|
The New York Times (19 January, 1892) AMUSEMENTS.
_____ MISS CAYVAN AS KATHERINE THORPE. The question why Mr. Daniel Frohman produced at the Lyceum Theatre a play like “Squire Kate,” an adaptation to the locale of British rustic drama by Robert Buchanan of an Ambigu-Comique idea, was asked many times before the curtain was rung up last night. The people who support the Ambigu-Comique in Paris are not the same kind of folks as those who go to Mr. Frohman’s theatre in New-York. The Ambigu is the home of lurid melodrama. Les etrangleurs flourish on its stage, and when the fun comes the people like it to be simple and broad and plentiful. The Lyceum audiences, on the other hand, are dainty and fastidious.
The question thus raised was answered very satisfactorily, however, in the second act of “Squire Kate.” Here Miss Georgia Cayvan’s acting, in a scene that is a faithful transcript from real life, was surprising in its force, thrilling in its genuine emotional power, and charmed the spectator by its unaffected simplicity. It was a piece of acting as near to reality as a good actor ever gets in the practice of his art. It was convincing, moving, flawless in conception and expression, and it will be remembered.
Miss Cayvan has not suddenly acquired new powers, but, for the first time since she has been the principal actress at the Lyceum Theatre, a chance has been given to her to exhibit her powers. And that is the secret of the production of “Squire Kate”—a production that in every way reflects credit upon Mr. Daniel Frohman’s zeal, liberality, and good taste as a theatre manager, for it is beautiful in a pictorial sense, and all the acting is thoughtful, careful, and harmonious.
The one great scene, in which Miss Cayvan’s acting recalls her worthy effort seven or eight years ago to save from inevitable failure a very bad piece called “Our Rich Cousin,” occurs rather too early in the play, perhaps, to secure a long-continued success for it. There is no other incident nearly so good. That, however, ought to attract to the Lyceum every person who honestly enjoys uncommonly good acting. We fear there are too few such persons nowadays to make success for any play. But their good opinion is worth striving for, and their influence is powerful.
The personages in the scene are two sisters—Tennyson’s “sisters,” of course. The elder has drudged and slaved for years to educate the younger, to fit her for a life of dainty luxury and ease. She loves her fondly. But this elder sister, although she is patient in adversity and thoughtful of the comfort of others, is no mere cipher devoid of hopes and aspirations of her own. She has an intensely passionate nature, and she is deeply in love with a commonplace, good-enough sort of a young man, whom her love has transformed into a hero. Good fortune has come to her. In a day she has become rich, and it seems that her dream of happiness is to be realized. She has every reason to believe that her love is returned. She is fooled to the top of her bent, and placed in a humiliating position. When she learns suddenly that her nice young man has chosen her silly little sister, under the influence of the shock she acts just as such a woman would act in real life. She does not remember copy-book maxims, and quote them. All the force of her passionate nature is exerted in the expression of her natural indignation and grief. Her broken, hysterical invective is exactly in harmony with her mood.
Miss Cayvan’s rendering of this scene could not be surpassed. Her powers are wholly equal to it. She brings tears of sympathy to every eye. Every tone of her voice is in keeping; every gesture is aptly expressive, and she lends to this perfectly simple and natural situation the effect of a great dramatic climax.
This is nature. We too often have had the same situation perverted on the stage. We have had a debilitating excess of mawkish amiability on the other side of the footlights. It would be much better for the world if we could have a little more of uncomplaining self-sacrifice and picturesque benevolence in real life and just a little less of them on the stage.
Miss Cayvan’s acting is strong and expert throughout the play, but she has no other scene that approaches the episode in the moonlit hayfield in naturalness and dramatic force. She had much applause last evening for her ingenious treatment of the inevitable scene of reconciliation between the sisters, in which Squire Kate assumes a cheerful manner to hide the sorrow that is still poignant. This was remarkably well done, but the art of the actress was necessarily plainly in evidence all the time. It is not a happily devised episode; and Mr. Buchanan, to tell the truth, is a very tedious and old-fashioned playwright.
