The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, May 11, 1902, Page 11

A1 ihe Lines arsed on a onograph and the Scenes Set Out on a Dummy Stage. whose sc s are built from es such as are tures! a play rehearsed from phor place a neat piled in dap- quietly phic actor and he run. He e never mis- e been drilled stage man- “When the ung,” you wonder why on ht of rehearsing T s being rehcarsed S countless changes to A writer can’t tell what is his lines until he hears them. Clyde Fitch writes his plays while they are being rehearsed, just as Worth builds & gown upon his patron. It is a meatter of experimenting, of trying, of changing a little here, a little there, of letting the work grow. THE SUNDAY CALL. 7924 ) i SO EL L (D HurPrREY, v oreKING ter to build a pla new parts every play those same parts the When Captain Robert Holmes 1aade love to Esther Howland on paper it looked all very well. The words seemed to burn then. The writers glowed fondly over thelr success. Then Mr. Bryant spoke them into the phonograph. He set the phonograph go- ing, sat back in an easy chair and = y night. In a weck of rehearsals there no time to build a pl So he upon the idea of speaking t he had written iito a phonograph, of let the phono; h rehearse under 1 ear. It has worked, and it has made an in- novation. rror,, listened. The scene was in the third act, in the orchard. The manager could shut his s-and see the lake rippling just as had planned with the eclectrician that ould ripple; he could see the apple- blossoms fluttering about in the breezes made by the stagehands; he could smell 11 them as the property perfume was to scent the house with apple-blossom ex- tract. « He actually forgot the brutal truth of the stagehand and the extract; the apple blossoms and the breezes be- gan to be real to him—as real as to any weeping mommer in his performance- to-be. . : Hettie and Lieutenant. Welling were meeting in the midst of them. Their love scene began. The manager was full of the atmosphere in which he had writ- ten the scene. It was in a real New Eng- land country town that he wrote it, and he was so full of the spirit of the thmg himself that he couldn’t imagine that his hearers might not-be. “Hettle, It was very good of you to keep your promise so faithfully,” =aild ‘Welling. “But I should not have come here to meet you,” she replied. The manager began to rise from his peaceful position in the easy chair. “Why not, Hettle?’ went on the amor- ous lleutenant. “Because Esther does not know I am here. I promised her that I would not come here without first telling her.” It had looked delightful when it was on paper. But “Whew!” sald the stage director, now he was listening to it as from the audience. ' It kept on going, for it was letter per- Ject In its lines. “Do you think your sister would. ob- Ject to a little meeting like this?” gently persisted the lieutenant. “Oh, I am sure she would,” protested the timiq damsel. “Stop!” roared the stage director. He made for the switch, turned off the cur- rent and the phonographic actor made love no more. Then he drew his blue pencil and made at tha scene with it. One slash and the scene was finished. It has never appeared upon the stage and never will “Of all the absurdities it was the most absurd,” Bryant says. “Of all fool girls 1 was making her the most foolish. It was an insult to the lady. It was girly- girly. It was abominably prudish. “When I went to work to rewrite the scene, I brought out the idea of the sis- ter’s opposition, but in an entirely differ- ent way, as the play shows. She's not Buch an awful goody-good now. And the ever dare to speak to her again I will thrash you within an inch of your life, it I die for it.” “Awful, wasn't it. Just what the of- fended hero always says. Real men don't talk like that, and I wanted real men in this play. This was how the line was re- written after I had heard it: “‘I've taken her home. If you ever speak to her again I'll break your damned neck.’ ” Sometimes the playwright manager found that a scene sounded far better than he had hoped. The long speech In which Seth tells Silas that he is going to leave ‘“Medder View,” tells him why he loves it, how it ‘“makes him feel happy like t' know thet Martha kin still see our old home”—this was the speech that the playwright was most afraid of, being the longest in the play. But when he turned it over and heard it he found that it dida't bore him and he took hope. Rehearsals proved that the thing didn't call for a single stroke of the blue pencil. But the rehearsing of the lines is only one part of the staging of a mew play. The lights and scenery have their rehear- sals, too, late at night after the player- folk have departed. Then is when you might hear: “Look out for that moon! It's going to explode!" “Confound you, turn the breeze loose!™ “What in thunder’s the-matter with the lake? That's its cue to begin to ripple,” ‘When the powers of the earth and the air and the water take to storming like this you may know that a new play is being staged. “When the Heart Was Young” called for three brand new scenes. After the play was written, long before the parts were assigned, the playwright-manager called in the scenic artist and began the planning of these scenes. The artist was given the roughest kind of a diagram—a group of lines which merely indicated the skeleton of the stage setting. his scene is an orchard,” he was told. “There's to be a lake here, a practical tree here, a fence and gate on this side. Make your model.” The artist disappeared to make his model, for this mimic stage of pasteboard is the foundation upon which everybody else’s work Is built. Next came an interview with the elec- trician. Take the orchard ene, for in- 7 '2./§r AP 0, Y Rrmecca Sricee licutenant doesn’'t say, ‘It was good of you’ I tell you, you have to hear a thing before you can tell what is the mat- ter with it. “And then the scene between the offl- cers. This was what the phonograph re- hearsed to me: “‘I have taken Hettie home. If 'you T SPINTER. (TR stk stance. “The time is early evening,” he was told. “‘Start with a reddish light and let it darken. Later on the moon rises. The lake ripples.” The electriclan went off with his direc- ticns and proceeded to work out the ar- rangement of lights. Calciums of different colors produced the effects wanted for the dying day. The moon was arranged to work by means of a windlass, and the man who managed the windlass was Instructed not to let it rise in leaps, as he is prone to do. The lake, a surface of translucent ma- terial, was the hardest proposition. It is stationary; under it are moving lghts, constantly shifting, changing color, glim. mering. This is the trick of moonlight en the water. The light, not