Little Genius

"I love Ruth Draper," wrote Henry Adams to a friend. "She is a little genius and quite fascinates me." When Adams wrote in 1911, the 26-year-old actress was still an amateur, reciting in people's drawing rooms. Then, as always, she created her own material; only once in her life appearing in a play, Ruth Draper at length became the most finished of professionals, without exhibiting the vices and vulgarities of professionalism. Thus, she has never sought in her sketches to keep up with the times, and so has never fallen behind them.

Last week Ruth Draper, 69, began a "farewell Broadway engagement"--while remarking that "the farewell engagement is a standing joke in the business." All the same, it was a reminder that an irreplaceable theater figure would not be an eternal one. Ruth Draper has soundly insisted that she is no mere monologist or diseuse; she describes herself as a character actress. In any case, she is with every slightest word, gesture and accent the character she is portraying. And with amazing, quick changes, she can be a featherbrained society woman, a bewildered immigrant, a spare, porch-sitting down-easter, a whole international procession of visitors to an Italian church.

Yet if she has sternly suppressed her own personality, she everywhere gives proof of her very personal taste and wit: with a resolute aristocracy of method, she is as much above her characters as she is outside them. If her finest talent is for social comedy, her particular genius is for suggesting a stageful of people, a whole social scene.

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