Tag Archives: Theatre

Mary Nash: Versatile Actress

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By Benjamin de Casseres

If you’ve seen Mary Nash as Anna Valeska in “Captain Applejack”—that rip-roaring “kidded melodrama” which is partly “Peter Pan,” partly “Seven Keys to Baldpate,” and partly just itself—you have seen a quivering, vital personality, totally unlike the blonde, pretty-face heroine of the average Broadway play.

To follow her saps your strength. Her methods are more Continental than American or English. Her whole body acts—not merely her lips, her eyes and her gowns. She fires her role at you. It goes over with a rush and a roar.

When I went into her dressing-room to interview her after the fall of the final curtain of a certain Wednesday matinee, she was still Anna Valeska. She was still vibrating with the part, still pulsing to the music of a fictional dream.

She is the dark, Spanish type of beauty—and every feature is fired by a cracking earnestness when she talks to you. No one is more perfectly natural and less stagy off-stage. One can see she enters con amore into her parts—she loves her art.

Humor threads all she says. Her eyes dance with laughter and over her face emotion after emotion—often contradictory—chase each other like thunderclouds mixed with golden sunshine.

When only seventeen years of age, Miss Nash was cast to play a child of fourteen by Clyde Fitch himself in “The City”—that astoundingly bold drama—for that time—which was produced after Fitch’s death. That was really her first part.

“I never had a bit of stage fright,” she said. “I took to acting naturally from the first time I faced an audience. From childhood I had been a play ‘fan,’ and while sitting on my seat I always conceived myself on the other side of the footlights doing the things that those actresses did which I admired. I could always project myself mentally into the parts I loved and, when my great moment came in ‘The City,’ I merely felt as tho I was taking possession of something that belonged to me—from before birth probably.

“Some actresses are born, some made, and others have their parts thrust upon them by producers. I was a born actress. Voilà!”

Miss Nash has appeared with Ethel Barrymore and Grace George. She has appeared in plays by William de Mille and David Belasco.

“I have never played two parts alike in my life. I have never been and never want to be —- identified with any special role or any special school of acting. There is not only fun but health in versatility. I am avid. I am hungry, for all kinds of roles, serious -— comic, melodramatic, vamp and ingenue. No producer can say ‘That is a Mary Nash part.’ It doesn’t exist. But I always like them to say when they are stuck, “Let’s get Mary Nash—she can handle anything.”

I congratulated her on a healthy sense of self-appreciation, but she waved me off with a n’importe!

“What we need in this country badly,” she said with a quick pirouette of thought, “is something like the Conservatoire in Paris. We need a national school of acting that will at least standardize our language. The stage here suffers from too many kinds of American brogue. We have New England schools of acting, Southern schools, Western schools, New York schools—all handling the same words with different pronunciations and enunciations. The American stage lacks an American tongue common to all.

“Then again technical training for the stage—in the sense that it exists in Europe—is almost unknown here. A born actress, of course, does not require much technical training. Acting is an art. It is not taken seriously enough here. Doing tricks of illusion on the stage is not acting. Before I learn my part, for instance, I know everybody else’s part in the play. I play into the spirit of the drama or comedy in which I am cast. During the first week of a new play when I’m off stage, I watch the parts I’m not in from the wings, and make mental notes on where I can improve my own work. I want to fit perfectly into the spirit of the whole action—not merely ‘do a part.’ The latter is a fault of many of our actors and actresses, and savors too much of the movies—”

My cue!—the movies. (It’s always a cue in every conversation.)

“Yes—I love the movies—real movies. I do not go to the movies merely to see them—there is so much trash. I select—as I do plays and books and gowns.

“I was in one picture—a George Fitzmaurice picture; but found that I could not act on the speaking stage and keep up my work in the pictures without doing myself and my employers an injustice. After one has spent the morning and afternoon in the studio doing pictures, one is totally—at least I was—unfit for work at night. I attribute a great deal of the inferior work of many of our actors and actresses on the speaking stage to the fact that they are played out by the picture work they are doing on the side.

“The pictures themselves I consider the most tremendous innovator and social influence of modern times. In the small towns thruout the country, for instance, they have become the glass of fashion for the young women. The pictures have taught them how to dress. They have brought to them new ideals of feminine charm and beauty. They all want to dress and smile like Norma Talmadge. The movies have revolutionized the wardrobes of the middle-class young woman.

“They are doing the same for furniture and interior decoration. I noticed in many Middle Western and Southern homes that rooms were furnished like movie sets. Imitative maybe—but it has raised the level.”

At the mention of “foreign pictures,” Miss Nash was all excitement again.

“Pola Negri!—she is an event. At her best she is one of the greatest actresses on or off the screen. She is a born actress. One does not believe she is acting to the directions of a megaphone or that she is conscious of the camera. She seems to be living her part, ejecting it from her very self, not from a scenario. Her vitality, her facial and bodily emotions swim right out of the screen. She does in the dumb world of the film what very few actresses have even been able to get over on the speaking stage. She conveys, in her parts, every nuance of the feminine soul. There is something great in that woman that I cannot describe. I only know it ‘gets you.’ It is genius.

“How different from the insipid, vapid, doll-baby stuff of most of our American screen actresses! Pola Negri puts vital womanhood on the screen—not a director’s trick-bear.

“Personal habits—likes and dislikes? I haven’t any outside of those I told you. I am not athletic or outdoors. In books I am hopelessly Mid-Victorian. I love my home. I love to embroider—and I love the play from an orchestra seat. I am at every odd matinee around town.

