From WHO TELLS ME TRUE by Michael Strange, 1940, p. 156 ff.

After a long and successful run in THE JEST (sic-JEST came after REDEMPTION),, building up Jack's reputation with audiences all over the country, it was decided--and again I think on Edward Sheldon's advice--that he should next play "Fedya" in "The Living Corpse" by Tolstoy, and I was asked to adapt this great but tutgid drama.

So I went to my Russian friend, Ray Rosenbaum (sister of that jovial opportunist sculptor Jo Davidson), for a literal translation, knowing that from Ray's vital and sensitive mind I would get something of what Tolstoy was driving at. And through hot August (1918) days and evenings we sat in the basement of her Russian restaurant while she read me the play, translating as she went along and I took down her lively speech and went home and worked it up by myself.

But when I read it to Jack he said, looking eerily off into space, "Oh, it's all right, only I want more sensuousness for Fedya. Now, have him the kind of man who, when he lies beside his wife in bed, feels, senses her lover wriggling in under the door on his belly, and getting into bed with them. Have Fedya tortured, driven mad"--and Jack's arm described the very cycle of madness--"by the thought of that man around his wife!"

"But, Jack, remember when the play starts, Fedya has already left his wife, only hopes her lover will be able to come across, and finally shoots himself to legalize their union." "Never mind," said Jack. "But, Jack, from the beginning Fedya is beyond the physical, and only wants to lie in a gypsy cafe, inviting the inconclusiveness of his Russian soul to balalaika music, while Masha, the beautiful gypsy girl, keeps on kissing him and hoping she can bring him to." "What?" cried Jack increduously, "Why, you can't play a fellow like that, I tell you?" and he rolled his eyes downward in a terrifying manner, "to give me something to tear out my liver with in front of those So-and-Sos!"

So I went ahead and gave him all I could; and never dared read what I was doing to Ray. The great night came. We went down together to the theatre and sat remotely in the gallery. My name was not on the program, as matters weren't officially arranged between Jack and myself, and the curtain rose. And for the first time I heard with terror, delight, and a sense of guilt, whole sentences of mine spoken from the stage. The audience was enraptured; Jack played an adorable Fedya with a slight Russian Jew accent that stood out with exotic poignancy from the simple mid-western voices that surrounded him.

During the first entracte, when the lights went up, I saw a very stout man sitting in the stage box angrily searching the program and waving his arms in controversy with the usher. Vaguley uncomfortable, I went down to ask her, "What's the matter with the fat man? Why is he so angry?"

"He is Count Tolstói. He is the son of the author," she replied, "and he wants to know immediately who adapted the play. He cannot find a name on the program." He

"He'll have to wait some time, thank God!" I thought to myself as I crept back to Ray.

From TO A LONELY BOY by Arthur Hopkins, 1937, pp 167-170

... In a previous letter I told you how impressed I was by Moissi in Tolstoy's THE LIVING CORPSE. I decided then that when I could find the right actor I would give the play a production in English. One day the actor came to me. He heard that I planned to to the play and he wanted the part. He was John Barrymore. At the time he was playing on tour in PETER IBBETSON. I agreed to hold the play for him. At lunch one day I told him I had a plan for him. To him it sounded inviting but rather overburdened with hope. By this time I had my own theatre, the Plymouth, made possible by a generous arrangement proposed to me by the Shuberts. I told Barrymore that we would open with the Tolstoy play, and that he was to stay at the Plymouth three years, during which we would build up a repertoire. I further proposed that we would not exhaust the run of the plays but do at least two plays each season.

It was then my plan that after three years we would tour the country with our repertoire. Barrymore was willing if it could be done. So thus began the combination of Barrymore, Jones and Hopkins that was to make theatrical history while it lasted.

Rehearsals for REDEMPTION began, and at the first reading I was rather startled to find that Barrymore had acquired for the part of Fedya a rich Russian accent. I quickly dismissed rehearsal for a much-too-early lunch and asked Barrymore to join me. When we were seated, he asked, "What's wrong?"

"The accent".

"What's wrong with the accent? I've been studying with a Russian all summer."

p 2 - Hopkins-REDEMPTION

"There should be no accent".

"Why not?"

"We're all supposed to be talking Russian. The others will speak with no accent. You'll sound like a foreigner among your own people."

He agreed, but his summer's study was never thoroughly vanquished. An occasional accent would emerge that had a distinctly Jewish sound.

After we reached the dress rehearsal stage, I thought it would be pleasant and courteous to give a special performance with only one invited guest, the guest to be a son of Tolstoy who was then in New York. He came, solemn and bearded, and sat through a complete performance with Barrymore acquitting himself magnificently. At the end of the performance I went to him, convinced that he would be moved and impressed by our treatment of his father's work. I saw quickly that he was neither. He looked at me with no little disapproval and said, "But where is Fedya's beard?" He had noticed nothing in the performance except that Barrymore was clean-shaven. So far as he was concerned, no beard, no play.

