Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-01-17


with spoon upllfted over an ice
cream dish, smackS his lips over the CONNECTION,
and says, My! but we We got good property
man with this troupe there are some fifty per
cent of the people that laugh at the joke who
could not, for the life of them. tell just what a
property man is. Property on the stage and
back of it, does not always mean real estate; it
may mean anything from Louis Qunze chair
to headstone in Vermont graveyard. 1t
refers to the detachable bric-a-brac with which
a scene is set, to every loose piece of furniture
except the actors.
Just where the term originated is unknown
Shakespeare used it, of course, although in
those days the stage properties generally con-
sisted OF impressive young BrltOn IN knee
breeches holding up sign "a sort Of Eliza
bethan sandwich man, as 1T were. standing
forth upon the stage of the old Globe theater.
The sign read, "Ie Foreste of Arden. We all
know what the Elizabethan imagination was.
When the audience saw that sign, they turned
themselves loose.
This simple trick of the seventeenth century
property man" might be translated as fol-
lows:
Ladies and gentlemen, You now have be-
fore you a stage bleak New Jersey Subur-
ban railroad station at ten o'clock at night.
The fittings consist of three yellow pine stools.
a torch and soggy drab colored drop. with
a split in the middle. This last is the back
ground. | will now ask you to turn on the
riotous colors of your thinking apparatus for
famous. and imagine that the slate colored
back curtain is a waving bank of green foliage
to wit, the leafy trees: the SHIT is wooded
aisle; the torch is the flaming orb of day which
will anon be addressed in rolling pentameters
by the leading man; the three stools are messy
COuCheS wherein each weary traveller as he
stumbles in L. will fall and sigh his discour-
agement
The audience in the good old days, endured
this sort of thing; they really let their brains
n he hat
brushes and hammers do for Would We
put up with such scenic simplicity in the
twentieth century? Ben Greet has attempted
to hold to the old way. but without much
popular success
The Present Trend
INDEED, the trend nowadays seems to be
toward the other extreme. The fame of
Belasco rests entirely upon his marvellous
carpentering and electric lighting; klaw &
Erlanger. in producing their splendid spec
taces, such as " Ben Hur" and Aladdin"
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and
months of time on this one matter OF property
alone: the Hippodrome is known from ocean
to ocean because of its mechanical effects, and
whenever the proprietors can hit upon such
scheme that of holding mermads under
water for fifteen minutes they regard it as
nothing short of a dramatic triumph; the
production of Peer Gynt resolved itself
simply into production of Mansfield plus
weird tumble of property.
To-day, the property maker is the thing.
He takes the place of the poet The dramatist
need no longer rack his brain for such lines as.
" The morn, in russell mantle clad, walks on
crest of yon high eastern hill, or. Jocund
day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops"
Instead, the hero simply turns his back to the
audience, points at clump of blue canvas
hills in the background and-the stage cleo
trician with his red white; and blue lights
does the rest. And who shall say that the
esthetic effect is not even greater by the in
novation? Won't Belascos dawn in The
Girl of the Golden West" get under the thick
skin of the man in the second row great deal
quicker than Shakespeare's words about the
"Jocund orb can ever hope to-
An Electric Complexion
7 WAS talking recently with the man who
made the properties for the Mansfield
production of Peer Gynt," and asked him
about the peculiar green light that played