Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1874 — Mark Twain’s New Play. [ARTICLE]

Mark Twain’s New Play.

A dramatization by Mark Twain of his latest work, “ The Gilded Age,” was produced in the Park Theater, New York, a few evenings ago. At the close of the performance Mark appeared in response to a call and spoke as follows: “ I thank you for the compliment of this call, and I will take Advantage of it to say that I have written this piece in such a way that the jury can bring in a verdict of guilty or not guilty, just as they happen to feel about it. I have done this for this reason: If a play carries its best lesson by teaching what ought to be done in such a case, but is not done in real life, then the righteous verdict of guilty should appear; but if the best lesson may be conveyed by holding up the mirror and showing what is done every day in such a case, but ought not to be aone, then the satirical verdict of not guilty should appear. I don’t know which is best, strict truth and satire or a nice moral lesson void of both. So I leave my jury free to decide. “I am killing only one man in this tragedy now, and that is bad, for nothing helps out a play like bloodshed. But in a few days I propose to introduce the small-pox into the last act. And if that don’t work I shall close with a general massacre. I threw all my strength into the character of Col. Sellers, hoping to make it a very strong tragedy part, and pathetic. I think this gentleman tries hard to play it right, and make it majestic and pathetic; but his face is against him. And his clothes! I don’t think anybody can make a tragedy effect in that kind of clothes. But I suppose he thinks they are impressive. He is from one of the Indian reservations. Oh! I can see that-he tries hard to make it solemn and awful and heroic, but, really, sometimes he almost makes me laugh. I meant that turnip dinner to be pathetic for how more forcibly could you represent poverty and misery and suffering than by such a dinner, and of course if anything would bring tears to people’s eyes that would; but this man eats those turnips as if they were the bread of life, and so of course the pathos is knocked clear out of the thing. But I think he will learn. He has an absorbing ambition to become a very great tragedian. “ I hope you will overlook the faults in this play, because I have never written a play before, and if I am treated right maybe I won’t offend again. I wanted to have some fine situations and spectacular effects in this piece, but I wasinterfered with. I wanted to have a volcano in a state of eruption, with fire and smoke and earthquakes, and a great tossing river of blood-red lava flowing down the mountain side, and have the hero of this piece come booming down that red-hot river in a cast-iron canoe; but the manager wouldn’t hear of it; he said there wasn’t any volcano in Missouri—as if I am responsible for Missouri’s poverty. And then he said that by the laws of nature the hero would burn up; his cast-iron canoe wouldn’t protect him. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘put him in a patent fire-proof safe and let him slide —all the more thrilling—and paint on it, “ This safe is from Herring’s establishment,” same as you would on a piano, and you can pay the whole expense of the volcano just on the advertisement; but the manager objected, though he said heaps of pretty things— among others that I was an ass—and so I had to let the volcano go.”