[Illustration: "_Sarah Bernhardt, George Cohan, and a Yale lock couldn't keep a Boston audience from leaving at train time_"]
Dramatic authors, likely to be the victims of incidents of this sort, cannot be blamed for manifesting marked peculiarities as regards "first nights." When my best and least successful play, "The Secret Orchard", was given its premiere at the Lyric, I trotted off to see "A Knight for a Day" at Wallack's. James Forbes spends his evening behind the scenes. After the opening of "The Commuters", which ran six months at the Criterion, he locked himself in a dressing room, convinced that the piece was a dismal failure, and refused to come out, even when implored to do so in order that the leading woman might get into her street clothes. Throughout the performance of his maiden effort, "Her Husband's Wife", "Al" Thomas walked up and down the block in front of the Garrick. Few men are able even to assume the insouciance of Harry B. Smith, who, at the primal presentation of his "The Bachellor Belles", smoked a cigar in the lobby throughout the first act and went home in the middle of the second.
[Illustration: "_Trilby died in every way known to medical science and the art of acting_"]
Until constant ridicule broke up the practice, most authors needed little urging to induce them to address their audiences on "first nights." As recently as the Fall of 1909, during the performance of "On the Eve", Martha Morton, its adapter, made a speech from her box at the Hudson. The man behind the pen has so little chance to get into the limelight--poor fellow!--that to speak or not to speak will always be a mooted question with him. Either course is likely to be mistaken by the critics, who put down the unfortunate scribe as a vainglorious person if he appears and as a poseur if he does not. Personally, I feel that the average author is much more favorably represented by what he writes than by what he says, and that neither he nor the player has any real justification for mixing his own personality with those of the puppets he creates. It is disillusioning, after having spent some time in witnessing stirring deeds and hearing high-sounding words, to be confronted with a little, stoop-shouldered man, his face white in the glare of the footlights and his hands anxiously seeking a refuge in his ill-fiting and pocketless dress trousers, and to realize that this grotesque figure is that of the inventor of all the splendid beings you have seen.
