If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American theatre, one speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical charity, for the New York theatre--so far as there is any taste in the American theatre--is the native theatre at its fullest flower. Persons insufficiently acquainted with the theatre have a fondness for controverting this, but the bookkeeping departments offer concrete testimony that, if good drama is supported at all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre, not in the so-called “road” theatre. The New York theatre supports an American playwright like Booth Tarkington when he does his best in “Clarence,” where the road theatre supports him only when he does his worst, as in “Mister Antonio.” The New York theatre, these same financial records prove, supports Shaw, O’Neill, Galsworthy, Bahr, and others of their kind, at least in sufficient degree to permit them to pay their way, where the theatre of Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh spells failure for them. Save it be played by an actor or actress of great popular favour, a first-rate piece of dramatic writing has to-day hardly a chance for success outside of New York. These other cities of America, though they are gradually reading better books and patronizing better music and finer musicians, are almost drama-deaf. “There is, in New York,” the experienced Mr. William A. Brady has said to me, “an audience of at least fifteen thousand for any really good play. That isn’t a large audience; it won’t turn the play into a profitable theatrical venture; but it is a damned sight larger audience than you’ll be able to find in any other American city.” Let the native sons of the cities thus cruelly maligned, before they emit their habitual bellows of protest, consider, once they fared forth from New York, the fate of nine-tenths of the first-rate plays produced in the American theatre without the hocus-pocus of fancy box-office “stars” during the last ten years.