“Time and again amateurs attain simplicity because they do not suspect intricacy, and truth because they see it and embody it in their acting with no veils of habit, method or precedent. Given histrionic instinct, aptitude and observation, they act with ease, freedom and variety, and with full self-surrender to their parts. If the means are not the professional means they do their office which is to bring the personages to life in the terms of the play. Acting for themselves and in their own way, they are not weighted with self-consciousness, tradition or imitative effort.” The word self-consciousness is the key-note. “Drop self-consciousness and get under the skin of the character you portray” might be considered the theory of amateur acting. Occasionally efforts have been made at The Playhouse to select a stage director, but as each participant takes advice and direction in inverse ratio to the firmness with which he is able to maintain his own views the plan has not proved effective. Our composite results are obtained by a process of mutual suggestion and recrimination, and if these simple means fail it is never from any shyness on the part of a fellow-actor in expressing an honest opinion. There are two rules posted in the Green Room: KEEP YOUR TEMPER AND RETURN YOUR MANUSCRIPTS. The second is imperative, the first variable in application. In selecting plays we have departed radically from the amateur tradition of resuscitating “plays with a punch,” which have fared well in the hands of professionals. In the established “tricks of the trade” of course the amateur cannot compete with the professional. This is the true significance of the well-known Green Room hoot that “The worst professional is better than the best amateur.” We generally try to give our audiences something they have not heard before, and seek plays in which the expressed word, the mental attitude and the interplay of character are of more importance than the physical action. Here, if anywhere, although such plays may seem difficult, lies the amateur’s opportunity. So we are not afraid of plays with little action and much talk, for is not the most intense drama of all, the drama of the soul, the struggle between mind and mind, heart and heart? There lies all the pain, the joy, the perplexity of life. It is in talk, low and intense, gay and railing, bitter and despairing, as the case may be, that we moderns carry on our drama of life, the foundation for the drama of the stage. MARY ALDIS. _Lake Forest, Illinois. July, 1915._ MRS. PAT AND THE LAW _Played for the first time on September 14, 1913, by Mr. BENJAMIN CARPENTER, Mrs. ARTHUR ALDIS, Miss POLLY CHASE, Miss ISABEL MCBIRNEY, and Mr. CHAS. ATKINSON._ MRS. PAT AND THE LAW. CHARACTERS: