JEFF, A PLAY, 'SUGGESTED BY STEPHEN LEACOCK'

Robert G. Lawrence

Few readers of Leacock's prose will now immediately associate him with a four act play called Jeff. To my knowledge, it has never been published, but it is a part of Canadian literary and theatre history, and provides a few mysteries.

During the first half of 1916 the New York Dramatic Mirror announced intermittently that The Barber of Mariposa would be the next stage vehicle for Cyril Maude, a notable English actor (1862-1951) who toured in Canada five times, and that the play was based on Stephen Leacock's recent (1912) work of fiction Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. By early autumn of 1916 the new drama by Michael Morton had been renamed Jeff.

Cyril Maude had toured in the U.S.A. and Canada throughout the 1915-16 season for the third time with the popular Grumpy. On 2 October 1916, he opened the succeeding season with his new play Jeff in Syracuse, N.Y.; three days later he took it to Buffalo (5-7 October). These performances were followed by a week in Toronto (9-14 October) and a week in Montreal (16-21 October). Maude's intention was clearly to give Jeff a series of try-out performances within a limited circuit before taking it to New York City (Saturday Night, 14 October 1916, p 6) for what he no doubt hoped would be a long run.

Jeff, however, closed in Montreal on 21 October, never, as far as I have been able to ascertain, to appear on a stage again. The early demise of the play is puzzling: Syracuse received it well; Buffalo provided Jeff with large, enthusiastic audiences (N.Y. Dramatic Mirror, 14 October 1916); Toronto gave the play 'capacity business' (N. Y. Dramatic Mirror, 28 October 1916); and in the Montreal Daily Star (17 October 1916) Samuel Morgan-Powell referred to 'a large audience' on the opening night.

Furthermore, by October 1916 the name of Cyril Maude was well known in all four cities in which Jeff was performed. The name of Stephen Leacock, prominent in all of the promotional material and advertisements for Jeff, was certainly familiar in Toronto and Montreal. He was a popular lecturer and author, having by this date published seven books.¹

There is no evidence in biographies or bibliographies of Leacock that he collaborated in any way with Michael Morton in the writing of Jeff, or even that he saw the play (Morton was the author of a few now-forgotten plays and collaborator in or adaptor of several others); yet Leacock already had some interest in the theatre. He was a regular theatregoer and arranged private theatricals in his Montreal home and at Old Brewery Bay, Orillia. In 1915 he encouraged Basil Macdonald Hastings to write and produce the play Q, which had appeared as a story in Nonsense Novels. Q was performed in London² and published by Samuel French in 1915.

Why, then, did Jeff fail on stage so quickly, when all the circumstances, indicated above, promised well for it? The reviews which the play received are, of course, revealing, but before commenting on them, I shall summarize the plot of Jeff, as reconstructed from promotional literature and reviews.

At the centre of the play is, naturally, Jefferson Thorpe, the insignificant barber of Mariposa, aged sixty. He is a Cockney, although Sunshine Sketches gives no hint that Thorpe had such a background; it is plausible to assume that Jeff became a Cockney for the benefit of Cyril Maude, who had been the star of many English comedies. The essential action of the play follows that of 'The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe,' the second chapter of Leacock's book: Jefferson's acquisition of a fortune from the sale of Ontario mining stock, his investment in Cuban lands, and his loss of his own and other people's money as the result of fraudulent stock promotion in New York. In the play Jeff has a housekeeper, substituted for the wife ('The Woman') whom Leacock had provided for the barber, but in both versions Jeff has a beautiful daughter Myra.

Near the climax of the play, the action diverges significantly from that of Leacock's prose fiction. The young bank clerk (Peter Pupkin in Sunshine Sketches) is in love with Myra Thorpe - readers of Leacock will remember that Pupkin's devotion to Zena Pepperleigh is central to three chapters. In order to share in the stock market profits, Morton's Peter Parsons attempts at night to 'borrow' money from his bank, but Jeff knocks him out near the vault. The next day three ineffectual detectives (Leacock needed only two) came from the city in a vain attempt to capture the bank robber who apparently hit the clerk over the head and escaped before the arrival of the caretaker. The play ends satisfactorily for Peter Parsons, with the implication that he and Myra will marry and live happily ever after.³

The première of Jeff, at the Empire Theater, Syracuse, N.Y., on Monday, 2 October 1916, was reviewed the next day with much enthusiasm in the Post Standard (p5). The reporter acknowledged repeatedly that Jeff was not quite as good as Grumpy, but he tentatively predicted success for Maude's new play. He observed that neither Grumpy nor Jeff could survive without the skilful acting and stage magnetism of Cyril Maude. He 'deserves the highest praise not only for endeavoring to give us a new character, but for putting all his talent, as he has done, into it.'