As for the play, founded on “La Fermière,” in which Katherine Thorpe, called “Squire Kate,” is the central personage—well, it is H. T. Craven’s “Meg’s Diversions” again without H. T. Craven’s real humor; with a touch of Douglas Jerrold’s “Rent Day” and a hint or two of “Daddy Hardacre.” Kate is Meg again, and Kate’s sister Hetty is Meg’s well-educated sister, who is loved by the man Meg loves. Jasper Pidgeon is there disguised as Geoffrey Doone, the faithful overseer of Kate’s farm; Master Bullfrog, from “The Rent Day,” brags, makes comic love, and gets drunk and behaves like a donkey in the person of Mr. Nash, the tax collector. The only touch of new humor is in the horse doctor, who is also a general practitioner, and who, when a girl is poisoned, treats her for incipient typhoid fever and partial paralysis of the nerve centres. There is another old friend in evidence, too, who is surely Edie Ochiltree of “The Antiquary,” now a shepherd and a herb doctor, who looks like Walt Whitman, but talks a good deal more like Robert Buchanan.
Hodge and Joan are there, of course, as they are in every play of English rural life; there is the customary quantity of straw, and there is, moreover, a bent, scowling, leering, threatening, snarling, grasping, treacherous old miser, Gaffer Kingsley, who is in sight and in hearing much of the time. This is a fine part for Mr. Le Moyne, who makes it as grimly effective as the art of “make-up” and the skill of an experienced actor can make such a part. In most of Act III. this old miser has the centre of the stage; he poisons a girl, he lies about it, he leers awfully while he is splitting wood with a very sharp axe, he threatens, he cringes and whines. This is all old-fashioned melodrama, and good enough of its kind. Some of Mr. Buchanan’s humor, however, is very depressing.
The acting is all good, as we have said. Miss Shannon is pretty and winning, Mrs. Walcot plays the hearty, stupid countrywoman in the good old style, and Mr. Kelcey plays a very thankless part in his accustomed conscientious manner. The scenery is capital, especially the views of the farm kitchen and the hayfield. The full cast of “Squire Kate” is appended:
___ New-York Daily Tribune (19 January, 1892 - p.7) THE DRAMA---MUSIC.
_____ LYCEUM THEATRE—“SQUIRE KATE.” In the comedy of “Squire Kate,” by Robert Buchanan, which last night at the Lyceum Theatre had its first presentation in America, an effort has been made to freight with romantic interest and to invest with picturesque theatrical accessories an episode in the experience of two English girls—orphaned sisters, resident on a farm in beautiful Sussex—who loved the same man and whose affectionate intercourse was thereupon temporarily interrupted by anxious misapprehension and jealous rage. This effort has resulted in the fabrication of a play that fits the stage, because it provides opportunities for the actor and for the scenic artist, and because its course is enlivened by incident and crowned by effect. But this effort has been conducted with little or no regard for reason, coherence or the ascertained facts of human nature; and hence the comedy, while it may please at the instant view, appears, in the retrospect, both frail in construction and trivial in substance. It seemed in various ways to please a numerous and refined audience last night, for it was very richly caparisoned, and the lurid and fantastic aspects of its high-pressure love-story, together with its occasional interludes of bovine farce, in which absurdity stands for humor, were interpreted by actors of salient talent and deep sincerity. It will, therefore, enjoy a temporary vogue. A play that is false, however, is for that reason ephemeral.
The great truth of feminine intuition, in all matters of love, has been absolutely ignored throughout this piece; and when you put aside all thought of its adornments, and look with clear vision at the heart of it, you find that it offers for your contemplation nothing more important or more impressive than the spectacle of a young woman afflicted with hysteria because she has found out that the man of her choice is in love with her sister. This fact, in actual life, she would have known without the intervention of any theatrical machinery to apprise her of it; and whatever feeling, in actual life, she might have had, upon this subject, she would most sacredly have kept it to herself. The woman—in her senses—who becomes violent in her conduct and vituperative in her language because her love is not reciprocated may awaken pity, but certainly must forfeit respect. The woman—out of her senses—who suffers and rages because of an amatory disappointment is a subject for a doctor and not a dramatist. The heroine of this play is either one or the other, and, whichever way she is viewed, she is sad to contemplate and painful to remember. “Squire Kate” has been put together upon the principle that you must get your effect, no matter how you get it, and hence it will only please those (and will cease to please even them, when its novelty shall have worn off) who, if entertained at the moment, are completely indifferent alike to dramatic mechanism and dramatic substance. The number of that audience, meantime, is very large.