The play opened, receiving laudatory but forbidding reviews. They stressed the Russian melancholy. What had looked like success now had the disturbing aspects of failure. Business was bad, and continued so for four weeks. Had we been in any other theatre we would have been forced out and our golden enterprise turned to brass. Yet there was an enthusiasm in the small audiences that came that convinced me we should hold on. They began to get the beauty of the play and the magnificence of its performance rather than its overstressed melancholy. The turn came. The business climbed to capacity. On our twenty-ninth and closing week no seats had been available for days. We were following out our policy of doing two plays a season no matter what the business.

Our second production was THE JEST......

From Robinson-Locke--p. 67--vol. 41

N. Y. Sun, April 27, 1919, by Lawrence Reamer

.....In honor of Count Ilya Tolstoy, son of the novelist, Arthur Hopkins organized a special performance of REDEMPTION. The theatre was empty except for a few guests invited out of compliment to the distinguished visitor. John Barrymore tore his passion to tatters as he unhappy hero. He had never acted with greater passion nor thrown himself more completely into the degradation and final destruction of the unhappy youth than he did on this occasion.

The handful of spectators was thrilled by his acting. So there seemed after all a reward in store for this effort when he came forward in the wings to receive the congratulations of Count Tolstoy, whom Mr. Hopkins has brought back stage. The actor was weak and palpitating still from his great efforts when the two were introduced.

don't

"You wear a beard, do you?" asked Count Tolstoy, eyeing him critically.

"Nor do the other men in the play wear beards." The Count, however, showed no signs of displeasure. "That's rather curious, you know, for in Russia most men do wear beards". Then the guest of honor faded away in the darkness and Mr. Barrymore, weaker and more fatigued than ever, staggered back to his dressing room to think it all over.

Theatre, Nov, 1918 R-L Vol. 41, p. 54.

I admit I like unusual plays, not for a steady diet, but the exotic and the bizarre appeal to me. I hope there are a lot of my way of thinking for Arthur Hopkins deserves well of the public for his temerity. The man who produces Tolstoi's "The Living Corpse," these days, certainly has his nerve with him. I wish success to the production, too, on John Barrymore's account, a young actor, who, vivid in his interest of big things, plays the protagonist of this particularly morbid play, now called "Redemption," in the manner of a true artist.

"Redemption" is the story of an artistic sensual weakling told in a series of episodes that show his gradual decline, ending in utter degradation and suicide. Its effect on his wife and friends is collaterally revealed. It is graphic, varied and hectic and psychologically introspective in its study of the lack of will. It contains at least two flashes of propaganda, the futility of the indissoluble tie of matrimony as imposed by the orthodox church and the oppression of stupidly constituted authority. It is impressive in its simplicity and exploited by suggestion rather than by detailed literary analysis.

As a production "Redemption" is quite remarkable in its atmospheric verity, attained too by the simplest means ingeniously devised by Robert Edmond Jones. Throughout, is the absolute suggestion of Russia, heightened by the continuous accompaniment of Slavic music. The company, too, is a large one and of unusual excellence.

Fedor is an acting part of the first magnitude. Some of its phases escape Barrymore, but in three scenes he reveals a histrionic grasp that shows the wonderful and impressive strides that he has made in his profession. His drunken scene with the gypsies, his recital in the underground slums of his mordant philosophy of love, hate, life and death, and his outburst of latent decency prior to the suicide he shied at earlier, betokened evidences of the big dramatic manner. Mr. Barrymore is distinctly arriving.

Russ Whytal, as the elderly friend, and Zeffie Tilbury, as mother of the young man who marries Fedor's wife, when he is believed to be dead, were admirable in their natural sweetness and dignity. Hubert Druce, as a drunken egoist, who styled himself a genius, brought a refreshing breath of comic variety to the scene, while the Tzigane parents of Fedor's enslaving influence were characteristically presented by Jacob Kingsberry and Helen Westley. There was real charm and nobleness in Manart Kippen's rendering of the devoted lover, while two bits of realistic Russian character were contributed by E.J. Ballantine and Thomas Mitchell. As the distracted wife Maude Hanaford was engagingly pathetic.

***

N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 20, 1918 R-L Vol. 41, p. 53

JOHN BARRYMORE.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, in the wildest of biographies, says that it is manifestly unfair to introduce a man whose story you are about to tell without some sort of far flung preface which will permit you to begin at the beginning.

This is to be a tale of John Barrymore, whose turn it is this year to hand on the Barrymore torch in Tolstoy's "Redemption" at the Plymouth Theatre, and this introduction will do what it can to wash in a background for the Barrymore opinions.

