The famous Mrs. Fair, and other plays

Front matter

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Introduction

Why print a play? The three plays by Mr. Forbes, collected in this volume, give, it seems to me, a rather conclusive answer. All three of them have been eminently successful on the stage, for which, of course, they were primarily intended, and upon which they must needs be seen, even by those trained to read play manuscripts, in order fully to catch their flavor or respond to their emotional appeals. Yet when they are read in cold print they are seen to vary greatly in merit, and what in the stage success of each one was dependent upon the extraneous elements of an actor^s personality, or the rush of living action that permits the spectator no time for pause and reflection, or the passions and idiosyncrasies of the day, becomes suddenly clear. There is no magic in print. The dramatist who writes, indeed, for the page rather than the stage, aspiring to be "literary," is merely courting a very proper disaster. Yet the dramatist whose plot and personages — their speech, their motives, the lesson of their lives — will not stand the calmer and lingering scrutiny of the reflective reader, is only a hack writer, after all. In the high sense, a drama is "literature" not because it can be read with pleasure, but merely because it can endure close and reflective scrutiny. From the failure of our theatre to keep its successful plays in a repertoire, there is no other recourse to the dramatist who challenges such scrutiny — a praiseworthy chaflenge, surely — but to print his plays. That is why the number of printed plays is a fair indication of the serious ambition of our dramatists.

Of the three plays offered here, "The Chorus Lady," no reader will need to be told, can least endure the scrutiny print affords. Yet it was enormously successful in our

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theatre, how successful readers who did not see the original production in 1906 may be at some loss to guess. The title part was played by Miss Rose Stahl, an actress who brought to its impersonation so breezy and crudely wholesome and dynamic a personality, tossing off its slang with such unstudied and spontaneous zest, that she took the public captive. The play, to be sure, had its origin in a magazine sketch by Mr. Forbes, and this sketch was expanded into a play upon a hint given to him by some picture he saw^-the picture of a chorus girl interrupted at a supper by the arrival of her obviously rural father and mother. It was not, then, "tailored" to Miss Stahl's order. But it certainly fitted her as no later play she acted ever did, and the reader of today, noting the crudities or triteness of plot, the melodramatic villain, the poverty and conventionality of essential characterization, may well be excused for classing it as a successful example of that type of play called "character comedy," which is to say, a play in which some one or more vivid and entertaining persons are allowed the run of the stage, making the most of their eccentricities and thus always conditioning the story to immediate theatrical demands. It is a type of play flourishing essentially in the theatre, and seldom enough able to stand up under a reader's scrutiny. The stage version of "Rip Van Winkle," so marvelously acted by Jefferson, is a poor, shabby thing in print. In spite of Mr. Forbes' assertion that he always works from character, not from plot or situation, in writing a play, evolving his story from the sort of people he is presenting, one can hardly escape the conviction that Patricia O'Brien, at least, became known to his imagination with her makeup on — ^he saw her as an amusing stage figure — and rather found a story to show her off than tracked down her actual life.

"The Show Shop" is stuff of a different metal. The present writer thought, when he saw this play first acted, that it was a good-natured satire of American stage life, as deftly, as truthfully and as humanly done as anything of a similar nature in the Continental theatres. A present reading of the

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manucript does not seem to him to call for revision of this judgment. Mr. Forbes says that the germ of the comedywas a desire to put the ''stage mother" into a play. This desire he has certainly realized; Mrs. Dean, even in print, is a formidable object! But how neatly each one of his characters is sketched, how diversified they are, how human, from the little Hebrew manager who doesn't believe he knows how to pick a failure, to the gloomy and unimportant author who haunts the flies as his manuscript is slaughtered to make an ingenue's holiday. It may well be that the average audience is not sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate in full either the truthful character pictures or the satire of "The Show Shop"; but that is nothing against its technical merits. It remains the most pungent, amusing, and yet the most kindly satire of stage life and the shams of theatrical production, yet written by an American. There can be no question in the reader's mind whether this play was tailored for an actor or actress. It was quite obviously written out of a first hand acquaintance with the characters, who conditioned the story quite according to their weaknesses and amiable failings, as the author felt them. Accordingly, it stands up four square under the test of print.

Mr. Forbes says that after he has become acquainted with his characters, knows all about them and their antecedents, and has found out what their story is, he is extremely unhappy and dissatisfied if he cannot put that story into a sentence. The preliminary sentence which summed up, for him, "The Famous Mrs. Fair" was, he says, something as follows: — "A woman actuated by duty engages in war work, winning honors and the loving admiration and encouragement of her family; but when on her return she, actuated by selfish vanity, again leaves them, the realization is brought home to her tragically that a wife and mother can have a career but not at the expense of her obKgations to her home and family."

That sentence, it seems to me, clears away a good deal of the dispute which has gone on regarding this latest and most

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serious of Mr. Forbes' plays. Written immediately after the World War, it was quite natural that the author chose war work as the unselfish career his heroine had been following without disaster to her home, but war work was not essential to his story; it might have been something quite different. The whole point was that during Mrs. Fair's first absence from home she left behind a sustaining devotion, and during her second absence this sustaining devotion was quite naturally absent. The author did not argue that a married woman cannot have a "career" (indeed, he showed the son's wife to be quite successfully holding down her job), meanwhile contradicting himself by stating that his heroine had already followed a career for four years. Critics of the play have assumed a contradiction that does not exist — possibly because Mr. Forbes has, in reality, not argued at all, but merely told his story and left all to inference; not always a safe proceeding in this world so dependent on sign boards. It does not appear from a reading of the play that Mrs. Fair was anything more than an ordinarily capable woman, as her family were certainly nothing more than ordinary folk. Under the impetus of the war, Mrs. Fair became a hero — war makes many heroes out of ordinary material — and her family, in one way or another, were moved by exactly the same impetus to transcend the normal. The play began with the coming back to normal, the very commonplace normal of the Fair family. The real trouble seemed to be that Mrs. Fair never knew she was commonplace. The woman who, under normal conditions, can look after a "career" and a family at the same time, doing justice to both, is exceptional; she cannot be commonplace, for she has got to furnish to her flock the same sustaining stimulus that war had previously furnished to the Fairs. One rather suspects that Mrs. Fair's daughter-in-law had capacities in that direction, for she possessed the hard common sense and direct vision which come from contact with realities, a privilege denied to the wealthy. Certainly there is no evidence in this play that Mr. Forbes believes it cannot be

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done, that he is an anti-feminist. All he says is, that Mrs. Fair, under normal conditions, was too shallow and vain a woman to do it, and by a set of almost tragic circumstances he brought the lesson home to her and put her on the possible road to finding an ultimate solution. Why, then, should many spectators have felt his play did not hold together? Perhaps the trouble is that we have been so accustomed of late to direct preachment in our serious drama that we are a bit bewildered when the preaching is done by the more artistic method of a story without footnotes.

At any rate, such controversies as have followed the production of "The Famous Mrs. Fair" were quite impossible over "The Chorus Lady." In the thirteen years which elapsed between the composition of those two plays, it is quite evident that Mr. Forbes considerably deepened his conception of what he means by "character," moving from the superficial to the fundamental, from externals to internals, from mannerisms to manners. He has thus moved from a play which suffers severely under the test of print to one which can meet the test with the assurance born of a reasoned reflection on life and human motives. One wishes that from this individual case, he could draw an analogy taking in the whole field of American drama; that he could say it is with all our playwrights as it is with Mr. Forbes. But such a statement, alas! would be the measure of hope rather than judgment.

Walter Prichard Eaton.