Players At Work

PLAYERS AT WORK ACTING according to THE ACTORS BY MORTON EUSTIS With a chapter on the Singing Ac for BY LOTTE LEHMANN THEATRE ARTS, INC. NEW YORK Prologue 9 Helen Hayes 15 Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne 29 Lynn Fontanne 34 Alfred Lunt 40 Nazimova 47 Katharine Cornell 59 Ina Claire 74 Burgess Meredith 89 FredAstaire 100 The Singing Actor 118 by LOTTE LEHMANN Helen Hayes in Mary of Scotland 1933 16 Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina 1936 17 The Lunts in The Taming of the Shrew 1935 32 The Lunts in Idiots Delight 1936 33 Nazimova in A Dolls House an early production 48 Nazimova in The Cherry Orchard 1933 49 Katharine Cornell in The Green Hat 1925 64 Katharine Cornell in Romeo and Juliet 1934 65 Ina Claire in End of Summer 1935 80 Ina Claire in Biography 1932 81 Burgess Meredith in Three-Penny Opera 1933 96 Burgess Meredith in Wintffrsetig S 97 Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon 1931 114 Fred Astaire in the film, Roberta 1934 115 Lotte Lehmann in Der Rosenkavalier 1934 126 Lotte Lehmann in Manon 1936 127 EVER since Shakespeare assuming the mantle of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark penned what is prob ably the most widely quoted critique on the art of act ing, the technique of the player in the theatre has been subjected to every known form of literary analysis and review. Critics and scholars, essayists and poets have torn passions to tatters extolling, or condemning actors and theories of acting. Daily and Sundays, in the worlds theatrical centres, the mirror of acting has been held up to every conceivable type of nature and of art, without finding the final answer to the question What is act ing The actors alone, in all the controversy, have re mained comparatively silent and aloof. Coquelin and HenryIrving, to be sure, did carry on a brilliant and delightful discussion on the relative importance of in tellect and emotion in the actors art. Fanny Kemble, William Gillette and a few others have made sporadic appearances in the periodicals of their time. But, for the most part, the worlds players, following Hamlets ad-9 to PROLOGUE vice, have gone about their business, suiting the action to the word, the word to the action on the stage. The reason for their muteness on a subject concerning them deeply, lies not alone in natural reticence but in the temperament and the special medium of expression which are the actors heritage. The players whole ap proach to art, and even to life itself, is one of interpreta tion. In the theatre, he creates life out of the rib of a playwrights imagination. Off the stage, he relates life, as he sees and feels it, to life as it must be seen, felt, recreated on the boards. His natural medium of expres sion is movement, gesture, a dramatists speech. His own vocabulary like his personality and physique belongs to the playwright. And though, occasionally, a generous providence may add the gift of literary expres sion to other natural endowments, as with Coquelin, and with Mme. Lotte Lehmann and with Stanislavski, more often than not, the actor who is able to express himself freely in his own words is unable to translate a drama tists words into living action on a stage. Leonard Merricks actress, Naomi Knight, is an ad mirable case in point. If Miss Knight could emerge from between the still covers of The Position of P0ggy Har p r, she could unquestionably recount the secrets of acting far more clearly than any actor playing on Broad way, or anywhere else. Noone could tell you more ac curately the exact point where technique blended into art, where movement, emotion, gesture, pitch of voice, rhythm and tempo, timing what you will fused into