What the Publics Want

An Enquiry into the National Passion for "Abie's Irish Rose", A Play Now In Its Third Year

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

EVEN as granite will be worn away by an endless drip of water, so the patience of the great-hearts who toil as critics of the drama in New York suffers an eventual erosion, from the patter of those onlookers who ask them woolly-witted questions about their labours. In particular, two queries recur with an exasperating persistence. I remember fondly a certain bland and charming day in the early fall of last year, because, though nothing eventfuL occurred that day, all its pleasant hours ran their course without a single person asking either question.

One of the questions takes this form: "Of course, your work must be simply fascinating; but don't you get awfully tired of going to the theatre?" My answers range between: "Oh, not at all; but thank you for asking", to "I'll say I do" —an elasticity of response due to fatigue and an honest bewilderment. That bewilderment, in turn, arises from the fact that I do not know by what process of thought this notion gets its currency.

I do not find, for instance, that these same persons interrupt some chronic bookworm long enough to ask: "Aren't you dreadfully sick of reading? How can you look another novel in the face?" They do not, in the manner of the enquiring reporter, lay an interrogative hand on the arms of five separate bon vivants, and ask: "How can you bear to drink another glass of white chartreuse?" They do not, while dining at the home of a blissfully wedded pair, turn candidly to the husband, and observe: "Well, it's easy to imagine how the little woman must bore you."

The Triumph of Hokum

SO those of us who haunt the play all the year round, not by order of any Soviet nor in expiation of some detected misdemeanor, might, one would think, be occasionally suspected of doing so from choice. For, after all, there is always the grocery business. Or fine embroidery. Or umbrella mending.

The other question, of more recent vintage, but greater virulence, and complicated by faint I-told-you-so accents, usually takes this form: "Come, come, sir, how do you account for the success of Abie's Irish Rose?" Now, as it happened, I was not among those Cassandras of the drama who made moan when, 'way back in my salad days, that mishpokah at a wake, that odd blend of "Oy, oy" and "Bejabers", was first put forth in New York. I was busy at another theatre—the Odeon, in Paris—where I was heavily engaged in a struggle to keep Oscar Cesare from leaving after the first act; for that fine artist, but somewhat limited linguist, had not suspected that an improving Shakespearean evening could lurk behind so languorous and seductive a title as Une Songe d'une Nuit d'Elé. And when, two years later, I did drop in on the persistent Abie, it was only to discover that it was a quite amusing piece of hokum, simple as the comic strips are simple, vehement with the heartiness of a vaudeville sketch, and warm with the kind of unabashed sentiment which still manages to thrive in America: perhaps because Fate, or something, has usually confined George Jean Nathan to gazettes of limited and persistently skeptical circulation.

But, even had I been present among the first-nighters when this dean of the current comedies was new in New York, and even had its emphatic humours and its slightly viscous emotion aroused in me the symptoms of nausea which were immediately made manifest in the reports of Hey wood Broun and F. P. A. in the New York World, and (both immediately and weekly thereafter) by Robert C. Benchley in Life, I should still repudiate, with some heat, the assumptions which are tacit in the question aforesaid.

The first assumption is that it is a critic's business to predict how popular a play will prove, how long it will run, and how much money it will make; whereas, of course, it is his sole business to describe a new work in terms of the impression which that work, as performed, has made upon himself. It is the assumption, when a play which a scribe has found vulgar and dull, thereafter runs to crowded houses for months and months, that that play has somehow been proved to be a fine play, and that the scribe, in consequence, must writhe in the humiliation of defeat. Which, as my dear old trigonometry professor used to say so often, is absurd. Indeed, the scribe's ensuing emotion, if (as is only faintly probable) any, would perhaps be coloured rather with the mild, but sinfully enjoyable, sense of having been freshly identified as an aristocrat.

The second assumption is that one should be surprised at such a phenomenon as the success of Abie's Irish Rose. Now, I can imagine that success evoking almost any other emotion. But not, surely not, surprise. I can imagine its filling Eugene O'Neill with such a cosmic anger that he would go out into the street and slay the first ten men he met. I can imagine its inspiring F. P. A. with a moody resolution to end it all. I can imagine its leading Mr. Broun to move from his new rusticity in Stamford to such a spot as Monte Carlo, where his career as an indoor sport need not be interrupted with any institution so frequently foolish as the theatre. I can imagine its provoking Mr. Benchley to assassinate his kiddies in their nursery, rather than have them mature in a land where the favourite national pastime is an addiction to Abie's Irish Rose. I can imagine all these variously agitating consequences. But I cannot imagine a naivete sufficient to engender the emotion of surprise.

