Judge — June 12, 1920 — page 25: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Dramatizing ‘‘Who'’s Who” By Pexrrrox Maxweut ND now we are to be deluged with plays of 1 stripe of * Abraham Lincoln,” the great Drink- water success. Next season the theater is to see two lives of Edgar Allen Poe done into drama; another entitled “Oscar Wilde” writ- m Barry; and still another founded upon the ten by T career of Mary Queen of Scots,” and heaven ws how many others of the same sort, should these four survive and hold public interest. All of which gives rise tothe thought that playwrights with more ambition than cerebral power may dig from their graves every notable character of history and fling them bodily onto the boards for our supposititious entertainment. If acted biography is to be the dramatic vogue wo, why stop at the shining lights of Spurred by the imitative s; another year or literature and history? and box-office hunger, why should not some enterpris manager give us a presentation of “Bill Tweec Here is red meat for the dexterous play-builder bination of crook play and lurid politics in histrios garb rom Mansficld’s production of * Beau Bru 1° to Tom Wise as P. T. Barnum we wide range of personage plays go on and off, and ye there remains a wealth of dramatic material in the lives of Judas Iscariot, Cagliostro and the Man Who Struck Billy Patterson. The stage Napoleons that have strutted through the years would make a doughty reg ment; the “Washingtons,” “Aaron Burrs,” “1 Putnams and “Caesars” of every Roman period would be numerically strong enough to fill the forty-od: theaters of New York Yet how many interesting characters ir try’s chronicle have been completely overlooked by the avid playwright! Why has no one staged the life of Rutherford B. Hayes?) Where could one find so heroic a vein of drama as that pervading the White House during the administration of our nineteenth President? How very timely, too, a play introducing a character ng enough to banish booze from the White House, the man who proffered the filtered residue of the noble Potomac in port wine goblets to visiting plenipoten- tiaries from older and less moral lands? Surely, if a a com- ave seen a racl 2 our own coun- 25 George Arliss can recreate the vital presence of Dis- racli on the stage and make Alexander Hamilton live gain in the flesh to thrill us with his speech, why may not a Fred Stone embody the passion and poignancy of Dr. Munyon’s career or Barney Bernard reanimate the corporeal entity of Mahomet? ‘There is only one obstacle in the way of a complete dramatization of all the world’s exploited personages, and that obstacle is well-nigh insurmountable. — It is the difficulty of explaining to a manager the importance of any character outside the movies or the headlines of morning's newspaper. ‘The playwright with acting life of Socrates under his arm would find Broadway producer, eve afte tough job to interest he had carefully spelled aud pronounced his hero’s name; any playwright, known or unknown, would get in wrong with his prospective backer should he prance into the latter's presence with the script of a stage version of the character of Josephus; he would be told with savaye t “the navy ain’t no good no more as intonation th comedy stuff.” But why wait until the notables are dead be dramatizing them? — Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chester- ton are to be in the “Oscar Wilde” play, thus establish- ing a precedent. ‘Therefore, why not Trotzky, Dr. Coc “Nicky” Arnstein or Billy Sunday as the central figure in the next new American animated biography? If} turesqueness plus subtlety is the desideratum, could or ask for profounder material? And of all historic figures who so magnificent as Wood row Wilson? But where shall we find a John Drinkwater to do the job? Indeed, is there any playwright in the world capable of dramatizing the sublime egoin the White House? Our mighty man and his final pathetic breakdown as world- adjuster might grow into drama at the hands of the author of ** Potash and Perlmutter,” or bloom into theatric being from the bowels of Sam Shipman’s typewriter. When all the great and near-great of the earth have been used up as stage material, there still remains the vegetable kingdom, and we may yet live to see a stirring melodrama revolving around a string bean or a sex play based on the philandering of a beet. comicbooks.com