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Miss Draper's grandfather was Charles A. Dana, famed editor and publisher of the New York Sun. Her parents, her father especially, was too correct and well-settled in social Philadelphia to approve of her eccentric plans to go upon the stage. But she somehow progressed from entertaining her friends with mimicries to playing to paying houses. She has never played to an audience that disliked her; and she has played in the six or seven languages which she speaks. She detests publicity and does not, in her quiet demeanor, display traces of the exhibitionism which inspires all acting. She writes her own monologues.
The King and Queen of England, on the recommendation of the Prince of Wales, invited her to perform at Windsor Castle two years ago. Last spring, Miss Draper was presented at the Court of St. James's, an honor no British actress has ever received, and an episode which added one more brief, unpredictable mis-en-scene to the abrupt series in which Ruth Draper's life, and all other lives, is told.
Back Seat Drivers is a farce in which two women try to manage their husbands' finances. They get involved in crockery and their husbands have to catch thieves. Spots of this are funny, in a modest way.
Cyrano de Bergerac's verses were bright, rousing, full of Gascon gallantries. His rapier was rapid. But his nose was freakishly long, disfiguring. Therefore he felt frustrated in his love affair with Roxanne, and Edmond Rostand's famed heroic comedy turns into tragedy. Cyrano has made theatrical history in the versions of Constant Coquelin and Richard Mansfield. In the. U. S., of late years, Walter Hampden has honored both himself and the role. On Christmas night he revived Cyrano, scored again. Ingeborg Torrup was a new, petite, luscious Roxanne.
That Hampden's Cyrano has become an institution in the U. S. theatre is due largely to the abilities of his art director, Claude Bragdon. Claude Bragdon's fame lies principally outside the theatre; largely in fact, it exists in the fourth dimension for it washe who translated Ouspensky's Tertium Organum and wrote, among other works, Four Dimensional Vistas. When Einstein came to the U. S., Bragdon was one of the first named as belonging to that hypothetical "ten" who understood the master's theory of relativity. Especially was Claude Bragdon interested in mathematical metaphysics as applied to esthetics, for by profession he is an architect. Among his buildings is the New York Central Railroad Station at Rochester, N. Y., in which town he lives.
Nine years ago, he began to arrange the scenery, lighting and costumes for Hampden's plays and he has done them all ever since. He began on Hamlet; in Cyrano he achieved his masterpiece, as Hampden achieves his. Claude Bragdon is now 62, twice-married, a theosophist, Buddhesque of countenance, a rare person.