Personality

The Human Element in the Art of Acting

That disconsolate individual whom you have just passed on the street was probably a playwright. His day has passed. The public will no more of him. The play not only is no longer the thing. It is no longer anything at all. In this best of all possible dr?.matic seasons the actor has taken the bit in his teeth and bolted, with the play rattling and banging along behind him.

But too much emphasis continues to be put on what is, after all, only one part of the actor's equipment-- personality. No one knows what personality is. Either it is there or it isn't. But where it comes from or why -- remains an inscrutable mystery.

At least it is easy to recognize. Lowell Sherman has it, and makes the most of it by his incomparable technique. He is at present putting over two mediocre plays at once-- Morphia and The Masked Woman-- by sheer force of his individuality. Jeanne Eagels has it, although she rather strains for it in Eain, and Helen Menken's youthful fire is responsible for a good deal of the thrill in Seventh Heaven.

The real battlefield of personality is, of course, musical comedy. Any number of good tunes, clever librettos, gorgeous settings, avail nothing without personality in the cast. A comedian is about as laughable as an undertaker without it.

A curious instance of that quality on the musical stage is Benny Leonard, champion boxer turned matinee idol, in the Winter Garden. It is not only the physique which he so delights in displaying, not alone the slapstick ingenuities of his scenes. It is the curious quality of personal magnetism shooting across the footlights into the hearts of every fluttering little gum-chewer in the audience.

In the same show Lou Holtz, who is given some exceptionally clever lines, seems lacking in it--in a house filled with memories of the triumphs of Jolson. Marie Dressier, on the other hand, has personality in every square foot of her.

And no discussion of comic personality on the musical stage can be quite adequate without due homage to Jack Hazzard, whose sentimental song parody is one of the brighter moments in the Greenwich Village Follies, or the overpowering pair of lovebirds, Savoy and Brennan, or the cowboy wit, Will Rogers of the Ziegfeld Follies. J. A. T.