The Last Stage

Being Something of a Fantasy Appropriately Conceived for the Funeral of All Theatres

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

THINGS were in a worst way. The producers, the hopeless playwrights, the few actors who were not fled to Hollywood, had had their inevitable luncheon meeting and decided that the theatre was dead. Dead, forever and irrevocably dead. Undeniably dead, as dead as a doornail or as Mr. Mar ley.

One last performance they'd all give that night, and then . . .

They planned that last performance with sad care. The renegade public, responsible for the constant failure and rebuff which the drama had suffered in these several past years, should be taught a farewell lesson. A lesson in all the joys and raptures, benefits and lively curiosities the stage had formerly furnished. A lesson in the form of a memoir of all those arts and entertainments which the public had once so dearly loved, so freely paid for, now forsaken and almost forgotten in these chill days of the dusk of the drama.

There would be, for instance, the signor who did tricks, the ballerina who did dances, the noble thespian who still persisted in playing Hamlet, in ancient dress, the little French maid who used always to be discovered dusting the bust of Beethoven when the curtain rose upon act one . . . they would all be there. They and many other dear old standbys of the days when playdom had lived and prospered . . . they would all be there, giving their valedictory performance on the world's last stage.

AND then, sure enough, when the show was done and the emptied house had been turned over a last time to the softly snarling whiskbrooms of the gnarled old cleaning women, that would be the end. The theatre would be dead, forever dead.

I am sure that the signor professor who did tricks was most affected by the sorrowful occasion. Those who sat in the front row claim that they distinctly saw two yellow drops of moisture (not perspiration, either) run down his nose and plop into the goldfish bowl he had just now removed so miraculously from out of his coattails. An emotion made his fingers tremble and quite marred the brilliance of his celebrated palming of the deuce of spades.

Then, later, I heard of an even more touching scene behind the stage when the old gentleman, packing his apparatus finally for a sale to some unsympathetic junk-shop, said goodbye to his pet rabbit. Every night, for how many years, this little creature had accomplished the unexplainable for him, had leaped full grown from out an empty derby hat . . . anybody's derby hat . . . but the public no longer wondered, and the marvel had grown dim, and the rabbit was a mangy little bag of bones.

And the drama was dead.

A composer of jazz, perpetrator in the past of scores of innumerable best beloved musical shows, maestro of so many formerly brilliant exercises in the ingenuity of suspended syncopation and cerebral blues, appeared with the tattered remnants of his band. A positively last appearance, anywhere.

Once upon a time, in the heyday of jazz, this great, fat man had gaily brayed the joys of his inspiration through his every pore— and great, fat convolvuli of glistening brass had answered him like sea-horses of a grotesque hugeness from a revolutionary deep. He had defined, refined, returned the mean, hoarse notes of pandemonium as stuff of resplendent symphonies. He had made art out of uproar. Out of the fullness of his fatness he had expressed all the ample lusts and terrors and mad comicalities of his lifetime in terms of saxophones, slide trombones, tenor banjoes. And a whole world had cut its hair and its skirts in tune with his creations, and taken his codas for its moral codes.

This was only the remnant, true, of the glories of his old band. They played very loudly and madly, presuming with one final fling to shriek the hinges off the gates of hell and give sudden freedom to all the leaping little devils of sardonic sound. But, somehow, it was as if the little devils had been serenaded once too often, and had made up their minds to stop at home tonight, instead. And the audience could do no more than tap its foot occasionally in time with the tired bass-drum out of sheer politeness. Myself, I overheard someone saying how sick he was of the classics!

As for that splendid mythological seascape of the leader and his big brasses, one was reminded now of nothing hut a dingy provincial aquarium where jelly-fish scarce breathed and tarnished octopuses twitched slothfully behind the dusty glass . . . for jazz was dead, or worse than dead, and all the drama kept it company.

THE last surviving prima ballerina did her dance. It was a creaky, melancholy one— but it was a dance; and she stayed on prim, artistic tiptoe to do it. The noble thespian, a grimly absurd ruin, recited Shakespeare with a double quaver gnawing at his throat, but with impeccably grand gestures, pauses of vast, pregnant echo, the attitude of a battered old lion. He, at least, would go down into disuse and oblivion with head unbowed. While the little French maid wept shrilly, and the mammy singer sobbed for once with big, genuinely impulsive sobs at the thought that, from now on, the great American MotherComplex would have to go hungry, unsung, unsentimentalized.

For, from now on, the drama was dead.

A more mournful performance, naturally, had never been given in the history of the world. The wings, where the producers had gathered in funeral frockcoats—since, having been producers, they would still dress in a right, rich, slightly too well-tailored way— almost smelled of the freshly upturned earth of a huge, world-wide graveside. The playwrights, frayed and gaunt, littered the backstage nervously with cigarette butts, and treated each other to whispered roundelays of savage wisecracks. They all knew it: the drama was dead.

The last performance came to a close. The audience—it had been a very small, cold audience in even the beginning—drifted out. The emptied house belonged for a last time to the softly snarling whiskbrooms of those gnarled old Fates, the cleaning women . . . and this was the end.

Out, down the cobwebbed lobby, past the cold, shut window of the box-office, through the glass doors which would never again open into scenes of rapture, pain, elation or high resolve. Out, out into the street, into the crowds of the everyday which had let the drama die.

But there, on the sidewalk directly in front of the theatre, three young black boys were performing.

Oblivious to the obsequies indoors, these boys had been doing young, crazy dances, singing a shrill street song, cramming their grinning faces with mouth harmonicas, scooping pennies from the pavement while they danced and sang. Passersby had made a small mob around them. When they laughed the crowd roared hack. Their foolish, formless, pickaninny treble was riddled by an accompaniment of heels like pistol shots, small coins tinkling to the ground around their crazy feet like hail upon a churchyard.

The crowd roared and was immensely cheered. Of course, the drama was dead, the theatre was closed forever and aye, the stage . .. and yet, look here. . . .

BUT this was heresy, and this was anarchy, and this was against all edicts, all advices and agreements. At first the worthier members of the crowd thought of applying to a policeman down the street, sure that here was something much in need of his censorship, something gay without reason, joyful without rule, successful without great preparation, organization or expense. In which case, of course. . . . But soon enough there was no longer any cause for worry. It all adjusted itself thus:

There was a playwright loitering on the edge of that crowd, watching and thinking automatically of some sort of plot wherein little black hoys, wretched, lawless, impudently gay . . . and there were at least two ex-composers of musical comedy who, the moment they caught the fiercely young, impromptu rhythm . . . and an ex-scene-painter, I suppose, who, when he saw these dark, bobbing faces before a background of restless taxi-lights and rain-dappled stone . . . and an ex-dancer, no doubt. . . .

And, certainly, there must have been some ex-producer there, too, halting immediately when he heard the pennies greet the pavement, thinking, sizing-up, waiting cannily the correct moment to interrupt: "Now, just a minute, boys, I know the drama's dead, and the theatre's closed, and all that and all that . . . hut what you boys need is a manager."