Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-07-13

| 1UsIC AND THE DRAMA.
SOME HOPE FOR AN AMERICAN COM
EDY DESPITE THE CRITICS.
virgirs 1Eneid Dramatized and Per-
formed by Young Lady Students In
Boston-General stage Notes.
In spite of the vigilance of our dramatic
criticism, which has shown such unwearied
perseverance N undertaking. whatever
was native or novel in the efforts of our
playwrights, we really seem to be pretty
well on our way toward the promise of an
American comedy, says William D. How
ellis in Harper's Weekly. We do not like
to put the case more strongly than this, be-
cause even yet we have moments when we
can scarcely credit the fact, the disparity
between the opposing forces is so great.
On the one side, we have long had large
body Of gentlemen trained to profound
misconception of their Office, and deeply
grounded in traditional ignorance of the
essence and nature of the drama, writing
every night about the theaters, and more
and more believing in themselves and
their ideal of what a play out to be, with
out reference to what life was.
The criticisms which they have thus
produce between churchyard yawning and
cock growing, with the advantages of a
| foreman behind and night editor before.
hurrying them up for their copy, have
been such as must surprise the sympathetic
| witness by their uniform confidence and
| severity; but they have not in a great
measure carried, even to the most generous
compassion, the evidences of fitness for the
censorship assumed. These gentlemen
have sometimes been able to tell us what
good acting is, for they have seen great
| deal of acting; not certainly by their fault,
for no man can be Justly blamed for not
| telling more than he knows. Many of
! them know what a French play is, for they
have seen enough adaptations of French
| plays to have learned to admire their ex-
| tremely neat carpentry, and their carefully
| adjusted and brilliantly vanished sections,
which can be carried to any climate, and
put together and taken apart as often as
you like, without making them less repre-
| sentative of anything that ever was in the
world.
They have been struck with the ingeni-
Gus regularity of the design in these con-
| trivances. They have seen how smoothly
they worked, and they have formed such
dramatic theories as they have from
dramas in which situation links into situa-
tiop, and effect into effect, upon lines of
such admirable rigidity that it is all as
| unerring as making up train of cars with
the Miller coupler and buffer. But it
| would be wrong to say that many of these
gentlemen, apparently, know anything of
; the contemporary Italian drama, Spanish
drama, Russian drama, German drama,
Norwegian drama, and it would be still
| more unjust to accuse them, upon the
proofs their work has given, of knowing
| anything of the true functions of any
| drama, or caring at all for the life which
all drama should represent. On the
| other hand, opposed to the powerful body
Of critical gentlemen, whose discipline is
so perfect that they often seem to think as
one man, and sometimes even as no man
at all, we have had a struggling force of
playwrights and managers, disheartened
/ by sense of their own want of conform
| ity to the critical ideal. and by guilty
| nc 81 q.
| they have seen and known in America to
| ler coupler and buffer pattern of the
French drama.
These poor fellows have not only been
| weakened by the knowledge of their in
feriority in numbers and discipline to the
critics (who count about a hundred to
every manager and thousand to every
| playwright, but they have had fear that
there was something low and vulgar in
| their wish to see American life in the
| theater as they have seen it in the street
| and the counting house and the drawing
room, as they have even seen it in the
| novel. They have been So much unnerved
by this misgiving that they. have not yet
ventured to be quite true to life, but have
| only ventured so far to offer us a COM
promise with unreality, which we can
praise at most for the truth which could
not well be kept out of it.
yIRGIL's ENEID DRAMATIZED.
Only Boston girl would dare undertake
| tanning the defunct language of the Latins
There are in the second and third classes of
| the Girls Latin School more tnan score
1 r. l.. r
thoroughly in love with the hero of Vir-
gifs poem that they determined to i'm
mortalize his wanderings by portraying
them before Boston audience. The effort
was a success, Of course. Not word of
English was spoken while the curtain was
up. OF course there are some, even in a
| Boston audience, who were little "rusty"
on their Latin, but they were not kept in
| ignorance of what was being done on the
| stage. The acting was realistic and, al
| though trihe amateurish at times, left no
doubt in the minds of the spectators as to
| what was intended to be represented. The
story of each act was told in English be-
fore the rise of the curtain. The task of
arranging the play was done by the girls
without assistance, it is claimed. Their
ages are between fifteen and eighteen
years. They committed to memory sew
eral hundred lines of Latin, studied the
characters until they were thoroughly
familiar with the roles they were to as
sumo, arranged their own costumes and
| provided their own scenery. The selection
of costumes bothered them more than any
thing else. They put in deal of hard study.
The libraries were ransacked for books
relative to the subject, and other channels
of information were explored. They knew
that there must be some slight difference
in the costumes of males and females, and
they recognized that difference in arrang-
ing their garments. But their modesty
would not permit them to be too exact in
reproducing the male attire.
| STAGE NOTES.
! Marie Wainwright is now at her Sara
toga cottage.
| Al. Hayman viii spend the summer at
Long Branch.
George W. Lederer will arrive from Eu-
rope ON Sunday.
| MAY Rrook lyn mnnh innroyed in health