Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1908-07-29
The ORIGINAL Impulse.

A fruitful bit of reasearch would be
/ a thorough inquiry into the real mo-
| tives that underlie the writing of the
best plays of today. Of every piece
of writing. dramatic or otherwise, it
is reasonable to ask 'why?" And it
is safe to say that II what we call
1.-The great plays" now current were
put to such a test, some would be
found to have been written for the
mere love of writing, some for fame,
many for bread, but the vast majority
and the really great ones, out of the
writer's desire to tell us the story OF
his life The predominant trait of
the best dramatic writing today is
that it is photographers; and be-
cause a man best tells what he has
Iactually lived, our so-called great
plays owe their greatness to the BIZ
ography that is in them. The latest
play that William Gillette wrote and
acted in was largely photographed
in source. Mr.. Gillette in life, long
was the hero in Clarice.
A reigning success on the New
York stage today is a play taken in
toto out of actual life. An actor
nightly performing in one play of pop
| uIar interest has but to walk block
from his dressing room and enter an
other theater to see re-enacted an in
cident taken out of his own life, and
couched in dialogue as familiar to
| him as his own speech. 1t is said
J that the actor frequently takes the
Iwalk and sees himself as he was 10
years ago. The prevailing trait Of
all plays written by Arthur Pinero-
at least those that are not professed
comedies-is a perpetual undertone
of hooking irony. From The Profit
gate, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,
The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, down
to- His House in Order, Pinero never
lets slip a chance to jab his pen
deeply and bitterly into the hypocri-
sy, the smallness, the meanness, of
England's middle class, Nina lesson
second wife to Filmer lesson, mem
Der of parliament, prig and mouther
of method and order-why could she
not succeed in deed as well as in sta
ton "the sanity An2Apel?" She rec
ognized her deficiencies, she tried
lizard to correct them, she loved Fill
mer, she would do Anything for his
happiness, yet she failed for the want
of little encouragement. And there
in lies the photographed note of
His House in Order. The pat on the
hack for which Nina hungered was
once as eagerly craved by Pinero him
self, in his first days as a playwright;
but it was denied him as summarily
as it was denied Nina, and by that
same psalm-singing. cold blooded,
pharisaical middle English.
The best plays of James A. Herne,
to whom we owe the first flicker of a
drama distinctly American, were tran
scriptions of incidents taken from
his own life. Griffith Davenport,
which William Archer in a converse
ton lately declared to be the very
best American play he had ever seen,
and one of the best he had ever seen,
| is dramatization of 20 years as
they were lived by Mr.. and Mrs,
Herne. One of the lasting impress
sions carried from youth to middle
age by Frank Mayo was the queerly
patterned, old fashioned wall paper
in the living room of his boyhood
home. 1t had always seemed to him
as reflective of the character OF the
family as the clothes worn by any OF