Mr. Buchanan’s first title for this piece was “The Little Sister,” and that title might wisely have been retained. The name of “Squire Kate” is suggestive of “The Squire,” by Arthur Pinero, of which drama Kate Verity is the principal character. In each case, furthermore, the heroine is a farmer, and in each case she is beloved by the patient, constant, manly, and much-enduring overseer of her farm. At that point, however, all resemblance ceases. Mr. Buchanan, though, like Mr. Pinero, has obviously felt the influence of the great novelist Thomas Hardy—of whom it may be said, if originality, imagination, absolute truthfulness, passionate feeling splendidly curbed, a Shakesperean humor, and a fine style are decisive, is the best author of fiction now writing the English language. It was Thomas Hardy who introduced into literature those strong, peculiar, female characters, full of the qualities of their sex, amid their unique surroundings in the rustic life of England; and when once he opened the path he soon had followers, both conscious and unconscious. Mr. Buchanan, in the making of this play of “Squire Kate,” has built upon the basis of “La Fermiere,” by MM. Armand d’Artois and Henri Paget; but the English soil in which his French roots are planted is unmistakably that of the novels of Thomas Hardy. The old shepherd Jasper Arundel and the sombre and gloomily grotesque scenes at his lonely hut, wherein the desperate Kate Thorpe comes to him for a love-philter and the sordid old ruffian and semi-maniac Gaffer Kingsley comes to him for a poison, are strikingly significant of that original—not necessarily in their plan, but in their attributes of character and in their atmosphere. The suggestions of haunted solitude, weird moonlight, a bleak wind, and the lamentable crying of the birds of night make those scenes exceedingly effective and supply for this comedy a genuine touch of poetic feeling such as would be valuable if anything came of it. And in themselves, apart from their context, they are excellent.
Gaffer Kingsley, the step-father of George Heathcott,—the youth who is loved by Kate Thorpe and by her sister Hetty,—is the strongest character in Mr. Buchanan’s play; but just as Kate Thorpe represents the dementia of thwarted love, so does Gaffer Kingsley represent the dementia of thwarted avarice. He is determined that George shall be married to Kate, and since Hetty stands in the way he will kill Hetty with poison; wherefore he mysteriously seeks the ancient shepherd by night and obtains, under the most suspicious circumstances, the drug most deadly and most fit for his purpose; and so, over this as over almost everything else in the piece there is the glare of extravagance and the disillusion of improbability. Act first, indeed, as a pastoral picture and as a display of the posture of the characters toward each other, is perfect, and it arouses a romantic interest at the same time that it pleases a refined taste. In this act Geoffrey Doone’s devotion to Squire Kate is touchingly indicated; the attitude of yet unspoken loves is made entirely clear, and the Squire, who is about to be evicted by the avaricious curmudgeon, Gaffer Kingsley, inherits a fortune. Act second,—requiring the spectator to believe that an uncommonly clear-sighted woman would accept at second hand and from a discredited source an offer of marriage from her sister’s lover,—moves rapidly to a climax of delirium. Act third shows Gaffer Kingsley’s quest of a poison, his successful administration of it, and his piteous hysteria when menaced with an exposure of his cruel and insane crime. Act fourth reveals the poisoner discomfited, the younger sister saved, and the elder,—momentarily under suspicion of having tried to destroy her rival,—shocked into sanity and delivered from the hateful thraldom of passion and of sin. She has had the common experience of loving and of losing, and those who have looked upon her conduct have seen that she has not borne it well. The value of this spectacle will be differently estimated by different observers. It would be welcome, indeed, if it could only be depended on to teach the young men and women who observe it the power and the beauty of a self-reliant character sustained by a pure spirit.
In a dramatic sense, the most interesting part of the play is the part relative to the unscrupulous and vindictive miser who would do murder rather than lose his object. This character is drawn with vigor and subtlety, and it was impersonated with thrilling force of sardonic will and snarling humor by Mr. Le Moyne. The make-up is particularly fine. The sour, sardonic, chuckling glee could not be improved. The sustainment of the personality is even and potent. There is, however, a tinge of unconscious kindness in the humor that is inappropriate, and the expression of frenzied terror is far less effective than that of frenzied rage. The action while actually giving the poison needs transparency. Concentration must not be carried to the extent of tameness. Mr. Le Moyne was wildly applauded and once was called back upon the scene. Miss Georgia Cayvan succeeded better in the love scenes that are provided for Kate Thorpe than in the delirium. Nothing could be more sweet or more true than her portraiture of the happy country lass; but the moment she struck the false note—which is Kate’s unwomanly conduct at the close of act second—she became artificial and merely vehement. An impassioned and sustained performance of the lover was contributed by Mr. E. J. Ratcliffe, who has the charm of grace, and Mr. Herbert Kelcey carried with fine feeling, delicately expressed, the cumbrous and colorless part of the patient waiter who does not lose at last. The piece should at once be shorn of some of the bumpkin talk and of the vacuous gabble of the tax collector. This is the cast:
___ The Era (30 January, 1892 - Issue 2784) THE DRAMA IN AMERICA.
_____ “SQUIRE KATE.”
Pastoral Drama, in Four Acts,
Adapted by Robert Buchanan from the French La Fermiere,
by MM. Armand d’Artois and Henri Pagat,
Produced for the First Time at the Lyceum Theatre, New York,
Jan. 18th, 1892.
(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) NEW YORK, JAN. 20.—Mr Buchanan’s play made a profound sensation, and commanded a generally favourable verdict. It was very strongly acted in its principal parts by Miss Georgia Cayvan and Mr Le Moyne, and the supporting Lyceum company brought considerable ability to bear upon the performance. In his adaptation Mr Buchanan has changed the scene of the play to a Sussex farm, and made his characters entirely English. Otherwise the story of the original French piece is adhered to as closely as fidelity to English incident and character would permit. The play has been done into vigorous, terse dialogue, the fury of the disappointed heiress is depicted with great naturalness of action and language, and the interest of the poisoning episode in the third act has been worked up with considerable dramatic skill. The final act is somewhat tedious in conventionality, and is the only portion of the play that allowed the attention of the audience to slacken. Daniel Frohman will, however, quicken the interest of this act, and when its faults are removed the Buchanan play will, without doubt, be one of the most remarkable successes of the Lyceum management. ___ The Era (13 August, 1892 - Issue 2812) THE Leo Hunters of San Francisco thought recently they had captured Mr Robert Buchanan, and felt exceedingly foolish when they discovered that they had been wasting their enthusiasm over a prosaic English trader without even a spark of poetry in his bosom. Mr Robert Buchanan is at present enjoying the sea-breezes at a certain popular resort on the Kentish coast. Next season he will make his first experiment in comic opera, and will also give his London admirers an opportunity to see Squire Kate, already produced by Mr Frohman in New York. Mr Buchanan has written a piece for Mr Sothern, and it has gone out with the manager named. He is also completing another play ordered for the New York Lyceum; he has been commissioned by Mr Palmer to prepare an English adaptation of L’Ainé, in which Mr Willard will appear, and he is hoping soon to complete a contract with Mr Beerbohm Tree for a new piece at the Haymarket. ___ The Saint Paul Daily Globe (18 September, 1892 - p.20) CHICAGO LETTER.
_____ Breezy Gossip of the Stage in the Windy City. Special Correspondence of the Globe.
CHICAGO, Sept. 16.—
.....
The only important event announced for the coming week will be the first performance in Chicago by Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theater company of “Squire Kate,” by Robert Buchanan. While confessing that he received part of the story from a French source, he has made this play almost entirely from a dramatization of his novel, “Come Live With Me and Be My Love.” The plot of the play can hardly be better presented than in a charming little poem, which Mr. Buchanan has written for the purpose, upon the play’s first production. Each verse, representing an act, runs as follows: ACT I.
ACT II.
ACT III.
ACT IV.
As a poet and novelist Robert Buchanan gained his reputation with the British public; and it was some time thereafter that he turned his attention to dramatic work. In his younger days he was a great friend of Thomas Carlyle, being a neighbor of his in Edinburgh. It was Carlyle who advised young Buchanan to go to London, and seek success in the field of literature. He went, and, like all penniless young writers, had to fight that hard battle for fame which has been continually waged in the big, smoky metropolis from the time of Johnson and Goldsmith to the present day. But fame is more remunerative in this world’s fair year than it was in the past, as has been shown by the success of Jerome K. Jerome and others. Robert Buchanan is now probably forty-eight years old, and enjoys a large income coming entirely from literature. ___ The New York Times (18 October, 1896) The new theatrical incidents of this week will be the opening of Frank Murtha’s Murray Hill Theatre, at Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue; the production of a new Irish operetta at the Broadway Theatre, which has been closed since “The Caliph” suddenly vanished, and the revival at Palmer’s, by Georgia Cayvan, of “Squire Kate,” a drama of rustic life, by Robert Buchanan, in which her acting was greatly admired at the Lyceum Theatre.
