FROM THE LIFE
part for Jane Shore. The stage director was helping by beating his breast like a gorilla and howling for more mother-love. A young leading man, in answer to a wire from Jane Shore, was coming from Washington to rehearse the part in which the star had fallen down. A New York manager had agreed to take the Atlantic City theater off their hands for the latter part of the week. And the producer was leaving for Broadway and the booking-offices, to arrange for an out-of-town opening for Jane Shore in "a new American drama" within the month.
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Her success in that opening is so much a part of the history of our stage that I hardly need refer to it. There is an accurate account of it in one of William Winter's books. He hailed her, if I remember, as a young Madame Janauschek—for she played her cheap melodrama with such eloquence and distinction that comparisons with the old school were inevitable. She showed, in her later plays, that she was modern and naturalistic; and Mr. Winter felt that she was a noble promise unfulfilled. She shrugged her shoulders and went ahead. What her theory of her art is I do not know. I suspect that she is largely innocent of any. Virginia Tracy has written of her: "I don't believe she ever in her life gave two thoughts to anything except the smashing out of certain congenial dramatic
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