Judge — August 15, 1925 — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

“Out Front” (Continued from page 18) It is another custom of the first night audience—as it was of the specific audience at “What Women Do?”’—to give vent to a richly criticil and sophisticated laughter whenever a hack playwright lets go some such elegant rubber stamp as “You're the first person who’s spoken a kind word to me since my Maw died,” “A woman’s virtue is her proudest possession” or “There is no creature more foul than he who steals a child’s faith.” Now, true enough, lines like these are not pre- cisely the sort to gladden the heart of anyone above the cultural level of a vaudeville actor or street- cleaner, but they are still no whit worse than many of the lines that the average first night audience re- gards with respectful silence. The audience simply wishes to show off its wiseness, as it likes to purr its sophistication whenever a playwright shrewdly coddles it by filling his play with allusions to Hispano- Suiza motor cars, the Ritz hotels, vintage champagnes and the Prince of Wales’ defective horsemenship. A third habit of the first night customers is to razz any unknown actor whose performance is unduly exaggerated. Let some actor who has hitherto not appeared on Broad- way try to earn an honest dollar toward the end of the season by the co-operative plan, and the Broadway wisenbergs will lay for him like so many hens at Easter. Very often these actors do not exaggerate half so much as, say, Lionel Barrymore, but that makes no difference. The audience is on its tiptoes ready to land on their necks. There is nothing it likes to posture so much as a critical attitude toward acting. Yet the truth is that it knows as much about acting as a cannibal knows about a tomato surprise. Certain of its favorites in the way of acting are utterly without sound competence; some of them—two in particular—are no better than cer- tain of the actors whom it has openly ridiculed. I hope that I shall not be held unduly invidious when I say that the colored first night audiences I observed last season at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem had twice as good manners and apparently twice as much good sense as the paler first night audiences of Broadway. It is commonly believed that our fellow icans of the dark race are fond ing their cosmic wisdom and sophistication on all occasions, but if this be true the theater remains one place in which the fact is still to be demonstrated to my satisfac- tion. If a Harlem colored audience behaved the way a Broadway white audience behaves, the manager of the house would ring up the nearest police station and have it arrested. I often wonder where the Broad- way managers get hold of some of the people one sees on the opening nights. One never sees them anywhere else, although I confess I have never made a tour of the neighboring in- sane asylums. Some of these first nighters are unquestionably _half- witted. I am not trying to be in- sulting or funny. I mean it literally. For if they are not actually half- witted, some one should be commis- sioned at once to look into me. Not long ago I took with me to the theater one of the most eminent psychiatrists in America. After half an hour’s observation of the men and women seated within sight and sound of us, he stated as his opinion that fully one-half of them were ap- parently congenital idiots. But by the end of the second act he re- vised his opinion. He put the number at two-thirds. The fashion for balloon trousers has its practical side. Sunshade Ina Tube”’ No Sunburn, No Blister, Peel or Freckle If you protect your skin with SUNEX this summer. On the beach, golf links, anywhere outdoors, SUNEX will protect you against the strongest sunshine. 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