The Perversities of Popular Taste

NOT, at least, in a country where they play Mali Jong and select certain excellent but uninspired citizens as the national executives. When it is occasionally demonstrated that Dr. Frank Crane has rather a larger public than H. L. Mencken, no one, as far as I have been able to observe, collapses with astonishment. When a Harrison or a Bud Fisher makes more money than a Frank Brangwyn, sharp cries of surprise are not heard in the land. When, in 1911, Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, proved a somewhat less popular book than The Winning of Barbara Worth, by Harold Bell Wright, there were, as I recall, no Congressional investigations. When a census of the British Army, in 1915, revealed the fact that, not Rudyard Kipling nor Arnold Bennett, but one Nate Goold was the favourite author in the library of Tommy Atkins, the only bewilderment arose from the fact that readers over here had never heard of Goold at all. When The Girls, by Edna Ferber, was outrun, in 1922, by the Black Oxen of Gertrude Atherton, no one, as far as the record shows, swooned away. The success, therefore, of Abie's Irish Rose has all the aspects of normalcy.

So only a muddle-head would expect to find that the audiences which take pleasure in such plays as Saint Joan, say, or Beggar on Horseback, were as numerous as those which relish the bouncing comedy by Anne Nichols. Ever)' once in so often, as when a Julia Ward Howe writes a Battle Hymn of the Republic or a Chaplin stands poised for a moment on the stage of the world, it is possible for President Eliot and the man in the street to sit in the same pew. But normally, the enquiry as to "What the Public Wants" ends in confused counsel, because of a persistent typographical error. The title of the enquiry should be: "What the Publics Want."

"Business is Good"

FOR the most casual observer of such a phenomenon as Abie's Irish Rose can hardly help noting that that play has flourished largely on the patronage of persons who usually do not go to the theatre at all. The long run in New York—on May twenty-third, the play entered doggedly on its third year at the Republic Theatre—might not reveal that fact so clearly as do the statistics of the extraordinary engagements in other communities. For five companies have been wandering over the face of the land with Abie's Irish Rose this season, and the play has remained for months in cities where most plays exhaust their public in a week. Thus, the record of twelve weeks in Baltimore, fifteen weeks in Washington, sixteen weeks in Pittsburg, twenty-nine weeks in Cleveland, and so forth, indicate that the incorrigible Abie had not only found its public. It had created its public. When I visited Cleveland during the latter part of that record-breaking engagement, I had supper with some sixteen affable natives, of whom only one had not seen The Changelings, then tarrying the conventional single week in that prosperous settlement. But only one of the sixteen had seen Abie's Irish Rose. The same impression of virgin soil would occur to any one who had noted that this same migratory entertainment, on visiting Erie. Pennsylvania, whence plays usually depart hastily and gladly the morning after the first performance, remained for four weeks of excellent patronage.

A somewhat related experience is one I probably share with many readers of this discourse. I not only have encountered few persons who had ever attended America's most popular play, but, in conversation with those who had attended it, I have found fewer still who had enjoyed it. "What do you think of it?" I used to ask, in those preoccupied months when I myself was a stranger to its charms. And they, with a hearty brevity, would answer: "Terrible".

There have, of course, been notable exceptions. Thus, Miss Zoe Akins, the ardent dramatist, has proclaimed a fine play; and so great was the enthusiasm of Mary Austin that she marshalled the members of the International P.E.N. Club and herded them to Abie on the play's third birthday, in May. I cannot escape, however, the haunting suspicions that these were less the expressions of true conviction than the almost inevitable outcries of automatic dissent. Thus, a sufficiently audible expression of any opinion will instantly elicit its negative. And after the derision to which the hardy Abie was subjected by the critics, the rising of some one to proclaim passionately that it was a superb art object was as inevitable as were the polemics of those in whom the scorn heaped on Dr. Cook induced, by a kind of irritation, a conviction that he had actually been to the North Pole, after all.

(Continued on page 68)

(Continued from page 43)

I am told that Abie's Irish Rose will, in all probability, accumulate for Miss Nichols the sum of $5,000,000. For it yields her, not only the royalties, but the production profits as well. As manager of the play, it is her agreeable and seldom shirked duty to pay the royalties to herself. She became its producer when, after the play had been rejected by every one to whom it was shown, she fished it out of her trunk and herself presented it to New York. Miss Nichols is a comely and twinkling young woman, who had been on or near the stage ever since that fateful day when she took her courage (and $32) into her hands and ran away from the school for girls at Ogontz, where a 'rusting family had bestowed her. In those trying hours when she was calmly, though mendaciously, assuring the unimpressed office boys of the managers' sanctums that she had played leading roles for years in the South, she little recked, as the romancers have it, that she would one day write the Ford car of American comedy, and ride in it to wealth and not a little fame.