Burns Mantle and the American Theatregoing Public

{ 51 } \ Burns Mantle and the American Theatregoing Public —DOROTHY CHANSK Y In 1920, Burns Mantle interviewed Dorothy Dalton, a now-forgotten screen star who was making her Broadway debut in an orientalist stage spectacle called Aphrodite. Mantle’s piece, published in Photoplay Magazine, helped shore up Dalton’s theatrical bona fides in what has become a time-honored way, as he asked her about her preferred performing venue. Said Dalton, “If I were forced to make my choice between the screen and the stage, other things being equal, I would unhesitatingly choose the stage.” Coaxing her to continue, Mantle writes, drawing us in with his use of the first person, “‘It’s the applause?’ I ventured.” “‘It’s the fascination,’ said she,‘and the satisfaction. It is the inspiration the actress in the theater gets from her audience, that the actress before the camera never feels. It is the lights, the stage, the voice, the human contact. It is—’” Mantle fills in the blank. “‘It is the theater,’ I said, and she agreed.”1 At this point, readers of a scholarly persuasion are quite possibly holding two simultaneous thoughts in their minds. One is that the term “theatre” cries out here for critical, historicized unpacking; the other is probably—whether we like to admit it or not—a sense of recognition and identification. The theatre. Of course. My project in this short essay is to look at Burns Mantle’s understanding of the American theatregoing public, which, for the last thirty-seven years of his life, meant largely the Broadway theatregoing public. As with “theatre,” there are often unspoken, present-day assumptions about this particular public that go unremarked under rubrics such as “mainstream” or “commercial.” Mantle struggled to understand and define this audience. His efforts are of interest not only because he was in a privileged position to observe this public but also be- { 52 } DOROTHY CHANSK Y cause of the perspective he brought to his task and who he was to become for theatre historians.Both his optic and the particulars of his descriptions may tell us more than we would like to know (or how much we would like to repress) about the public that supports American theatre in its largest, most visible and influential venue. Burns Mantle is known to any scholar of the twentieth-century American theatre as the founding editor of the Best Plays volumes, started in 1920, hailed in 1967 as “the oldest continuous record of theatrical activity on Broadway and environs,” and still going strong in 2011.2 Mantle founded the series at the request of editors from Small, Maynard in Boston, who were looking for an analogue to their existing Best American Short Stories yearbook.3 He retained the editorship for twenty-seven years, overlapping his work as a daily critic for the New York Daily News from 1922 until 1943. As yearbook editor, Mantle established the practice not only of selecting and redacting the ten “best” plays of every season but also of providing what Joseph Wood Krutch lauded as a record “astonishing in its completeness” and analogous to those in other specialist fields but previously nonexistent for theatre. Each volume listed, “in the order of their first nights, every New York theatrical production for the year—with its cast, its run, and a brief synopsis of the plot. Moreover, all this [was] indexed and supplemented by various other compendia of information.”4 Lewis Nichols declared Mantle’s position in 1946 to be “comparable only to the worthy writers who put out ‘Moody’s Industrials’”;5 Edward Albee asks rhetorically on the current Best Plays website, “Is there a more complete and useful record of each year’s American theater life?” He answers, “I doubt it.”6 Besides the prodigious data Mantle compiled, however, he left a record of his intermittent thoughts about the people who were presumably among his readers, and who, crucially, whether they bought his books or not, were loyal theatregoers. Mantle spent fifty years as a critic of commercial theatre, starting in Denver in 1892, moving to Chicago in 1902, and taking up residence in New York in 1911, where he first wrote for the New...