“I have embroidered whole luncheon sets on the stage in parts where I have used the basket and the knitting-needle. I believe I am the only actress who does this. And I never missed a cue. I cant embroider in my present part—but I hope my next part will enable me to complete on the stage——”

“Those two silk ties you promised me,” broke in Miss Nash’s husband, who had come in just in time to hear her last sentence.

Original publication
Benjamin de Casseres, “Mary Nash: Versatile Actress,” Shadowland, April 1922, pp. 19, 73, 75.

Encoritis: A Protest

Essays/Articles, Works, , , , , ,

THE encore fiend, with his huge maulers and silly giggle, his bubbling, thumping, ear-splitting appreciation of everything that assails his lack-lustre eyes from the stage, has become such a nuisance in our places of amusement on first nights, second nights and all other nights that we think the time is ripe for a fuller appreciation of this most extraordinary specimen of the homo imbecilis.

There he squats in all his brazen glory. He has come to enjoy the “show,” not, mark you, in the manner in which as a normal human being he would enjoy anything else, by finely discriminating between what he likes and what he does not like; but he has come to enjoy—”take in”—this particular part of his day’s more or less diverting experiences by a solemn compact with himself, not to be bamboozled, cozzened, or thimble-rigged out the equivalent for the two dollars he laid down at the box-office. And if the play is execrable, if the actors are doing their unspeakable worst, if there is in all the dreary stuff never a smile or a real emotion—no matter. Go to! He’ll have his penny’orth of excitement willy-nilly. He’ll have his hands do the work that his judgment ought to be doing, if judgment the good God had given him. And while the rest of the audience wants to cool its heels in the lobby and its throat at the replenishing station next door, this maudlin vulgarian, exquisitely titillated by the work of his marvelous palms, has the curtain up again and again until the players themselves sneak knowing winks at one another, and even the manager looks at the arabesques in the carpet to keep a straight face. The Briareus of the stalls—who will deliver us from the body of this iniquity !

All our theatres are now equipped with opera glasses and acousticons. Why not hang from the back of each seat a box containing a huge watchman’s rattle? Ah ! that would be worth while. For a dime the fist-yammerer could then make Rome howl—even if they had not succeeded in doing so on the stage; make each particular hair on each particular bald head to stand on end like javelins upon the fretful elephant, and drive each decent and self-respecting playgoer into the street, leaving the auditorium wholly in the hands of the high priests of hubbub.

Have you never been awakened out of a sound sleep at the end of act three when all the air a solemn stillness holds by “Speech !” “Speech !” “Speech !”? That is the tertiary stage of encoritis. Nobody wants to deliver a “speech,” nobody wants to hear a “speech,” nobody who is anybody asked for a “speech” —but behold ! the Palm has annexed a larynx, and tongues have sprouted on the night. The author, the manager, the star, anybody, will satisfy this unfortunate who has come among us. Just to see a real live man appear between the footlights and the fallen curtain, and hear those inspiring words: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the name of the company and myself—,” and all the rest of the platitudinous palaver that goes by the name “speech”—just to hear that and nothing more, brings the bliss that passeth understanding to the soul of the encoritic and satisfies him until the last act, when, emerging from his trance at seeing particeps criminis before the curtain, he will yet linger for a good-night love-tap.

Applause—the real simon pure article—is something that brings as much joy to the auditor who never applauds—we all know him, the fellow whose face is pipe-jointed to his Dignity, and who is afraid to let out a link in his macadamized attitude—as to the players on the stage. In the third act of “Zira,” when Margaret Anglin spins the web of despair all about her to break it in a whirlwind of defiance and then collapses into a heart-splintering confession, or when James K. Hackett in a splendid outburst pronounces his now famous anathema maranatha on the lady cigarette smokers and the finely upholstered man-killers of Mayfair, and in mighty vocables and unsterilized staccato smashes the smart set to infinitesimal flinders that pretty nearly knocks down the Coca-Cola sign in Long Acre Square, the audience is carried off its feet and fairly bellows its appreciation. This is all very different from demanding of Edna June a repetition for the tenth time of “Under the Beerbohm Tree.”

Then, too, this scurvy encore fellow has no regard for the actor or singer. It was long ago officially announced by Mr. Mansfield that actors have rights which the public is bound to respect. Neither age, rôle, nor previous condition of perspiration is safe from the onslaught of the encoritic. His fiendish purpose is never satiated until he has seen all the company linky-hand, then he must see each bored countenance stand in the centre of the stage and bow its approval to this ass in evening raiment. Voices are worn down, but that is nothing to him; shoe-leather worn out, but that is nothing to him—an actor, a singer encored to death, but that is nothing to him.

It was the last night of all Time. Through the infinite darkness there reigned the calm that was to precede the Final judgment. From the east there flared intermittently yellow and purple-green lights, and the last of the earth-men, seeing these things, cowered deeper and deeper into their burrows. But the end had come. Sulphur and ashes filled the universe and giant sidereal systems flashed into flaming pyres, whose flames licked the roof of the Zenith. World rattled against world, comets clove the solid earth of the younger worlds and belched their fires to the furthest spaces. And over against the east, where the first dread flashes had been seen, the Angel Gabriel rose, and on his face there lay the marmoreal silence of eternity, and upon his trumpet that reached unto the last outpost of Space he blew the three prophetic blasts. And from out that grinding war of atoms and stupendous impact of force on force, through the hellish murk and lurid lights of vanishing worlds, there emerged the figure of a man who once had dwelled on earth. As the last trumpet-call died away the man smote one palm upon another in wild applause, and, with eyes fixed upon the face of Gabriel, he called wildly thrice: “Speech!” “Speech!” “Speech!” It was the encore fiend.

BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.

Original publication
Benjamin De Casseres, “Encoritis: A Protest,” The Theatre Magazine, December 1905, pp. 303, x.