I remember vividly the primal performance at Hartford of Paul Arthur's melodrama, "Lost River." One of the mechanical effects in this piece was a bicycle race, during which the contestants pedaled wildly on stationary machines. The effect of passing landscape was given by a panorama and a fence that moved rapidly in the opposite direction. At least, they were supposed to move in the opposite direction, but on the occasion of which I speak they didn't. The race became one between the bicyclists and the surrounding country, and the surrounding country was far in the lead when an irate stage manager rang down the curtain. This accident never happened again, but, had the "first night" been in New York instead of on the road, once would have been enough.
The late A. M. Palmer used to tell a story illustrative of the fact that players, under stress of "first night" excitement, often share "the wickedness of inanimate things." Mr. Palmer produced "Trilby" when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, and upon the consequences of the performance depended his immediate future. Paul Potter's dramatization opened in Boston, and gave no cause for worry except in the matter of its extreme length. Half the population of Boston is also the population of suburban towns, and Sarah Bernhardt, George Cohan and a Yale lock couldn't keep 'em from leaving a theater at train time. Consequently, when eleven o'clock came and the last act of "Trilby" had just begun, a frown settled on the classic brow of the ordinarily imperturbable Mr. Palmer.
Virginia Harned, neither as experienced nor as clever then as now, was playing Trilby, and she felt that her portrayal had been more or less overshadowed by the Svengali of Wilton Lackaye. There is no better part in the drama than that of the hypnotist, while the opportunities of the name role are limited. Miss Harned's first chance to make her talent conspicuous came with the death of the model in the last act. "Trilby began to die at 11:10", declared Mr. Palmer. "The audience had already commenced looking at its watches, and a photograph of my thoughts would have developed into a blue print. Miss Harned, on the contrary, approached the scene with joy, too wrought up to take into consideration the fact that the people in front had begun to be more interested in Newton than in the affairs of Little Billee. Trilby died in every way known to medical science and the art of acting. She died of heart disease and consumption and cerebral spinal meningitis. She died a la Bernhardt and Marlowe and Clara Morris. She died on the sofa and the piano stool and two of the rugs, and, just when I thought she had breathed her last against the door R. I. E., she found strength to take a few steps and do it all over again in the center of the stage. Little Billee was waiting in the wings, but, as you will understand if you remember the play, no one could come on until Trilby had shuffled off her mortal coil. And Trilby, on this occasion, simply would not shuffle. It was nearly 11:30 when she finally gave up the ghost on a davenport L. C., in the presence of that portion of the audience sufficiently Yankee to be determined upon missing nothing it had paid to see. That death scene, abridged and expurgated, afterward became a most powerful and effective bit of acting, but I confess that on the evening in question the quality of it was somewhat obscured by the quantity."