FRENCH. PLAYS- WITH ADJUSTABLE ENDINGS.

Evening Post, Volume LXX, Issue 61, 9 September 1905, Page 15

FRENCH . PLAYS- WITH ADJUSTABLE ENDINGS.

Says a recent issue of the New York Evening Sitn:' I It has been whispered during recent seasons that the French dramatists/ who &c casting envious eyes oil the American market, were trying io modify the Gallic spirit' of their plays by a marked deference to American taste. This is a nation oi theatre-goers. Our royalties to the dramatists that please >us are larger than any other country pays. The French authors .lately have^ se~en themselves cut off' from all this profit our audiences either wilL, not or can not enjoy their intimate studies of French marital life. The task of pleasing both Paris and New York id difficult. Th<S Frenchmen are trying to do it by preparing their plays with two endings. In the version intended fbf American consumption the wicked dre, df course, properly punished, while the good are rewarded as their rectitude deserves. Wives are restored to their husbands aud not to other persons they jnay have preferfid. ThiS system 6f 'adjustable endings supplied by the author himself will undoubtedly work, better than the method formerly pursued by the adapter. It was the adapter's task in the past to convert into simple flirtation what may have been much* more serious intrigue. It was his functiob to sets that at the ctys& tif the play there was no spot of any kind on the characters supposed to jxjssess the sympathy of the audience. It was- through some such intermediary a 8 this that in the story of "Marguerite Gautier," wheri Henry James for the first tinle saw Dumas's play year* ago. in Boston, the two lovers were vaguely described as engaged; These subterfuges, never deceived any liufc the mdsfc irigefaiioiis I But proper respect wrs shown for the moralities. * It will be better to have the plays come straight from the original writers with their 1 two ending already made, onfe to serve for the sophisticated audieflcfis of the boulevards and the other adapted to our tastes and sympathies here in Hew York.