t can never compare with drama. There
is a considerable number of people who attend the opera because they
love it, but a much larger number attend because it is fashionable.
All the drama leagues and numberless organizations which are trying to
cultivate taste for good plays and to better the drama are on the wrong
track. It is not a cultivated, appreciative public that is needed. Let
those interested in drama learn a lesson from opera. Let them employ
their energies to make drama fashionable. When it becomes incumbent upon
society leaders to occupy stalls in the theater for a season, we shall
have an endowed theater and not until then.

THE DEUTSCHES KUENSTLERTHEATER

Readers of THE NEW DRAMA may be interested to hear that the enterprise
of the actors of the Brahm Company, which in the winter seemed
uncertain, is now secure. The Deutsches Kuenstlertheater was incorporated
on April 20, with a capital of 790,000 marks. Willy Grumwald is
really to be manager, Ernst Friedmann, business manager, and among the
associates are Tilla Durieux, Carl Forest, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hilde
Herterich, Else Lehmann, Emil Lessing (Brahm's stage manager), Theodor
Loos, Hans Marr, Emanuel Reicher, Rudolf Rittner (who declares, however,
that he is to return to the theater only as associate, artistic adviser,
and stage manager, and that he still has no intention of ever
acting again; since his blending of blazing passion with austere
self-discipline is all too rare, let us hope he will change his mind),
Oscar Sauer, Mathilde Sussin (whose sublime Deaconess in 'When We
Dead Awake' so fully meets Ibsen's requirement of the actor of this
character: complete self-effacement until the close, and then tragic
acting of the highest order; Alfred Kerr, whose words--don't you
think?--no other living critic can equal, has called her 'eine der
Schattengestalten dieses groessten Theaters der Unscheinbarkeit, der
Seele'), and Paul Wegener. The Deutsches Kuenstlertheater is still
undecided whether to build a theater or to lease one; it will enter into
active being in July, 1914, when Otto Brahm will pass, alas, from the
active service of the theater, which he has served as has no other man.

JAMES PLATT WHITE.

THE 'SLAM'

A characteristic feature of modern newspaper criticism is the 'slam.'
The fundamental principles upon which 'slams' are based are as follows:
The writer of a 'slam' ought to be quite young, not long out of college.
That is the on