He has spent whole nights alone in the theatre auditorium
with his electrician, "feeling" for the "siesta" somnolence which carried
his audience instantly into the Spanish heat of old California, in "The
Rose of the Rancho;" and the moving scenery which took the onlooker from
the foot-hills of the Sierras to the cabin of "The Girl of the Golden
West" was a "trick" well worth the experiment.

Thus, no manager is more ingenious, more resourceful than David Belasco.
But his care for detail is often a danger; he does not know fully the
value of elimination; the eye of the observer is often worried by the
multiplicity of detail, where reticence would have been more quickly
effective. This is the Oriental in Belasco. His is a strange blend of
realism and decorativeness.

"A young man came to me once," he said to me, "with the manuscript of a
new play, which had possibilities in it. But after I had talked with him
awhile, I found him preaching the doctrines of the 'new' art. So I said to
him, 'My dear sir, here is your manuscript. The first scene calls for a
tenement-house set. How would you mount it?'"

He smiled, maybe at the recollection of Gordon Craig's statements that
"actuality, accuracy of detail, are useless on the stage," and that "all
is a matter of proportion and nothing to do with actuality."

"I felt," Mr. Belasco continued, "that the young man would find difficulty
in reconciling the nebulous perspectives of Mr. Craig with the squalor of
a city block. I said to him, 'I have been producing for many years, and I
have mounted various plays calling for differing atmospheres. I don't want
to destroy your ideals regarding the 'new art', but I want you to realize
that a manager has to conform his taste to the material he has in hand. I
consider that one of the most truthful sets I have ever had on the stage
was the one for the second act of Eugene Walter's 'The Easiest Way'. A
boarding-house room on the top floor cannot be treated in any other way
than as a boarding-house room. And should I take liberties with what we
know for a fact exists in New York, on Seventh Avenue, just off Broadway,
then I am a bad producer and do not know my business. I do not say there
is no suggestion in realism; it is unwise to clutter the stage with
needless detail. But we cannot idealize a little sordid ice-box where a
working girl keeps her miserable supper; we cannot symbolize a broken jug
standing in a wash-basin of loud design. Thos