Abie's Country Cousin

Some Notes for Theatrical Producers on the Much-Sought Secret of Universal Popularity

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

AFTER all, Abie's Irish Rose has a rival.

That hardy everblooming perennial which has so gladdened the heart of the author and lacerated the sensibilities of the critics, has, indeed, enjoyed not many more than 2000 performances in New York, though Heaven alone knows how many outside. But a play called Aaron Slick from Rankin Crick has probably seen from five to eight thousand performances, and is still going strong. Last year, the seventh, I am told, of its conquering career, there were between 700 and 1000 productions of this dramatic masterpiece. These performances were not in New York, to be sure. They escaped Broadway's bilious scrutiny but they were given almost everywhere else in America, even unto the most provincial grange hall. A play which goes on year after year getting itself produced before a thousand audiences must answer some demand of the American public, it must have some significance as a social document. It may even help to answer that most difficult of all ask-meanottier's—"What makes Abie's Irish Rose so popular?"

I first heard of Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick several years ago, at a Drama League convention in Chicago. The Superintendent of Education from a large midland state told of his efforts to get his state high schools to produce "better plays", and referred sadly to their decided preference for Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick. This remark was greeted with a laugh—the kind of laugh which betokens familiarity; evidently nearly everybody present knew the play—everybody but myself. Mine was the ignorance of the true New Yorker. What was this play, I wondered, which had, the previous year, according to the speaker, supplied about 50% of the amateur programs in the Midlands? Why was it so popular?

I SENT to Walter H. Baker, the Boston publisher, and readily secured a copy (for the modest sum of thirty-five cents), which 1 read with much derisive delight. The author of this "clean rural comedy in three acts" is Lieut. Beale Cormack ("author of The American Flag, etc."). There are seven speaking parts, 3m., t[(., two sets, Mrs. Berry's kitchen on an Oklahoma farm, and a Chicago cabaret, (the stage directions say "no scenery is necessary"), and no royalty charge, except to professionals, who, so far as I know, haven't yet discovered this treasure. Since the play can be produced with seven or eight hooks, at thirty five cents each, and no scenery except a few borrowed palms for the cabaret, it has a considerable economic lure for the rural amateurs. 7000 copies were sold in 1926, which means probably a good deal better than 700 performances. But there are other amateur plays which ask no royalty, which have simple sets and few characters, but which don't sell 7000 copies a year, season after season. What is the answer?

The answer is exactly the same as the answer to why Abie's Irish Rose, has run 2000 nights. Aaron is an amateur Abie; it lacks professional technique, it is naive where the other is theatrically crafty. But it appeals to the same simple emotionalism, rouses the same childlike laughter, and answers the same needs of audiences in their age of theatrical innocence. If you want to know why Abie's Irish Rose succeeds on Broadway, read Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick, the "big wow" on Main Street. Maybe it will give you a new realization that our Broadway sophistication is only shin deep, after all.

Aaron has most of the age-old elements of popular appeal. The hero, Aaron Slick, "not as green as he looks", is a rube who loves his neighbour, the Widow Berry, and constantly endeavours to propose to her, being as constantly interrupted by the Widow's helper, little Sis Riggs, a "regular tomboy". Mr. Wilbur Merridew—magnificent monicker!—is hoarding with Mrs. Berry, accompanied by his stylish niece, Gladys. (She really is his niece —remember, this is a clean comedy.) The niece apparently exists largely to go out into the pasture with a red parasol and get chased by a "cow", hut Wilbur is the villain. He has discovered oil in the old pasture spring, and tries to buy the farm from the poor widow for a mere $1200, the dastard. But Aaron fools him! Aaron makes him come across with $20,000. You'd suppose Widow Berry would have been grateful to Aaron for that, hut she isn't. She skips off to Chicago to try the gay life, and Aaron has to sell a batch of steers in order to follow her. The 3rd act shows him in the toils of The Girl in Red, in the Chicago cabaret. She gets his purse—the little devil! But Aaron is too slick for her in the end. He gets it hack. The Girl in Red in the original production, the directions inform us, "wore a wonderful dress made of cheese-cloth covered with red mosquito netting and hat and bag to match." The cut-up! But it's a swell role for the village vamp, and probably she's better off playing it than training her batteries on the visiting salesman.

OF course there wasn't any oil on Widow Berry's farm; Aaron had dumped a barrel fill into the spring to get the laugh on Mr. Wilbur Merridew. Wilbur threatens to sue the Widow, and has her well frightened, when a detective who has been bobbing up mysteriously all the evening, steps in and arrests him, "for that little deal out in Iowa two years ago." Then follows a truly immortal line. Gladys, the niece, exclaims, "Oh, Uncle Merridew, what shall I do now?" and he replies as follows:—

"Co back to your husband in Alton."

After this climax, there can he nothing left but a quick wind-up. Aaron proposes at last, is monosyllabically accepted, and they're off for Oklyhomy and the old farm on Punkin Crick.

