Continental stagecraft

Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play, because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama originates when two or three people are seized with a desire to give an old legend or an old ritual a living form. They want to act. As they act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and to the player who interprets him.

That is the history of the theater through twenty-five centuries. It begins with the actor, and it comes very close to ending with him.

It is rather a good thing to understand about the history of the theater. It gives you a certain respect for the actor which actors do not always inspire. It makes you patient with the difficulties of writing anything intelligible on this most ancient and most complex and most unsubstantial of all the things of the theater. It makes you realize the dangers of dogmatizing on the subject. And, if you can look back with imagination to the day of Garrick and his great apron stage and his Hamlet in knickerbockers, back to the day of Burbage and his sunlit platform in the midst of an Elizabethan mob, back to Æschylus answering the chorus of the Furies in the half circle of Athenians that piled up the hillside of the Acropolis; perhaps, then, you will see that the actor was not always a fellow with a false beard or the manners of a soda water clerk, who expects you to believe that he is no actor at all, but a family doctor or an employee of Mr. Liggett who has taken to living in a room with one side gone. At any rate a little hint of theatrical history, full of amazing surprises, might make you tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four types of acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to come of them.

The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be found in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek comedian made his entrance in The Frogs looking so amazingly like the statue of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody could be sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected to see. In Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who played Caliban got together a collection of false hair and wooden tusks which made every one wonder who the new member of the company could be. And probably among the Greeks and the Elizabethans there were players so amazingly like servants or kings in face and carriage that they never played anything else. Yet it is safe to say, nevertheless, that the actor’s trick of trying to look like a different human being in each new play and never at all like himself, and his other trick of never looking like anything but himself and always playing exactly the same kind of part, are histrionic symptoms of the disease called Realism. There was never so much literal and deliberate impersonation as in Europe to-day, and so much “type casting” as along Broadway.

These are two very different methods of work, but they both reach the same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has necessarily anything to do with art. The first—for which the word “impersonation” is commonly and very loosely used—is pretty generally esteemed to-day. It is considered to mark off the actor, even the artist, from the crowd of clever mummers. It is hard to deny an instant and hearty interest in any player who can look like and act like a tramp one night, and like a barbaric king the next. The emotion he creates as a king, or the artist’s vision he displays in selecting his material and making Form out of it, may be great or small. But his ingenuity in masquerade will always win admiration. In fact we are pretty sure to spend our time praising such an actor as Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic artist in Samson and Delilah, and like a husky young horse-thief in The Idle Inn, instead of recognizing the artistic distinction these impersonations show.

Examined in cold blood, the virtue of this sort of acting is the virtue of the wig-maker. The difference between a Van Dyke and a pair of mutton chops; the difference between Flesh Color No. 1 and Flesh Color No. 3; the difference between a waiter’s dress suit bought on the Bowery, and a doublet designed by James Reynolds and made by Mme. Freisinger—that is the secret of this kind of acting. Not the whole secret, of course, for the pose of the actor’s body, the grace or awkwardness of his carriage, the lift of an eyebrow, or the droop of a lip is quite as important. Such things, however, have no more of art or emotion in them than the tricks of make-up. They can give us recollections of real persons or figures in literature, in painting, or in other plays, about whom we have felt emotion. But it is not until the actor puts Form of his own into this lay figure, by the movement of his body, and the emotion of his voice, that anything approaching art can be said to exist.

Stanislavsky may look like a colonel in The Three Sisters, and like a spineless gentleman in The Cherry Orchard; but that is not the measure of his art. Stanislavsky might even be a colonel on leave who took a fancy to acting, or a spineless gentleman who lost his patrimony and fell back on his university reputation as an amateur actor; and he would still have to prove himself an artist.

There is an amusing similarity and contrast between the two varieties of realistic actors. The first impersonates a different character in every play, and never himself. The second impersonates the same character in every play and always himself. The first impersonates by changing; the second by remaining the same.

Provided that there is a large and varied supply of types—military men, bar-keeps, politicians, artist-neurotics, criminal-neurotics, he-men, she-men, rabbit-men, not to mention all sorts of women—the result on a play should not be so very different whichever system of acting is adopted. If a play-goer were to see only one play, he couldn’t detect any difference. If he were to see two, he would be likely to get some added pleasure out of the knowledge that the same people were acting both, and he would probably use up on the business of spying out the tricks of it all a good deal of the energy and attention that he ought to give to the play.

There is one practical difference, however, in these two ways of casting a play. You cannot make a repertory company out of types. In spite of the old jargon about Leading Man, Leading Woman, Juvenile, Old Man, Ingenue, Heavy, Character Man, and so forth, no permanent company giving realistic plays can get along without actors who can achieve some sort of differentiation. Since the German theater and most of the European theater is run on the repertory system, the Continental actor is generally a man adept in masquerade. Because America has no repertory theater, because producers in New York pick new actors out of the apple barrel for every new play, and because almost all the legitimate actors of America make New York their headquarters, the system of casting by type is the natural, workable system for us.

Type acting need not mean that the type the actor plays is absolutely identical with his own personality in private life. It usually isn’t. But it does mean that, because of his own personality, his physical and mental equipment, the actor is able to play a very similar type to his own. Two excellent examples of this are Frank Craven and Ernest Truex. In real life they are never Tommy Tucker of The First Year or the hero of Six Cylinder Love, but on the stage they are never anything else. It is just possible that they could be something else, but they began this way, and this way the managers and the public will probably make them continue.

All of which brings up a single artistic point upon which varied impersonations and the repertory theater defeat type casting. Type casting is apt to tie a man to the kind of part he first acts with any ability, and not the kind he can act best. He may be able to play ten different sorts of characters, and one or two of these may release something in him that permits him to be a true artist in his impersonation. But if he happens to play some other of the ten characters first, and play it reasonably well, our casting system may keep him from ever reaching those characters in which he might excel. For another thing, the constant change of parts in a repertory theater gives an actor practice that he cannot get if he repeats type parts in fewer plays, as he must do in America. Through this practice with varying parts, he may come to add something of artistic significance to his work.

A nice esthetic point arises if you find a type-actor—say Craven—giving an extraordinarily good performance. He is playing himself, we will say; yet within that familiar personality, he is achieving just as interesting emotion as some other actor of a different personality, but possessing the knack of varied impersonation, could achieve; he is even reaching a sense of Form, selecting out of his own personality, experience, and emotion, and combining these into a shape that moves us esthetically—whether to laughter or to tears. Is this art? Would it be art if the actor were Georgie Price imitating Craven, or somebody from the Moscow Art Theater impersonating Craven? Would it be art if Craven played a character so different from himself as the savant in He Who Gets Slapped, and played it as successfully as he has played Tommy Tucker? Unquestionably the answer to the last question would be Yes. As for the others, there is legitimate room for argument.

This business of varied impersonation versus self-impersonation arouses a great deal of dispute. The most interesting feature of the squabble is that usually the opponent of self-impersonation or type-acting points back with mournful pride to some of the great actors of the past like Booth or Forrest. When he does this, he passes clean outside of realistic acting. Moreover, he brings into the argument actors, who, while they played a wide variety of parts, never took the trouble to hide behind the wig-maker or to pretend to be anybody else physically than the great Edwin Booth or the celebrated Edwin Forrest.

To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is the third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Giovanni Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out to list the players who use their own mask frankly for every part, achieving impersonation and emotion by their use of features and voice as instruments, you would find many more names of women than of men; for the actress has far fewer opportunities than the actor to employ the ingenuities of make-up. You would also find, I think, that your list was not so very long, and that it contained the names of most of the players of great distinction from Eleanora Duse to Charlie Chaplin. There is magic in the soul of such players, not in their make-up boxes. They create their impersonations before your eyes, not in their dressing rooms. You may, perhaps, be tempted to say that their art lies in the voice, that the face is a mask. But the face is obviously not a permanent mask; it changes not only from character to character in many subtle ways, but from scene to scene, and emotion to emotion. Also, there is Chaplin, the voiceless; his face speaks. It seems a mask, too, but it is articulate.

Such acting may be given—and usually is given—to the interpretation of realistic drama. It belongs at heart to another thing, to almost another age, past or to come. It achieves the necessary resemblance through the inner truth of its art. But it never submits to submergence. It reaches out towards a kind of acting that we used to have and that we will have again, while it meets the necessities of Realism.

This fourth kind of acting may be called presentational—a word that derives its present use from a distinction set up by Alexander Bakshy in his The Path of the Russian Stage. Presentational acting, like presentational production, stands in opposition to representational. The distinction is clear enough in painting, where a piece of work that aims to report an anecdote, or to photograph objects, is representational, and a piece of work striving to show the relation of forms which may or may not be of the everyday world, is presentational. In the theater Bakshy makes a parallel distinction between a scenic background that attempts to represent with canvas and paint actual objects of wood or rock or whatnot, and a background that presents itself frankly as what it is—curtains, for instance, or an architectural wall. The distinction applies to acting as well. A Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who is trying to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who refuses to admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand people are watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An actor who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience before him, and that it is his business to charm and move this audience by the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. The difference deserves better terms, but they do not yet exist.

It is obvious enough that the first actors were presentational. The Greek men who shouted village gossip from the wains, and made plays of it, were villagers known to every one. The actors in the first dramatic rituals may have worn masks, but they were frankly actors or priests, not the gods and heroes themselves. Roscius was Roscius, Molière was Molière; even the Baconians cannot deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare when he appeared as old Adam. I would maintain that Garrick and Siddons, Talma and Rachel were frankly actors; did they not see the audience out there under the light of the same chandeliers that lit their stage?

To-day our greatest players reëstablish to some extent the bond with the audience when they abandon any attempt to represent their characters through wigs and make-up, and present their own faces frankly as vehicles of expression. In comedy and in tragedy presentational acting comes out most easily. There is something in really great sorrow—not the emotions of the thwarted defectives of our realistic tragedies—that leaps out to an audience. Hecuba must speak her sorrow to the chorus and over the chorus to the people who have come to the theater for the single purpose of hearing it. There can be no fitting communion with the characters who have caused the tragedy or been stricken by it. The sufferer must carry her cup of sorrow to the gods; they alone can drink of it and make it less. And the great fact of the theater is that the audience are gods. It is a healthy instinct that causes many an actress in a modern tragedy to turn her back on the other characters of the play, and make her lamentation to the audience as though it were a soliloquy or an aside.

There are gods and gods, of course, and it is to Dionysus and Pan that the comedian turns when he shouts his jokes out across the footlights. In fact he takes good care, if he is a wise clown, that the footlights shan’t be there to interfere. If he is Al Jolson, he insists on a runway or a little platform that will bring him out over the footlights and into the lap of the audience. If he is a comedian in burlesque like Bobbie Clark, he has the house lights turned up as soon as he begins a comedy scene. He must make contact somehow with his audience. If the fun-maker is Fanny Brice, the method is a little less obvious, and it draws us closer to the sort of presentational acting which will dominate many theaters in the future, the sort of acting that presents an impersonation, and at the same time stands off with the audience, and watches it. If the player is Ruth Draper or Beatrice Herford, you have something that seems to me almost identical with the kind of acting I am trying to define.

I present these four categories of acting for what they are worth. They are frankly two-dimensional. They are divisions in a single plane. Other planes cut across them, and the categories in these planes intersect the ones I have defined. Consider almost any player, and you will find a confusion of methods and results which will need more explanation than I have provided. There is Richard Kellerhals, for instance, the Munich player whose strikingly different work in The Taming of the Shrew and Florian Geyer I have described. This is not impersonation achieved with make-up. It is a thing of expression, a spiritual thing. Take the actors of the Moscow Art Theater. They use make-up to the last degree, but there is always a spiritual differentiation far more significant than the physical, and there is always a sense of the Form of life more important than either. Harry Lauder has one impersonation—The Saftest of the Family—which is so different from his others in almost every way that for the moment he might be a different player. Here is a presentational actor indulging in the tricks of the realistic impersonator, and showing that, while the fields of realistic impersonation and presentational acting are not absolutely exclusive, at least they are somewhat incongruous or at any rate mutually hampering. Louis Jouvet of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier presents an opposite phenomenon when he appears in the realistic drama Les Frères Karamazov as the horrific old father, Feodor, and in Twelfth Night as Aguecheek. These are absolutely contradictory impersonations. In each case Jouvet completely disguises his own personality. The interesting point is that the physical impersonation which he brings to the Russian play is essentially unrealistic. It is all very carefully designed in costume, make-up, and gesture as a broad and striking expression, but not as a representation, of rough dominance. The red face and the green coat mix in the olive-bronze hat. His hair and his hat, his coat and his elbows flare out in lines of almost comic violence. He is very close to caricature in a thoroughly realistic play. Here is a curious mixture of methods and ends—planes and categories cutting across one another and creating new figures.

Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier is to-day the most interesting forcing bed of the new acting in Europe—unless the Kamerny Theater of the Russian expressionists is nourishing more than scenery. Copeau’s theater, with its naked stage and almost permanent architectural setting, its lack of proscenium and footlights, and its steps and forestage leading down to the audience, makes unquestionably for presentational acting. The illusion of Realism and representation is extremely difficult to attain. In four plays, Les Frères Karamazov, Twelfth Night, The S. S. Tenacity, and Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, varied as they are, we see no great amount of the sort of masquerading which Jouvet does so well in the first two. In the main, the actors keep their own normal appearance throughout; but they are not, of course, playing types. To some extent, therefore, they are working in the vein of Bernhardt and Grasso, striving for impersonation in emotion rather than in physique. Except for a gouty foot and a simple change in costume, Copeau’s Peruvian governor in the comedy Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, and his impersonation of the intellectual brother of the house of Karamazov are outwardly very much alike. It is in the mood alone that he registers the difference. In both, but particularly in the comic governor, there is a touch of the presentational attitude which fills the rest of the company in varying degrees and informs most of Twelfth Night. The difference between this acting and what we are accustomed to, is particularly plain in a comparison of the English sailor as played in the New York production of The S. S. Tenacity, and in the Paris production—the oily reality of Claude Cooper’s impersonation against the rather brash, certainly very dry version of Robert Allard. Allard’s performance has the stamp of almost all the acting at the Vieux-Colombier. It is something intellectually settled upon as an expression of an emotion, and then conveyed to the audience almost as if read and explained. In the school of Copeau, who was once journalist and critic, there is ever something of the expounder. It is a reading, an explanation, in the terms of a theatrical performance. It is, to a certain degree, presentational, because in every reading, in every explanation, there must be an awareness of the existence of the audience.