The San Francisco call., 1907-02-24
By James Crawford

held in Denver, when representatives
of all the cattle breeding States and
Territories competed. He was among
our guests on the stage, and before we
departed for Ogden he kindly showed
US how easy it was to reduce to tract
ability pony that never before had
man on its back"
at is difficult TO understand" | said,
chow you could conceive such con-
vincing stage portrait of the Virginian
without having had some personal
knowledge of his kind
Il give you my word of honor that
outside OF Buffalo Bills Wild West
and shows of that sort ! never saw a
cowboy or spoke to one anywhere
until | met Colville. How did | get
the Virginian's moods and manners so
correctly in accord with the Western
ideal of such a parsonage? By read
ing the book a dozen times or more
and by adopting the authors sugges-
tions at rehearsal. For nine weeks
after the play was produced he was
with US, suggesting and revising and
pruning and patching, until the play
attained the shape in which you see
II now He knew what his characters
should say and do, and how they
should say and do, and after we began
rehearsals my party, covering POO
pages, was almost entirely revised
He wrote his amendments on cigar
cite papers, backs of envelopes and
visiting cards, pieces of wooden boxes,
or any other available thing, and hand
ed them to us, and we inserted them
where he intended they should 60
1t took long time and infinite pains
TO make The Virginian' what it is to-
day"
In my opinion the strength of The
Virginian' is dependent almost exclu-
sively upon its character delineations,"
| said
That has always been my opinion" :"
queth the man better qualified to opine
on the subject, and to find people
fitted to play some of its characters
was no easy task Indeed. to obtain
more than one of them it was neces-
sary TO go outside of the regular act
ing profession. You see. the charac-
tiers had to be looked as we'll as act
ed, because the book was widely dis
tributed and the public had learned
TO fix In their minds the appearance
of the people shown in its illustra-
tons. So we found many actors who
could play a certain part we'll enough,
but could not be made up to look the
character; and there was no scarcity
OF actors who could look the character
but could not play the part we'll
| enough to suit. No other play that
| ever heard OF had as many try
outs of actors as The Virginian
When we finally got the cast as per-
feet as 1t could be made | took care
TO keep it so, and that is one OF the
chief causes of the plays unabated at
tractiveness near the close of its
fourth season. 1t is good for many
more seasons as a road show, but it
will never be successful in stock the
aters, because no stock company
could do anything like justice to all
its characters or devote to it the re-
hearsal that is essential to playing it
with the smoothness it must possess
to be impressive Itis less of drama
than coherent series OF clean Incl
dents, and what 1t lacks in dramatic
strength must be compensated for
by the acting of each incident with
fidelity to detail that holds the in
terest of an audience. Long practice
in team work is requisite to attain
clich acting aS that