This brief synopsis, of course, does scant justice to the drama. It does not indicate, for example, the stirring climax of Act I, when a mouse gets into the Widow's kitchen. the Widow swripes at it with a broom and hits Aaron instead, knocking him into a pan of bread dough. He angrily shoves the dough at her, and she hits him over the head with it. Curtain—Sis and Gladys standing ,on chairs, Aaron at centre, covered with dough, Mrs. Berry L. C. glaring at her ruined bread. As Mrs. Feitlebaum would say, "Was a scrim."

Then there is the opening of Act III, "a Chicago cabaret". This set is to be accomplished with "fancy screens, palms and large plants ... a few Japanese lanterns may be hung about the stage . . . shaded candles on tables." The next direction is significant: "At rise of curtain several guests, male and female, are seen seated at tables, drinking lemonade." It's a wild life on the Loop! "Three or four specialties are introduced at this point. If possible open with several bright, snappy popular songs by chorus. Follow this with a male quartette or a mandolin, ukulele and guitar number. Then a fancy dance if desired. Then a popular solo, with the guests standing in semicircle behind soloist and doing some simple gesturing and dance steps."

CAN'T you see them doing some simple gesturing and dance steps—especially the simple gesturing? If you can't you've never known the drama in rural parts, and in your life is a Great Void. The author of the play adds, "Do not have any recitations, as these detract from the interest of the play plot." That seems rather a pity. It would so add to the authentic cabaret atmosphere to have Fawn Lippincutt recite "Curfew shall not ring tonight."

The Girl in Red comes in on the last stanza of the song, and soon the "play plot" is in full swing. With the entrance of Aaron amid these scenes of sophisticated revelry, the humour becomes almost excruciating. Vide:—

AARON: I didn't like the way them waiters acted. "Come yere", 1 yelled at one of them. "Give me two soft biled eggs and don't get fresh!" {Pause, then holds nose with fingers.) And he didn't. Oh, them eggs, them eggs! If they was fresh, the hen that laid 'em must have been sick anyhow. I cracked open one and that was enough fer me. I called the waiter. "What's the matter?" says he. "Shall I open the other egg?" "No," I says, "if you wanter open anything, fer the love of Mike open the winder."

CLARENCE the detective, now disguised as a waiter That was too bad.

AARON: TWO bad? Yep, both of 'em was had. You see, I jest dropped up from Oklyhomy yesterday.

CLARENCE: Oh, you blew in on the night train?

AARON : Yep. I reckon I did. Blew in eighteen dollars and sixty-eight cents.

And so on, while the Grange Hall or the local op'ry house rocks with mirth and the no longer mute nor inglorious village Joe Jefferson wonders how long he ought to hold his pauses. Shall he let the laugh die entirely down, or come in with his next crack while they still are chortling?

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Aaron Slick from Punkin Criclc seems at first glance to lack one important element of popular appeal— romantic love. But curiously enough that isn't such an important element on the amateur stage. Amateur lovemaking can seldom he taken seriously enough to kindle response in the audience, and hence the love-making, to he effective, has to he dashed with humour. Middle-aged lovers on the professional stage are seldom popular; they appear a bit ludicrous, and almost invariably fail if they are made the centre of the play. But on the amateur stage, the very touch of ludicrousness which is resented in the professional theatre is welcomed as a saving grace, and when Aaron proposes to the IFidow Berry the loud guffaws of the audience at his clumsiness are also tributes to his persistence, an admission that sex doesn't cease at thirty, a grinning salute to the spirit of Romance.

Don't he too scornful of these rustic dramatics, dear Theatre Guild Subscriber. I have in my collection a photograph of Weber and Fields in baby clothes, in a burlesque New York once howled at. From the Grange Hall to the Guild isn't so far. The Guild revived Mr. G. B. Shaw's Androcles and the Lion a year ago. Suppose you take a look at that play. The preface is serious stuff; but the prologue is not so many metres above the intellectual level of Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick. Try the play—as I have seen done—on a class of schoolboys. They howl when Androcles talks baby talk to the Lion and Mrs. Androcles grovels in terror, and they howl when the Lion chases Caesar all over the stage. But the serious drift of the play leaves them as cold as a New England April. Since we are assured that 50% of the population remain schoolboys intellectually all their lives, is it so hard to understand the popularity of Abie's Irish Rose or Aaron Slick? The critics this winter have all hailed Saturday's Children as a fine, realistic play. In Act I a girl writes on a piece of paper what another (and wiser) girl tells her she should say to catch a man, and when the man calls she manoeuvres herself into a position where she can read these remarks without being detected. She catches him. What do you mean, realistic? Nothing could well be more theatrically contrived, artificial and absurd. But, as a piece of claptrap, it is funny. That sort of thing is always funny in the theatre.

Pinero once defined a classic comedy as "a successful farce by an author who is dead." The truth is that realism and high seriousness on the stage are tolerated only for a time, and then only by the sophisticated minority. Sentiment and the slapstick are the real rulers in the theatre. The difference between Broadway (or any modern "Little Theatre" group) and the rural crowds who flock to Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick is, perhaps, that the latter don't attempt to deny it.