Zona Gale

As a person, Zona Gale is thoroughly entertaining in two distinct moods. At one moment she speaks with the accents of “Pollyanna”, the next with those of her own “Grandma Bett”. She is slight, delicate, pretty, shy but firm. She is quiet in her gestures and her voice is soft. She will allow herself the great pleasure of an emotional experience such as helping a crippled boy to write, and finding in him something which is, presumably, quite beyond his actual talents. Yet she has a dry, detached manner of viewing life. While she has forced herself to believe that life is sweet and beautiful, her work often shows that she knows better than that. She was born in Portage, Wisconsin, and she has lived there most of her life, except while she was at the University of Wisconsin, and in New York City working on a newspaper. She is eager, ambitious, sympathetic. She has the ability to dramatize the optimistic side of events. She is the type that champions pacifism avidly and has principles about kindness to animals. She worked night and day in New York until she had succeeded in gaining the attention of various editors for her poems and short stories. She then returned to Wisconsin, where she remains. Occasionally she arrives suddenly in town, sees her friends, produces a play (there are two waiting in the Broadway offing now), indulges in a round of gaieties, then turns again to the native state and her charming mother. Her earlier books betrayed her most sentimental mood. “Miss Lulu Bett” and “Birth” show her at her truest. Perhaps she has been too cloistered ever to go beyond mild cynicism and surface realism. When she characterizes, she rings true, but when her characters require great emotional experience she finds herself at a loss. A writer of distinction, she has yet reached no stable ground. She is an artist only in part. Perhaps she is too much the woman to be the uncompromising craftsman.

THE NEW WORD IN PLAY PRODUCING

Producing a play seems to me, as I have recently watched it, to be partly the art of dealing with people. And the new word in dealing with people is to deal with them, not to direct them.

Watching Mr. Brock Pemberton staging my play, I used to think that if one of the oldtime producers were to enter the theatre, he would say: “But this man is not doing anything. He just sits there.” It was true that he seemed just to sit there, hour after hour. The director of my fears, he who stood tense or wild in the midst of the players and cried that fire from heaven had fallen on such and such a reading, or bit of business, or tempo—he was not in the theatre. Soon he will not be in any theatre. Or in any other creative work. Which means almost all work.

Instead there was, in this case, a man who sat in the house, halfway back, and who at first said principally: “From the beginning, please.” Or, “Once more, that scene.” And very often: “Come now. Let’s all help.” There also was I who in those first days kept saying to him: “Don’t you think that should be read so and so?” or “That oughn’t to be done so, just there” or “That isn’t the right reading.” And the invariable reply would be: “Let’s let them get the lines first.” “Let’s see if they won’t come to that in a day or two.” In the first weeks of rehearsal I must have said these things literal scores of times and always to that same reply, delivered without impatience and without a shadow of turning.

Gradually, in instance after instance, it was clear that the suggestion which I had been so eager to make was either finding its way into the reading by the feeling of the actors, or was being supplanted by something of their own creation that was better. When I spoke of this—“It means so much more when they find out a thing for themselves,” the producer said.

After a time, at the close of a rehearsal, he would go down to the front row and say: “I have a few notations—will you take them down?” He would make innumerable suggestions, and the company would note them on their parts. When a member of the company asked how a line should be read the first reply from the producer was usually: “How do you feel that line—what do you feel is the most natural reading?” Again and again he asked them for suggestions. If a line needed something and I could not make the suggestion, he would ask the one to whom it belonged to try to think of the thing he would like to say in such a situation. Some of the least unsatisfactory lines, therefore, came from the company themselves.

Often it seemed to me that the producer thought of himself as one of the company. And as if industrial difficulties might be solved if only all the coöperators in industry could recognize themselves in this way. That which Walter Hampden welcomes as “industrial and artistic coöperation” was assuredly here. It is the new word in industry as in art—the third word, the human factor. Yet in the end this play was shot through from first to last with the ideal of naturalism which all along had been the ideal of the producer—but he had developed it, he had not stamped it on from without.

This attitude cannot be unique. There must be others of the modern stage who are producing in this way, but it is not the old way, and it is not the way in which the public generally thinks of a production being made. Nearly everyone has said: “Isn’t it a terribly difficult experience, having a play put on? Isn’t it nervous work? Don’t you have to fight for your own interpretation?” But it was not difficult. There was nothing “nervous” about it—excepting that one couldn’t engage all the actors who applied for the parts. And so for my own interpretation, my fear was that they were sometimes reading a line in my way to please me when they knew it would be better some other way. I have always believed stage people to be the most likable people alive, and now I know it.

There is far more reason why play producing should be nervous work than that routine work should be so; because, first, there is no routine to follow and, second, everybody involved is in some degree a creative artist—who carries his own authority. By reason of the daily intimacy and the swift work and the high pressure and the risk for everybody, it is true that irony or arbitrary authority or lack of sympathy could make of play producing about as uncomfortable an association as any other association dominated by “nerves”. Perhaps, as Dr. Joseph Jastrow once suggested, all these things are not alone in the domain of art and of ethics but of manners. Or perhaps it is merely that theatrical producers, in common with all other business men, are eliminating waste—waste nerves along with the rest. The roots of art are fed and watered by undivined agencies. In this case I believe that the work ran smoothly because the producer was more intent on getting out of every creative worker his creative bit than in remembering that he was the director and that his way was best. He was not only directing a play—he was dealing with people. The final art.