Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/152

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN voice in the theater to be heard. Inaudibility is the curse of current acting. There is no more serious offense in the theater. Of what avail to be realistic if the unfortunates back of F can not hear what you say? Some time ago I had a last-minute opportunity of seeing one of the best of the younger actresses in an interesting rôle. The best seats remaining were in the sixteenth row. She played a repressed girl and in her effort to be natural she kept her voice at a pitch that barely carried across the footlights. She was an actress of sufficient ability to enable me to read in her face something of what I could not hear, but as the play was not billed as a pantomime, my irritation and that of the bulk of the audience was justifiable.

A writer of fiction may let his characters stray over the face of the earth without restraint of space and little of time. When he attempts the same story on the stage he is in the predicament of an artist in colors restricted to black and white for his effects. The story must be told within the limits of three hours, the narrow frame of the stage, a practicable cast, the mechanical resources of the theater and the fact that the spectators cannot take the play home with them and finish it in bed.