Broadway says, "As soon as these new fellows make money on melodrama, they lose it on art." Scollard might as well scold Murphy for Tammany Hall as scold Mohler for the American theater. Murphy and Mohler are as much the victims of conditions as Scollard is. ”

“ He was delighted, but he does not conceal that he was kept at a distance, that conversations ceased as he approached, that games did not include him, that some of the celebrities with whom he wished to talk were pointedly unresponsive to his attempts to be sociable. He does not seem to realize that these people are accustomed to defend themselves from the curiosity of outsiders, and do it mechanically. ”

“ He usually ends by having two personalities,—even when he is off the stage,—one for the press-agent and the interviewer and the curtain-speech and the social appearance, the other for his private life and his friends in his profession. ”