This same AT 9.45 was the only play not closed by the actors’ strike of eleven years ago; we kept it open—I am sure I don’t know why—and I doubt if Mr. Brady does. It was, I suppose, because we both of us love a fight and we had a perfectly grand time in doing a thing that no one else was able to do. As most of our actors left us at the first demand of their union, we would have been sunk at once if Mr. Brady had not called for help, and we built up a cast from some very important actors who were not in sympathy with the Equity Society. There were, however, very few of these, and it became necessary for Mr. Brady himself to play the most difficult part, a butler with a big scene. He played him—big scene and all—plus the most amazing stage side-whiskers I had seen in many years. Mr. Brady loved it, whiskers and all, and had the time of his life. I truly think he was sorry when the strike was ended.
Winthrop Ames was one of the fine stage directors, and although never especially active in the theater, every production he made was almost perfect in its detail.
Winchell Smith, the best of the dramatist-directors, knows more theater than any of us, and has been responsible for a lot of fine work.
James Forbes, Rachel Crothers, George Kelly, Elmer Rice and Frank Craven are all first rate directors of their own plays. I myself have had a lot of experience in this work but I am sorry to say that I have one rather annoying trait as a director. It is so much easier for me to make up a new play than it is to be bothered by following a manuscript that I am quite likely to get my company a trifle mixed.
Among the professional directors, Robert Milton is a first class man and Sam Forrest has skill and great experience. Hugh Ford, who worked with George Tyler for many years, had probably the longest unbroken string of successes.
George Abbott, both as a writer, actor and director, brings sanity and good judgment to every job he undertakes and deserves every bit of his very unusual success.
Aside from the dramatists who direct their own plays and the free lance stage directors, there is, of course, Arthur Hopkins, in many ways a better man than any of us. He does a play because he likes it; it doesn’t in the least matter to him whether you or I like it or not; he is absolutely untouched by any man’s opinion but his own, and surely no one man in our theater has done so much fine work or done it with a higher motive. He saw beauty in it—no other reason ever did or ever will make him produce a play.