Peep-Holes

Regrettable Lack of Reticence

on the Part of Stage Characters

The stage has always gone its own way with neither abetment nor protest from across the footlights. The folk of that fanciful world attend quietly to their household duties, recking little of the envious eyes upon them. Lovers do their loving shyly but unaffectedly, make their pretty speeches, kiss their pretty kisses, with no thought of the thousand eyes intruding upon their sentimental privacy. It never occurs to the stage criminal that his audience might, were it so inclined, betray his secret. His trust is as implicit as it is touch- ing. Suppose, for instance, that you, leaping up from your seat in the sixth row center, were to level an accusing finger at the dissolute brother and shout in stentorian indignation: "He it was, and not the poor but honest hero on whom he is trying to lay the blame, who took the missing papers from the lower drawer of the mahogany desk in the upper left hand corner of the stage just before the curtain fell on Act I, Scene 2! "

Or suppose that, clearing the footlights with one agile spring, you were to seize the hand about to sink its yellow fingers into the heroine's throat, pull the miscreant to whom it is attached from the secret passageway behind the purple arras, turn him over to the uniformed Hibernian just offstage, and yourself earn the right to that final kiss, instead of the dilatory but bandolined hero?

You can always have in the theatre that feeling of just waking up from a nightmare, with all the thrill of emotional participation and none of the consequent hazards. You can get the keenest satisfaction out of a mild taxicab flirtation in Anything Might Happen, with no anticipatory tremors at sound of the clicking meter. You can share the Parisian amours of the charming wife and somewhat less charming husband in The Love Habit with no fear for your ultimate respectability. You can listen to the sweet mutual nothings of Romeo and Juliet, and your amorous envy will be allayed by prescience of their unfortunate finish.

And meanwhile the inhabitants of stageland go their exciting ways, tangling up their affairs most marvelously. They commit their crimes without regard for the law. They do their dying with never a thought of asking if there is a doctor in the house. And you sit by, indelicately observant, with never a qualm of conscience at having stripped them of all reticence, peeped through an imaginary keyhole at their utmost intimacies. J. A. T.