“Squire Kate,” is founded on a French drama called “La Fermiere.” Miss Cayvan has somewhat reduced its text and omitted two scenes. The play will now be presented in four acts, the scene of the first and fourth being Kate’s farmhouse, and that of the second and third the harvest field. New scenery has been painted, and great pains have been taken with the ensemble. The harvest merry-making will be elaborately represented. George Woodward will have the rôle of the miser, and other prominent parts will be taken by Frank Atherley, Orrin Johnson, Florence Conron, and Annie Sutherland. ___ Brooklyn Eagle (1 November, 1896 - p.24) Georgia Cayvan has proved herself one of the best actresses in America. Her appearance as a star has been clearly enough foreseen during her long service with the Lyceum stock company, and many of her admirers will be glad of an opportunity to welcome her in a field which will give a wider scope to the powers which the actress has often indicated, but has not yet fully displayed. The opportunity will come this week at the Park Theater, where Miss Cayvan will make her first appearance in Brooklyn as a nominal star. Almost exactly four years ago Robert Buchanan’s pastoral drama, “Squire Kate,” was seen for the first time in this city, being played by the Lyceum theater company, with Miss Cayvan as Kate. It returns to the Park theater now, when it will be presented by Miss Cayvan and her newly organized company. In the interim it has, however, been in large part rewritten, its incidents have been rearranged, and the critics of New York, where Miss Cayvan has been presenting it during the final two weeks of her engagement at Palmer’s theater, say that it has been vastly improved. “Squire Kate” is a story of English country life, and it breathes the freshness of the fields and the wholesomeness of rusticity. It tells a love story and tells it in a manner which compels sympathy and interest to the very last. Catherine Thorpe loves George Heathcote, but of this he suspects nothing, for he himself loves Catherine’s little sister, Hetty, whom Catherine has reared and been a mother to. The story is a struggle between Kate’s love for her sister and for her lover. The knot is cut by the poisoning of Hetty, and the plot complicated by the suspicion which falls for a time upon Kate. But the little sister is saved and Catherine is fully cleared, after which the story has a pleasant but unconventional ending. Miss Cayvan’s manager has staged the play well, the scenery having been painted by Mr. Homer Emens and the production being under the stage direction of Mr. Napier Lothian, jr. The company, too, is good. It includes Miss Anne Sutherland, Miss Florence Conron, Miss Winifred McCaull, Miss Mary Jerrold, Miss Kate Ten Eyck, Miss Louise Palmer, Messrs. George Woodward, Frank Atherley, Orrin Johnson, William Herbert, Albert Brown, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Bridgeland and Charles Thropp. The engagement at the Park is for one week only. ___ Brooklyn Eagle (3 November, 1896 - p.9) TWO STRONG ACTRESSES.
_____ GEORGIA CAYVAN AND OLGA
NETHERSOLE IN TOWN. The American Star in “Squire Kate” and
the English Woman in a Strong Repertory,
Beginning with Denise—Chevalier at the Columbia
_____ If the rest of Georgia Cayvan’s starring tour moves as auspiciously as its opening at the Park Theater last night, she need have no misgivings that her place among the peripatetic actresses of America is assured for some years to come. Miss Cayvan has long been admired as the leading woman of the Lyceum company in new York, and it is inevitable that a good leading actor sooner or later starts out on his or her own account, taking the gambler’s hazard of the receipts at the door with the financial worry involved, in lieu of the comfortable salary and artistic freedom which the head of a stock company gives. But there is always more or less uncertainty about the success of the venture. Rose Coghlan, for instance, has not won the success which her merits as an actress deserved, and most people familiar with the theater can fill out a list of actors who would be better off if they had never left the ranks. Appearances last night indicated that Miss Cayvan’s was to be one of the successful experiments. If she has as many friends in other cities as in Brooklyn and if her stock of interesting plays holds out, there can be little question about the result. The Park was filled as Brooklyn theaters are filled only a few times during the season, there were four curtain calls after the third act and an emotion after the fourth and final scene which did not materialize in applause, chiefly because the pathos was too keen. The play was Robert Buchanan’s “Squire Kate,” which suggests Hardy’s novel, “Far From the Madding Crowd,” so sharply that the dramatist has time and time again been accused of borrowing the novel and has as often denied it until now his play is officially traced to a French original. Its spirit is thoroughly English, however, and remains so now that the play has been extensively altered. The melodramatic scenes have been cut out by Napier Lothian, jr., leaving a consistent pastoral drama which turns upon the love of Kate and her petted younger sister, Hetty, for the same man, and the sacrifice of Kate when she