Page:The International Jew - Volume 2.djvu/101

 plays that are acted could not be read at all, for the most part, any more than the words of jazz songs can be read; they don’t mean anything. The people who want to see the real plays and cannot, because Jewish producers won’t produce them, are forming little dramatic clubs of their own, in barns and churches, in schools and neighborhood halls. The drama fled from its exploiters and has found a home with its friends.

The changes which the Jews have made in the theater, and which any half-observant theatergoer can verify with his own eyes, are four in number.

First, they have elaborated the mechanical side, making human talent and genius less necessary. They have made the stage “realistic” instead of interpretative. The great actors needed very little machinery; the men and women on the pay rolls of the Jewish managers are helpless without the machinery. The outstanding fact about the vast majority of present-day performances of any pretension is that the mechanical part dwarfs and obscures the acting, however good. And this is the reason: knowing that good actors are growing scarce, knowing that the Jewish policy is death to talent, knowing perhaps most keenly of all that good actors constitute a running charge on his revenue, the Jewish producer prefers to put his faith and his money in wood, canvas, paint, cloth and tinsel of which scenery and costumes are made. Wood and paint never show contempt for his sordid ideals and his betrayal of his trust.

And thus we have, when we go to the theater today, bursts of color, ruffles of lace and linen, waving lines and dazzling effects of light and motion—but no ideas, a great many stage employees, but very few actors. There are drills and dances without end, but no drama.

That is one influence on the American Theater which the Jew claims, and the credit for which can be given him in full. He has put in the iridescence, but he has taken out the profounder ideas. He has placed the American public in the position of being able to remember the names of plays without being able to recall what composed them. Like the “Floradora Girls,” a Jewish creation, we remember the name