He is accessible to interviewers, he will tell you, at any hour of the day, not because he has ever compromised his long-standing aversion to them, but just because his natural bent is to kindliness.

But he is filled with little verbal barrages, which he would just as lief lay down on your head as not if you ask him any fool questions, and the best way to tap his remarkable resources is to back and say nothing until he himself is a little bored with the silence.

He is usually to be found leaning over backward to avoid a pose. He runs his hands rapidly through his hair when he talks, like a poet or an Italian, but he doesn't know it and is probaly prepared to deny it. He is prodigiously in earnest. He is what he would scornfully call a highbrow, and speaks their language with a facile gracefulness, till some echo of his round phrases drops back on his inner ear, and in order to ruin any impression of Intellectualism" he then calls Tolstoi "a great old guy" and "Redemption" a "hell of a great play."

He abhors theories about acting, though he is harboring one, unbeknownst to himself, as will presently appear. He is acutely interested in Arthur Hopkins and tires repeatedly to button him into a definition that will be something of a fit. In fact, it shall be in just this business of paying his respects to Mr. Hopkins that Mr. Barrymore may now appear in his own person, and the introductory may cease.

"I thought I loathed the theatre, till I ran into that man--a most amazing man--the most interesting man there is in the American theatre," says Mr. Barrymore. "I don't want this to degenerate into one of those perfectly sweet interviews where the actor says his manager is the dearest thing alive. But you don't realize how interesting this fellow is. I don't want to say too much, because I don't know him very well. That's why it's always devilling me to get my mind made up about him."

"Now, he decided to put on 'Redemption.' On the face of it, it isn't a play for America. It's all about a man that Americans think is a failure, and it's Russian. The guy that didn't think his thinking except every other Tuesday would say 'Huh, take it away.'"

"But Hopkins says 'This is a great play, and the world is full of people who will respond to it, so this will be the next thing I do.'"

"Of course, he's intuitive--that is, I think he is. He's got a remarkable humanity in him, too. He's the man that's got the faith in the fellows that everybody else calls fools. I don't believe Hopkins thinks there's a fool in the world. That is, I think that when I watch him work. He's got an abounding faith. And courage."

"Oh, I don't mean this tied-in-a-knot sort of courage, that is tense with excitement and useless to the world. His is a placid, steady--here, wait a minute, I know what it is. It's Chinese. He couldn't have the intuition he's got without putting his faith in it--that steadies him."

"But I had something to say about this play, and don't let me get away from it, trying to explain Hopkins. He knew it would succeed and

Tribune, "Redemption" Oct, 1918

(3)

"There's nothing to acting but thinking. That's all it is. If you think like the man you're playing you can't do anything you oughtn't to, because--well, it's automatic. You are expressive of what you feel, all the time. That's true of the man in the street as well as the one on the stage. Gestures are spontaneous to the man actually feeling something or thinking something. They don't really mean anything--any more than words do--but they come naturally to him, and by them anybody looking on him give a good guess at his feelings. That's what we do on the stage--try to tip ourselves off and make audiences share our feelings with us.

"By the way, can you tell me why it is that one man can sit absolutely motionless, in a chair, on a stage, and have every eye in the audience glued to him, while other men stand on their ears and wave flags and can get no attention at all? Well, I don't know either, but I've seen it done--that is, by fine actors. I think it's--well, it's a trite old phrase, but I think it's being on the level with the audience. Thinking--sincerity--that's what it is.

"Oh, of course, I know there's something else. No actor is going to turn his back to the audience and go and weep out of a back window, no matter how sincere that might be. He would know that to the audience it would just look as if he were being sick. One-fourth of your brain looks on, while three-fourths thinks. Or maybe that isn't it at all. Maybe it's instinct for the theatre that stands guard.

"But I know one thing--let the audience sense the part of you that's watching, instead of the part that's feeling, and you've lost them. And here's another--it's the coquetry of audiences. Let them feel that you know they're there and you've lost them. You have to go about your business, ignoring them as you would a child, and if you do your business worth a cent they're with you every time. Try to draw them in or pay attention to them and they get self-conscious and they squirm. Wouldn't you think they'd like it better if you did act up for them, when they've paid their $2? No, what they want from an actor is sincerity, and they know they're not getting it if he's got one eye on them. You know, the theatre's the best fun in the world. Maybe I just think so now because of Hopkins. I know I used to hate it hard enough. But somehow this play has been the finest thing that ever happened to me. Giving a great play to people who want it--with a man who knows how--its fine business. You know, there's one thing--I've been talking along here as if Hopkins and I had invented 'Redemption'**I keep overlooking Tolstoy! When I first read it I said: 'Lord, what a thriller!' But a long time afterward I realized something else about it that nobody seems to have noticed--he has created a new form for the theatre. This play is an absolute innovation. There was that old guy, 'way past seventy, doing something that had never been done in the theatre before, and he probably didn't even know it. Does everything modern come out of the past?"

