Well, what can I say about Ying Lee? Except that I sat here in a 1912 theater, and that Ying Lee was therefore not a “Chinese” but a “Chinaman.” We knew that, because his eyes were taped into a slant, his skin had been yellowed, he wore black cloth slippers, and his pigtail reached to his waist. And in the moment we saw him up there, carelessly making the bed, the audience reacted not with an actual laugh—he wasn’t doing anything funny yet—but with a murmur hinting of anticipated laughter because . . . well, this was a Chinaman.
“Ying!” a woman’s voice called from offstage, and Ying looked up, his face going stubborn, not replying. He accidentally dropped a pillow, clumsily stepping on it, and got a ripple of laughter. Then in came Mrs. Fagin, the landlady, my program told me. “Why don’t you come when I call you?”
“Me make bed.”
“You know less about making a bed than a mule.”
“Me quit!” He folded his arms.
“Now?”
Ying thought about that. “By and by”—getting his laugh.
“Well, in the meantime go and straighten my room up.” And Ying left—singing what either was or was meant to be a high-pitched Chinese song, and we laughed again.
“Claire” walked on—this was her room—and I took up my program because she was truly lovely: Alice Martin. She began telling her trouble to Mrs. Fagin, and we learned she was married to and deserted by “The Greyhound,” a confidence man who’d treated her badly, though she still loved him. But I started to lose track of the plot because I’d begun listening less to their words than to the odd sound of their voices. And realized that, without microphones, their voices carried out to us oddly, absorbed instantly by our several hundred bodies. This curious deadened sound, flat and echoless, was strangely compelling, making the actual presence of the actors up there extraordinarily real.
I also sat waiting for witty Mizner lines, but wasn’t hearing any. Claire and Mrs. Fagin exited, Ying and McSherry came on, and we learned that McSherry was a reformed card shark, now a detective, in love with Claire, and so forth. “Mrs. Fagin upstair,” Ying said. “You wait.”
“Well, maybe you can tell me something,” McSherry said, and brought out a big sheet of red paper in such a way that we could see it was written in Chinese characters.
Ying glanced at it. “No sabby.”
“That’s too bad,” said McSherry. Then, suddenly and loudly, “Sim yup tong!”
Instantly Ying reacted, because it turned out that this was a command from his tong, never to be disobeyed. Immediately servile, terrified, Ying shouted “Ni ha limya!” or something like that, snatching the paper, turning to face us as he read it silently, head moving up and down the vertical columns.
“You sabby now?”
“Mebbee.”
McSherry pulled up his left sleeve to show a scar on his wrist. Ying Lee looked at it, consulted the red paper, looked back at the wrist, apparently checking the scar against a description of it. “This Chink’s from Missouri,” McSherry said, to the audience.
Wilson Mizner? The celebrated wit? I refused to think so. Looking at the red paper, McSherry said, “Looks like a bill for tearing up a shirt.” When McSherry asked where Claire’s husband was, Ying said, “He come by and by,” and McSherry said, “To a Chink ‘by and by’ means two minutes or forty years. Which do you mean?”
“He come yesterday. One o’clock.”
“What time the day before?”
“Seven weeks.”
Well, the audience liked it. And I was part of the audience, so I laughed with them. But . . . ?
Mrs. Fagin and McSherry advanced the plot: he was here to help Claire because he was in love with her himself. Then along came a line I’d read sarcastically referred to in the Times review. McSherry, speaking angrily to Claire’s husband, The Greyhound, said, “Any man that can’t go straight on his own, don’t do it for a woman after he’s got her!”
“Ain’t it the truth!” Mrs. Fagin exclaimed up there on the stage, and I sneaked a glance at the Jotta Girl, and then at the audience immediately around me. They sat smiling, enjoying the play, but not taking lines like that any more seriously than I did.
A couple of times in the same scene, when McSherry was affected by the powerful emotion of his love for Claire, he did something that surprised me. He’d turn away, and stand with his back to the audience, shoulders bowed—something I’d never before seen an actor do. An acting convention of the time, I suppose, to show emotion so strong the face must be averted. I’ve heard that a ballet dancer, working hard and sweating, will seize an instant when her back is momentarily to the audience to wipe sweat from her face with a lovely wrist movement, then fling her arm gracefully out to flick the sweat away. Maybe McSherry, I thought now, was up there, back to the audience, making funny faces.
As he and Mrs. Fagin finished, Ying came in with a broom. “Me make sweep?”
Mrs. F. stepped back in astonishment. “First time in his life he ever asked to work!” When McSherry and Mrs. Fagin left, Ying’s sweeping slowed till the broom was barely moving, no longer quite touching the floor, a Chinese Stepin Fetchit.
Act One pretty well laid out the plot: A group of con men and a woman were sailing to Europe in order to fleece a rich family aboard the ship. And I was wondering if maybe Wilson Mizner had personal knowledge of how that was done. I liked the gang’s names: The Greyhound, Whispering Alex, Deep Sea Kitty, and The Pale Face Kid, so called, I understood when he first walked out onto the stage, because his face was so red. “You’ll be in the way on this trip, Kid,” said Deep Sea Kitty.
“Why?”
“On a first-class ship people wear garments, eat with their forks, and change their clothes to sleep!”
“I could learn all that in a week!” said the Kid, and I laughed, and nodded—I thought that had the raffish Mizner touch. But mostly this play seemed to me as if it might have been laid out of an afternoon. Over drinks.
I’d been careful not to read the scene description in my program. I wanted the little surprise I got when the curtain rose, this time on Act Two, the deck of a ship, and it was fine.
There it all was: people reading in deck chairs; others leaning on the rail to stare off at the sea and painted backdrop of sky and clouds; a very real-looking lifeboat; a radio shack; even a couple playing that shipboard game where you toss rings. And when I glanced down at my program I saw that this was “The Hurricane Deck of H.M.S. Mauretania.” I’m one of those people who are fascinated by the great old ocean liners; who like to read about them, and stare at their pictures wondering what it had been like to sail on them. And of course the Mauretania was possibly the most loved of all the splendid old liners—was this really what the Mauretania looked like? I sat forward, studying the set, and—well, who could say? But this looked real, even the deck seemed like genuine ship’s planking.
The Times later published a layout of scenes from the play; these are a couple of them. The people aren’t overacting as much as their photographs may suggest; they’re posing for a slow camera, I think, holding an expression not too easy even for actors. Wearing caps and hats was okay for this audience; all men wore one or the other outdoors. This flag-holding bunch—a Mizner comic touch?—are superpatriot hicks from Lima, Ohio: they’re the rich family the crooks are about to meet with a forged letter of introduction.
Suddenly we all jumped: from the radio shack up there on the stage came a startling sound burst, a hissingly electric dit-dit. Dit-dit-dit! Dit-dit-dit-dit-dit! And we sat up and paid attention. Wireless messages at sea were new in this world, and this was a new and thrilling sound. The rapid, sparking dit-dit-dit stopped, all the passengers staring at the radio shack. And a moment later a man in ship’s uniform came out with a piece of paper. “Aerogram!” he called. “Aerogram for Foster Allen! Aerogram for Mr. Allen!” and off he went hunting for him.