I Do Not See How An Actor
Can Forget Himself And Portray Hot Passion Before A Cold
Still Audience.
I should think he would feel foolish.
It is a pain to me to this day, to remember how that old
German Lear raged and wept and howled around the stage,
with never a response from that hushed house, never a
single outburst till the act was ended.
To me there was
something unspeakably uncomfortable in the solemn dead
silences that always followed this old person's tremendous
outpourings of his feelings. I could not help putting
myself in his place - I thought I knew how sick and flat
he felt during those silences, because I remembered a case
which came under my observation once, and which - but I
will tell the incident:
One evening on board a Mississippi steamboat, a boy of ten
years lay asleep in a berth - a long, slim-legged boy,
he was, encased in quite a short shirt; it was the first
time he had ever made a trip on a steamboat, and so he
was troubled, and scared, and had gone to bed with his
head filled with impending snaggings, and explosions,
and conflagrations, and sudden death. About ten o'clock
some twenty ladies were sitting around about the ladies'
saloon, quietly reading, sewing, embroidering, and so on,
and among them sat a sweet, benignant old dame with round
spectacles on her nose and her busy knitting-needles
in her hands. Now all of a sudden, into the midst of this
peaceful scene burst that slim-shanked boy in the brief shirt,
wild-eyed, erect-haired, and shouting, "Fire, fire!
JUMP AND RUN, THE BOAT'S AFIRE AND THERE AIN'T A MINUTE
TO LOSE!" All those ladies looked sweetly up and smiled,
nobody stirred, the old lady pulled her spectacles down,
looked over them, and said, gently:
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 72 of 558
Words from 19569 to 19877
of 156082
