Show BILL XYES FARCE Collaborating with anl Potter Flayivrltlne la Prisons Bill Nye Is going to try again to utilize his humor in a farce His first attempt was an utter failure He talked talk-ed the other day about the second which has taken the form of A Stag Party and is in rehearsal for early production It Is a collaboration with Paul Potter lometlmes I fancy said Mr Nye that Potter looks upon humor as a sort of literary varnish that can be applied with a brush whenever and wherever it may be deemed necessary neces-sary I know he has a pleasant habit of handing me the manuscript of a scene and saying Here old man just put a littel repartee in that will you Sometimes I have fancied from his manner that he expected me to do it while he waited just as If he were having hav-ing his hat blocked I have found out already that there is a great deal of difference between a joke that is intended in-tended for the stage and one that is intended for publication In a magazine or newspaper In the theater you have no time to roll a good bit of humor under your tongue or to hear it over again whereas if you come across something funny in a book you can go back and read it over again and study Us subtleties and enjoy it at your lies ure Dr Holmes whose humor by the way was of the kind that will bear the closest of study said that a lecture was never thoroughly successful until it had been delivered about 100 times and had been shorn of all the things that the man who wrote the lecture and delivered de-livered It considered clever and enriched en-riched with all the cheap and obvious jokes that he could pick up in the course of his travels Well I have conscientiously tried to put some original jokes into my work although It has been a sore temptation to get even with the farce comedies and comic operas which have been using us-ing my stuff for the last ten or fifteen years Potter and I have worked together to-gether very harmoniously although we have been separated from one another during the period of our collaboration by a great many hundred miles of space He does the trunk and branches j of the dramatic tree and I put on the foliage You must really see Potter and get some of his ideas on dramatic construction He claims that everyman every-man can become his own dramatist if 1 he will only study the Potter rules of Instruction I must say too that he Is always willing to let other people profit by his experience and his latest scheme is to teach in Cooper union What do you mean by that Well he has a very praiseworthy and charitable plan for helping the citys poor A great many intelligent young men are either out of employment employ-ment or else working for very meager wages and Potter purposes to open a class at the night school and teach them the trade of play writing He tells me that at the end of the winter he will have several dozen strong and healthy young men hard at work writing writ-Ing plays for Palmer and the Froh mans and making excellent wages and that in the course of a few years there will be a chair of dramatic instruction in-struction in every trade school In the land Now I like his idea very much but there is one thing that fills me with grave apprehension I am afraid that in the course of time playwrit tog will be introduced Into the prisons and that managers in need of new comedies com-edies or farces will go to the prison contractors for them and they will send up to Sing Sing where they can be made more cheaply than by workmen work-men who go free and obliged to pay board bills As a humorist I have never suffered from this sort of competition com-petition and I hope I shall not be If I become a dramatist New York Sun |