Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura | Page 4

MIZZOURA
A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS By AUGUSTUS THOMAS
REVISED 1916 BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS

PREFACE.
This preface is one of a number[1] trying to show, each for its
particular play, the manner of the play's conception, whether starting
from a theme, a character, or a situation; the difficulty of the start and
the larger problems of the story's development, together with the ways
considered and chosen to answer them. It has been thought that such
accounts might be of interest, and, in some instances, perhaps, helpful
to others beginning on the same kind of work.

In the spring of 1891, Mr. Nat Goodwin was one of the most popular
and successful, as well as one of the most skilful, of American actors.
He had played lively and slight farces almost exclusively; but, having
the ability for serious work as well, he was ambitious to try it. In a
comedy by Brander Matthews and George H. Jessop, called "A Gold
Mine," he had given one or two dramatic scenes most convincingly;
and one sentimental soliloquy with a rose in exquisite tenderness. In
person he is under the average height[2]; and then, was slight, graceful,
and with a face capable of conveying the subtlest shades of feeling. The
forehead was ample; the eyes were large and blue, clear and steady.
The nose was mildly Roman; the hair was the colour of new hay. His
voice was rich and modulated. These points are reported because they
helped form the equipment of the "star," who wanted a serious play in
which he should be the hero. The order was without other conditions;
the play might be of any period and of any land.
My own ignorance fixed certain limitations. At that time I had
acquaintance with no other countries than the United States and Canada.
These I knew fairly well. I had travelled them with one-night theatrical
companies; and also in newspaper assignments; and over restricted
districts I had worked in the employment of a railroad company. I
didn't care to write from books; so my Goodwin hero was to be
perforce an American. It seemed best to make him an American of
1891. Other times and places were excluded and dismissed from mind.
Now, a blond hero five feet seven inches tall and weighing under one
hundred and fifty-pounds--a Roman nose, and a steady, steel blue gaze!
I stood the Goodwin photograph on my table and looked at it until it
talked to me. The slight physique couldn't explain the solid confidence
of that look except there was behind it a gun. We were doing more man
to man shooting in the country then than now; and my Western
friendships made me more tolerant of the gun than some others were.
Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from
Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to
fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from any
conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of gunpackers:
the authorized and the others. I concluded that there would be less
trouble, less "lost motion"--that was a phrase learned, and an idea
applied in the old-fashioned composing-room--less lost motion, in

portraying a lawful gun toter than in justifying an outlaw; and the
Goodwin part was therefore to be either a soldier or a sheriff. I have
said that he was thin, graceful--and he was, but he wasn't particularly
erect. He was especially free from any suggestion of "setting-up:"
sheriff was the way of least resistance.
My hero was a sheriff. You see how that clears the atmosphere. When
you must, or may, write for a "star," it is a big start to have the
character agreeably and definitely chosen.
There must be love interest, of course.
A sheriff would presumably be a bit of the rough diamond; contrast
wherein "lieth love's delight" prompted a girl apparently of a finer
strain than himself; and conflict necessitated a rival. The girl should be
delicate and educated, the rival should be attractive but unworthy; and
to make him doubly opposed to Goodwin I decided to have him an
outlaw--someone whom it would be the sheriff's duty and
business--business used in the stage sense--to arrest.
Four or five years before the Goodwin contract, I had been one of the
_Post-Dispatch_ reporters on the "Jim Cummings" express robbery.
That celebrated and picturesque case was of a man who presented to an
express messenger at the side door of his express car, just as the train
was pulling from the St. Louis station, a forged order to carry the bearer,
dead-head, to a certain distant point on the run. The messenger helped
the dead-head into his car, and chummed with him, until about an hour
later, when, as he was on his