Concerning Camille, ice cream, spirituality, red silk tights, Blanche Bates, Thomas Betterton, second-hand plays, parochialism, matinee girls, Augustin Daly, and other interesting topics.
"Why is a resident theatrical organization known as a _stock_ company?" Blanche Bates repeated after me one afternoon when she was playing in "The Dancing Girl" at the Columbia Theater, Washington. "Simply because the people in it work like horses."
Miss Bates, whose name at that time probably was as unfamiliar to David Belasco as any word in Arabic, knew whereof she spoke. She had been for several seasons with T. Daniel Frawley in San Francisco, she had had four roles and a row with Augustin Daly inside of two months in New York, and finally she had cast her lot with a combination that was whiling away the summer months by producing a new piece every week in the hottest city in America. After a little time I'm going to tell you just what labor is involved in producing a new--or, rather, a different--piece every week. For the present, suffice it to say that Miss Bates' witticism was founded on a whimsical view of facts, and that the modern stock company is exclusively responsible for the existence of that amazing anomaly, a hard-working actor.
Most actors are kept fairly busy three weeks each year, that period being devoted to rehearsing the one play in which they appear during the course of a season. Throughout the remainder of eight months they are actually occupied about four hours per diem, and at the end of these eight months they count on having four months for rest, recreation and relaxation. This is not at all true of the man or woman "in stock", who, in the language of the street, "is on the job" twenty-four hours a day and, when there is special need of exertion, gets up an hour earlier in the morning to make it twenty-five.
The great bulk of New York theater-goers, with the parochialism that characterizes them, know practically nothing about stock companies. Perhaps, the chief reason of this is that within the memory of man they never have had fewer than five at one time. Stock companies in Philadelphia or Boston they might have studied at long distance as curious institutions, but never stock companies so unappealingly near as Fifty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. Your blithe Broadwayite leaves such places of amusement to the people in their neighborhood, and sticks to musical comedy in the vicinity of Times Square.