I cannot remember if it was one of those torrid and terrible nights of August when the chain-gang of New York’s critics was tolled off to the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre for the première of The Torch-Bearers. But I do know that the general atmosphere of oppression—physical, mental, professional—was a little denser than usual. In the first twenty-eight days of August, 1922, managements too daring or too resourceless to wait for September had deluged us with a steady stream of inanity, and here was another dousing in prospect. If it wasn’t the heat, it was certainly the humidity of theatrical August. Unknown play, new producers, author’s name vaguely connected with vaudeville; altogether a production so little esteemed by the booking powers that it had to slip into a few weeks before the Equity Players began their season at this theatre. It could have been a night of Elysian coolness, and still we would have been expecting the worst. It could have been mid-April, and still we should have found an almost ineffable freshness in the breeze of George Kelly’s little comedy.
The cold, historical fact is that at about 9:15 o’clock on the evening of August 29th, 1922, five or six hundred average New Yorkers, two or three hundred friends of the management, and about fifty sophisticated first-nighters were in grave danger of rolling off their seats in hysteria because of The Torch-Bearers.
The intermissions were filled with three questions which more or less concern the reader of the published play. Who was George Kelly? Where did he get the comedy? How would it go?
On August 29th, 1922, George Kelly was a perfectly good Philadelphian in his late twenties who was much better known to vaudeville than to fame. He had written, directed, and played in about a dozen one-act comedies and dramas on Keith and Orpheum time. He had begun by quitting his family’s private tutor to try acting in a playlet by the late Paul Armstrong. Then—with no more preparation, apparently—he had begun to write his own vehicles. A certain drama in France absorbed his attentions for a while. After that more “sketches”—as the vaudeville powers call any effort above vocal or bodily acrobatics—and suddenly a play.
The origin of The Torch-Bearers was simple enough. Kelly wrote the kind of tight, effective short plays that amateur actors and little theatre directors are always looking for. He had a perfectly good Philadelphia family behind him. And so he was being invited to lunch every now and then by the Pampinellis of the cities in which he played. To hear them was enough. They had to live a wider life.
The Torch-Bearers passed a prosperous term on Broadway, and I think it will go far in the little theatres which it satirizes. But upon the opening night I remember much dubious debate about its chances. We had laughed ourselves almost literally sick, and at the end of the second intermission we had not yet seen the rather prosy last act. Yet—conscious of our personal superiority—we wondered.... Brander Matthews and Aristotle would scoff at it, George M. Cohan and Professor Baker would scowl. The Torch-Bearers broke all the rules, and it had no plot. Obviously, by all the rules, it ought to fail.
There may be a good many reasons why it didn’t, and some may lead you far into aesthetic explorations of the present breakdown of dramatic form all over the world. But the reader will find more cogent reasons in the pages that follow this introduction. Personally, I should put it down to the fact that the character-study of the first act and the hokum of the second are irresistible. We have all met our Pampinellis, and we have all seen the lady prompter take a curtain call, or had our mustache fall off in the big scene. We can never resist some characterization on the stage, and as for such hokum as this record of all the mishaps of the amateur actor, ill luck is the heart of broad comedy and when ill luck comes where it is most painful—in personal display—Cassandra herself must smile.
There were other things to make the death-watch wonder whether The Torch Bearers could live. It was satire. Satire is not ordinarily a popular commodity in the theatre. It defeats sympathy, and sympathy is necessary to emotion, and emotion to theatrical success.
Satire has had its great moments, however, in the history of the drama. Aristophanes made merry over the fashions, foibles, and philosophies of Athens. Satire was Molière’s stock in trade. Shaw has done very well by poking a finger at society. Every nation has at least one outstanding theatrical satire to its credit. But for the war, the wise of Paris might still be laughing at the French Academy because of de Flers and de Caillavet’s L’Habit Vert. England has The School for Scandal, as Ireland has The Playboy and John Bull’s Other Island. Germany, though a little heavy in the theatre, can still point to Schnitzler’s Literature.