N.Y. Star, Oct. 16, 1918 R-L Vol. 41, p. 53

JOHN BARRYMORE IN "REDEMPTION" AT THE PLYMOUTH.

Arthur Hopkins has at least an artistic success, even if not a great
financial one in "Redemption," an adaptation of Tolstoy's "The Living
Corpse," which he brought to the Plymouth Theatre Thursday evening,
Oct. 3. The play also serves to bring John Barrymore to Broadway again
and he plays the principal role in masterly way and with a keen under-
standing of the requirements of the very difficult role.

"Redemption" is not a pleasant story to sit through. It tells
of the unhappy marriage of Fedya and his willingness to give his wife
her freedom so she may marry a girlhood lover. He goes among the gypsies for refuge. The wife is willing to forgive him; he neglects her
and when the divroce matter is broached to him, he agrees. In order to
get away from the evidence which is necessary in a legal divorce, he
tries to shoot himself, but this he cannot do. His gypsy companion
suggests to him that he pretend drowning, which he does. He sinks into
a life of dissipation and later on when it is discovered that he is
alive, his former wife and her husband are accused of bigamy. He finally ends it all by shooting himself.

Mr. Barrymore gives wide scope to his characterization and gives
a forceful and telling performance. A cast of unusual merit has been
engaged to support him.

The general atmosphere of the play is enhanced by the several
effective sets designed by Robert Edmund Jones.

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CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

sons. When we played it in Canada, where so
many people had lost sons, the sympathy for the
play was most unusual. This quiet, peculiar
appeal hardly seemed like the theater.

After Peter Ibbetson, I had my choice of
two plays. One of them was Barrie's Dear
Brutus. The leading part of this was sympa-
thetic and good, and when I read the play it
seemed difficult to see how anybody could fail,
even if he were only able to give one-tenth as
good a performance as was given by Gerald Du-
Maurier in London. I knew that the play could
not help succeeding in New York, and worse
than that, if one played it in New York there
would almost inevitably be a long road engage-
ment. The least to be expected from Dear Bru-
tus was two seasons.

So I elected to do the other play which was
offered to me, an English version of Tolstoy's
play, The Living Corpse, which we called Re-
demption. My wife made the adaptation, but it

2

## CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

wasn't credited to her on the play bills. She had
from the first been enthusiastic to have me do
Redemption, and while I was hesitating about
accepting Dear Brutus, she went to the sister of
Joe Davidson, the sculptor, who was then run-
ning The Russian Inn in New York, and from
her she obtained a literal translation. Out of
this she made an excellent adaptation, which,
like most good adaptations for the theater, con-
tained a great deal that was original. I am cer-
tain that it was in a large measure responsible
for the success of Redemption, a success which
bewildered a great many people. At first the
play did not do good business, because it was put
on in the midst of the flu epidemic. As soon as
this scare was over, however, and people began
to go to the theater again, it became an estab-
lished success.

I have never felt that my playing of it was
particularly able, and there were portions of it
that I never found very clear and consequently

3

## CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

could not make them clear to audiences. In the
first act, when I should have been a human be-
ing, I was given so many jewels and appurte-
nances to wear that I always seemed to myself a
sweet-scented jackass. Till the last act, where
there was great reality, I was never on the balls
of my feet. Occasionally, I think I was good in
that last act. As everyone knows, Redemption
is one of those gloomy depictions of a Russian
soul in especial agony, and only rarely is there a
mild bit of cheer or color.

One night my brother came to see the play,
and near him was a girl who munched chocolates
diligently all through the performance. When
in desperation at the futility of life I stood be-
fore a mirror to shoot myself, she said in a loud,
nasal voice to her companion: "Oh, the poor
pru-in." I fear that in that line the voice of
many persons spoke, though perhaps they would
not agree with the pronunciation.

One night, in changing a scene, the mirror

4

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

before which I stood when I was about to shoot
myself was broken and there was no time to get
another. So that I might be looking at some-
thing before I pulled the trigger, the frame was
left on the wall and asphaltum, which is ever
ready in the theater to touch up scenery, was
daubed in the frame where the glass should have
been. After that performance, a friend of mine
who is a painter came back to my dressing room
and after telling me some nice things about my
performance, said: "What a perfectly wonder-
ful touch that was of Tolstoy's—that a man
about to kill himself should, before doing so, go
look at a painting of a landscape." The artist
in him spoke. Each to his trade.

Before we did Peter Ibbetson I had pur-
chased the rights to do Sem Benelli's play, La
Cena delle Beffe which was called in English
The Jest. Both Ned Sheldon, who made the
English version, and I thought that this would
be a very good play for Lionel and myself to do