be feared that "stars" will continue to seek the stage center and crowd
others of the cast out of the right focus, to say nothing of distorting
the work of the dramatist, under the goad of megalomania, so long as a
goodly number of unintelligent spectators egg him on. His favorite line
of poetry will be that of Wordsworth:

"Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky." It is to help the
personnel of such an audience that our theater-goer needs his training.

A general realization of all this will definitely affect one's theater
habit and make for the good of all that concerns the art of the
playhouse. It will lead the properly prepared person to see a good play
competently done, but with no supreme or far-famed actor in the company,
in preference to a foolish play, or worse, carried by a "star"; or a
play negligible as art or hopelessly _passe_ as art or interpretation
of life for which an all-star cast has been provided, as if to take the
eye of the spectator off the weaknesses of the drama. Often a standard
play revived by one of these hastily gathered companies of noted players
resolves itself into an interest in individual performances which must
lack that organic unity which comes of longer association. The
opportunity afforded to get a true idea of the play is made quite
secondary, and sometimes entirely lost sight of.

Nor will the trained observer in the theater be cheated by the dollar
mark in his theatrical entertainment. He will come to feel that an
adequate stock company, playing the best plays of the day, may afford
him more of drama culture for an expenditure of fifty cents for an
excellent seat than will some second-rate traveling company which
presents a drama that is a little more recent but far less worthy, to
see which the charge is three or four times that modest sum. All over
the land to-day nominally cultivated folk will turn scornfully away from
a fifty-cent show, as they call it, only because it is cheap in the
literal sense, whereas the high-priced offering is cheap in every other
sense but the cost of the seat. Such people overlook the nature of the
play presented, the playwright's reputation, and the quality of the
performance; incapable of judging by the real tests, they stand
confessed as vulgarians and ignoramuses of art. We shall not have
intelligent audiences in American theaters, speaking by and large, until
theater-goers learn to judge dramatic wares by some other test than wh