the water, does the rippling. Next came the labor of the property man. He was shown the models of the different scenes and told what was want- ed to furnish them. There must be cur- tains for the best room, flower pots for the window-sill, candlesticks for the man- tel plece. There must be a pump for the yard. Everything to be handled, to be used, comes under the jurisdiction of the property man. For this production, with everything new, the rehearsals of lights and scenery were going on a long time befors the opening night. The moon had to be put through its paces, and the man behind the moon had to be-instructed not to fall asleep as he has been known to do, wak- ing late and jumping e moon up into the skies, three feet at a jump, to make up for lost time. The electriclan’s work had all to be put through rehearsals, from his rippling lake to his electric fire in the fireplace of the best room. Every one of these workers depended upon the pasteboard models made in the beginning by the scenic artist. They are perfectly proportioned, built to a scale by the aid of the carpenter, and so complete that they could be sent tos any theater in the United States and carried out from the miniature. Even the more important of the properties are modeled, such as the shelf and the pump. The trees are in position, the gate and the fence are shown. With this model before him the electrician studies the placing of his lights, the property man selects his properties, the stage manager assigns places to his characters. Still another piece of work is the ar- ranging for stage noises. Bryant has utilized his phonograph for this. A chor- us recorded upon it is used to give the effect of distant singing, and the bugle call is one that was bugled by the most famous trumpeter in the U ed States army. This is something of a revolution in the matter of stage noises and it apens up all kinds of possibilities for distant ef- fects. e,-\f(e: the aassignment of the roles came the choosing of the costumes. These were described In general terms to each member of the cast, then they were told to put their heads together in choosing them so that colors should not clash. The Ciadig Bfrfz & Roor. leading woman had the first choice, the others had to pick colors to accord with hers. So the staging of a new play In this modern world of ours means a great many things besides ithe reading of the lines. Which is worth being put in the pipe and smoked by the actor who thinks he is the whole show. " Dog That Has Made a Fortune by Posing for Living ALKING about dogs, how would like to pay $400 a pound for fifly nds of dog? Of course mot. But that is e you never stopped to ds of this particular dollar dog—B the a statue act on the Or- ary that many a col him, the dog d dollar life in- e dog that is the only d in the world. ere are other pure white setters, but not another d, nor one that has stand, marble still, for a whole minute of sixty long seconds, s Chester, who has a act, and of dog-star that 0o was broken he did not to the sausage mill or the ago Miss Chéster was travel- ing with another dog performing the same She knew that only the ugliest of plaster of paris act. she began to look about for a pose dog to act as understudy. In Chicago she found Bflly and jhis sister, Lilly. Thelr pure white coats presented wonderful pos- sibilities considered in connection with black backgrounds. It was after she had given her check for a good big sum that the dealer told her their birthday was Avgust 13 A brace of boodoos. But the dealer was relentless, and Miss Chester couldn’t get her money back, so she packed the pair off to her father, who knows how to train dogs. In two weeks her old dog was dead. “Thirteen,” sald Miss Chester. “I knew it.” That meant all dates canceled until the new dogs were trained. Ten months Miss Chester and her father spent on them, and just as Lilly was ready for the stage she took cold, had congestion of the lungs and died “Thirteen,” sald Miss Chester. “I knew 462 Now, Billy had never shown particular aptitude for tricks. His sister had always stood at the head of this class of two, while Billy persistently refused to learn. By way of punishment he was thrown into a kennel, where he lived and fought with fifty other dogs for three weeks. When he came out he was sobered and ready to take a serious view of life. The teaching of these dogs is a long and tgdious task—at least three hours a day, and sometimes as high a¥ seven. Billy bhad to learn to pose alone with Miss Chester, then on the stage with strange surroundings, then to stand unmoved with the blinding footlights before his eves and the roar of applause In his ears. Once Billy knuckled down to business, however, he made up for lost time, and exactly thirteen months from the day he was born he was ready for the stage. Chirteen,” sald Miss Chester. “Will he die, refuse to work or go mad?’ He did neither, and from that day Miss Chester's hoodoo was broken. To-day she declares thirteen ber lucky number. ' “Billy is the best dog I ever had,” says Miss Chester. '“He never sulks or gets angry, and no matter how I feel I can always depend on him. “Billy’'s education was certainly not a matter of intellizence. I hold the com- SCENTING GAME mon street cur is more apt to learn than the finest bred dog in the world. If I were to let Billy loose on the street he would be killed in five minutes. He wouldn’t know enough to get out of the way of street cars and heavy trucks, while the commonest curs never get hurt. “This dog is absolutely dependent on me. He will not cross a street until I tell him it is safe. In fact, I never leave him out of sight for five minutes. “Oh, no; I'm not afraid of his being polsoned, for he will eat nothing from a stranger until I tell him ‘it is paid for’; nor will he drink water until I give him permission.” Billy has a right to hold his nose rather high in the air, for it was only the last time" he was in London that the Duke of Cambridge sent a messenger to M'ss ictures Chester after the performance with a check for £2000. He wanted the dog, and it didn’t occur to him that £2000 of ducal money was not half-enough to buy Billy. Another thing, Billy can travel free on the Old Dominion steamships whenever he pleases, with the privilege of sleeping in a stateroom. It happened this way: During one of Billy’s voyages across the ocean the customary concert for the ben- efit of sallors was given. Billy remained modestly in the background until the end of the concert, when Miss Chester gave him a small basket and told him to “take up a collection.” He did It, pausing before each one with the persistence of a vestryman, and when he completed the round he had nearly $100 in the basket. After that the boat ‘was his.