finds that George loves Hetty. A trace of melodrama remains in the attempt to poison Hetty by George’s miserly step-father, Gaffer Kingsley, but the attempt fails and is chiefly important because it brings George and Hetty nearer together, nerves Kate for her sacrifice and leads to a hint of her future happiness with Geoffrey, the faithful overseer who has loved her since her girlhood. This outline conveys little idea of the strength of the play, which comes from clearly drawn and faithfully realized characters and from natural and life like scenes. The first two acts are purely pastoral, a farm kitchen and a hay field in which types of rustic character based on those in Hardy’s novels are presented and which have something of the bucolic flavor of “The Old Homestead” and “Shore Acres,” though for Americans they lack the vividness of familiarity. In these two acts the comedy characters are prominent and Miss Cayvan is not particularly convincing. At the end of them, however, George has proposed to Hetty and his miserly old step-father, having guessed Kate’s love for him, has proposed in George’s name and won an acknowledgment from Kate that she loves and will marry his step-son. The last two acts are tense and rapid. First, Kate sees George and Hetty love making and is half crazed with grief. In her frenzy she turns upon Hetty, accuses her of trickery and orders her from the house. That is an intense and stirring scene and Miss Cayvan played it like a whirlwind last night, winning four curtain calls for her fiery denunciations of her sister and her sister’s lover. It was powerful acting of a school that has somewhat gone by. One may doubt if Miss Cayvan were still in a stock company whether she would have played it so violently. More repose would have been better art. But there is no question of the theatrical effectiveness of the scene. The actress caught the house and the four curtain calls, which were the high water mark of enthusiasm rewarded this scene. In the fourth act Miss Cayvan’s manner changed and she abundantly satisfied the lovers of quiet and naturalness. Hetty is supposed to be dying of poison and circumstances tend to throw suspicion upon Kate. The horror of such a suspicion kills the woman’s hate of her sister and rouses her better nature to the sacrifice which shall restore Hetty to the arms of the man they both love. In that situation Miss Cayvan acted with all the intellectual insight, the subtlety, delicacy and truth which have marked her performances of less exacting parts, and with the power which has at various times led her admirers to believe that she was intended by nature for the Jocastas and Lady Macbeths rather than for the drawing room style of drama, in which she is most familiar. It was beautiful, natural, true and poignantly pathetic. There are not four actresses on the American stage who could have done it so well. The company which supports Miss Cayvan is above the average of star companies. George Woodward played Gaffer Kingsley with a humor and power which won prompt recognition, and other parts were well filled by Orrin Johnson, Frank Atherly, William Herbert, Albert Brown, Charles Thropp, Florence Conron and Anne Sutherland. Special interest attached to the appearance of Lionel Barrymore, a young son of Maurice Barrymore. He has only been on the stage for three or four weeks, but his sketch of Lord Silversnake had the firmness and ease of a veteran, and it showed a touch of humor which may indicate a coming character comedian. The settings were about as good as they could have been if Miss Cayvan were still under the management of the Lyceum theater. The real hay had the pungency of the meadows and the scenes were solidly and well painted. Next week, “The Lilliputians.” ___ The San Francisco Call (10 April, 1897 - p.9) SHE LIKES CALIFORNIA
_____ Georgia Cayvan Once More
Comes to San Francisco.
_____ On This Occasion She Is at the
Head of Her Own Company.
_____ Georgia Cayvan, who occupied such ample space in the hearts of the local theater-goers when last she played in this City, is again here.
She is a star now. She says she is not. She says she is merely the head of her company, but she is a star now all the same, and she is as well pleased that her orbit leads her and her satellites to San Francisco as when she was just leading lady and in that capacity captured the local hearts.
Miss Cayvan says she is glad to get back here. “You know,” she said, “my first, or almost my first, training was received here. I had only a year’s experience when I was made leading lady of the old California Stock Company, and the critics and everybody were so good to me that it is little wonder I am glad to get back.
“I like to travel at the head of my own company, and I am anxious to do well. The work has become so interesting, but in another way than ti used to. To feel the part myself is not enough, each member of the company must feel his or her part too, then the whole effect is as it should be.
“Which play do I like the best? I like them all; it is too hard to choose, so I’ll let the public do that. I will do my best in all of them.”
Miss Cayvan has had phenomenal success since she returned to the stage since her long illness. She will open at the Columbia on Monday evening in “Squire Kate.” |
|
