Miss Dressler's best-known and most characteristic work on the stage was done in the rôle of the boisterous music-hall singer, Flo Honeydew, in "The Lady Slavey." It was hardly a case of acting,--better call it a case of letting herself go. Marie Dressler without subterfuge presented herself in the guise of the unconventional Miss Honeydew. She seemed a big, overgrown girl and a thoroughly mischievous romp with the agility of a circus performer and the physical elasticity of a professional contortionist.
To call her graceful would be an unpardonable accusation. Possibly she might have been graceful had she chosen to be; but what she was after principally was energy, and she got it,--whole car-loads of it. Her comic resource was inexhaustible, her animal spirits were irrepressible, and her audacity approached the sublime.
Yet, amid all her amazing unconventionality and her astonishing athletic feats, one found, if he met her on her own plane of impersonal jollity, neither vulgarity nor suggestiveness. Her mental attitude toward her audience was absolutely clean and straightforward. She was not a woman cutting up antics and indulging in unseemly pranks, but a royal good fellow with an infinite variety of jest.
With nothing especially tangible to offer as evidence, I have a suspicion that Marie Dressler, if she could escape from her reputation as a burlesquer, might act a "straight" part not at all badly. It is only a fine line between burlesque and legitimate acting, only a triflingly different mental attitude, which results in travesty instead of seriousness. Of course, the burlesque must be set forth with the proper amount of exaggeration to give point to the take-off, but that is only a matter of technique. Artificiality in actors and insincerity in dramatists very often result in unconscious burlesque. The melodramatic school is particularly prone to this most inartistic of blunders, and many a good laugh has followed lines that were supposed to be charged with the most highly colored sentiments and situations that were intended to be dramatically strong and impressive. One at all familiar with Miss Dressler's methods cannot have failed to notice her trick of beginning a speech with profound and even convincing seriousness and ending it in ridiculous contrast with a sudden drop from the dramatic to the commonplace. In spite of the fact that one knows for a certainty that she is fooling him, she succeeds invariably in making the first part of her sentence seem honest and sincere.