Jeff next appeared at the Star Theater, Buffalo, 5 -7 October 1916. The reviewer for the Buffalo Evening News (6 October 1916, p13) was even more enthusiastic about the play than his Syracuse counterpart. The Buffalo critic found Jeff 'clever,' with more body than Grumpy and a cast 'of perfect balance,' climaxed by Mr. Maude's 'sparkling genius.' The Buffalo Express also sent a representative to see Jeff (6 October 1916, p 5), but the perusal of his report cannot have given the cast much pleasure: 'The comedy is loosely constructed and very ragged in spots. The author touches some really dramatic moments in the course of the play, but loses endless opportunities and fails to develop many of the characters ... ; he allows the action to drag, but through all and over all Jeff is illuminated by the fine and polished art of Mr. Maude.' (So much for critical unanimity.)

By Monday, 9 October 1916, Jeff was in Canada. In Toronto the only newspaper to review the play was the Mail and Empire.⁴ The anonymous writer commended Cyril Maude's convincing performance as the ineffectual and naive 'little Cockney barber,' but the reviewer had much criticism of the play itself, partly because to him the other characters were New England 'types' rather than believable residents of Ontario and partly because after a good first act Jeff deteriorated into 'the broadest sort of farce.'

A retrospective comment on Jeff, presumably by the same reviewer, appeared in the Mail and Empire on Saturday, 14 October 1916, p 19, as the week's run in Toronto concluded; here he returned to his criticism of the American qualities of the play - the characters apparently said, 'Gosh dern' and 'ice cream sody,' and the lawyers dressed like 'down-at-heel Kentucky colonels' - created by a dramatist with no first-hand knowledge of Canada; however, the reviewer passed on some of the responsibility for an unsatisfactory play to Stephen Leacock. A reference to 'that frail little volume' hints that by 1916 Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town had not yet become the revered classic that it is now. The reviewer felt that, although Leacock had some skill in caricature and hyperbole, he was not a reliable guide for Michael Morton when the Englishman attempted to delineate Canadian characters.

Hector Charlesworth in Saturday Night, (14 October 1916, p6), also commented on the American tone of the play; he liked Jeff, acknowledging that the story line was weak and 'frankly episodical.' He enjoyed the first act the least of the four. He commended Maude's performance: 'His humour and pathos are unrestrained and natural.' Amongst the other actors, only Muriel Martin-Harvey (Myra Thorpe) earned more than a brief phrase: '... Charming and piquant, though it would be flattering our common school system to say that it gives the village maidens of Ontario a deportment and diction so refined as hers.'

In Montreal, Samuel Morgan-Powell also praised Cyril Maude's skill as a comic actor; as well, this reviewer lauded the other actors, but condemned 'the poor comedy' as being weak structurally and artificial in tone. With seeming prescience, he observed, '... it is devoid of those qualities without which no comedy can live - long.' ⁵ The Montreal Gazette (17 October 1916) noted 'the absence of an interesting and coherent plot,' but said that to the play Mr. Maude had 'devoted all the resources of his skill as a delineator of character.' ⁶

After Jeff closed in Montreal, four days subsequent to the publication of Morgan-Powell's words quoted above, Maude returned to New York, and opened in The Basker on 30 October 1916. It was a new play to Maude, although it had been a George Alexander success in London in 1915. The Basker was a rather feeble play, and it too folded soon (2 December 1916), forcing Maude to revive Grumpy and to go on tour in the U.S.A.

The actor later recalled Jeff with some chagrin: 'I took a good deal of trouble over it, but it turned out absolutely hopeless. I played an old Canadian barber in it, and I expect I was very bad. It was a sort of village play. Nobody cared for it ....' ⁷

This should be the end of my account of Jeff, but there is an interesting footnote and a mystery. Within a year, Stephen Leacock wrote a little known play, Sunshine in Mariposa, his own adaptation of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Leacock's play was soon published in Maclean's,⁸ but no reference to it appears in Ralph Curry,⁹ David Legate,¹⁰ or Robertson Davies,¹¹ and I can find no trace of a stage performance.

If a reader comes to Sunshine in Mariposa already familiar with Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, he will be disappointed. Even if one did not know the prose version of the story, Leacock's four-act play would seem painfully melodramatic. It is quite lacking in the charm, innocence, and 'sunshine' of the fiction, and has a cynicism, a sharpness of tone that comes closer to echoing Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1915) than Sunshine Sketches.

Sunshine in Mariposa centres on Jefferson Thorpe's naive mining speculations, with the ominous presence of Harstone and Slyde, two New York con men who come very close to making away with most of Jeff's fortune. In the drama Jeff has actually received $112,000 from his stock in Corona jewel; one half of this he has invested in Cuban lands, and the other half he has sentimentally put in trust to build a home for destitute children in memory of his late wife.

A reader of Sunshine in Mariposa learns late in the play that Peter Pupkin was truly a hero, thanks to his having interrupted the robbers, Harstone and Slyde, in the cellar of his bank and getting knocked unconscious for his trouble. The cash which Jeff and his fellow townsmen were about to invest in Cuban lands was temporarily in the basement safe and had, of course, disappeared with Harstone and Slyde. In the last minutes of the final act Andy, the man of all work, rushes in to recount the fate of the robbers: they were accidentally run down on the trestle bridge by the fast freight train on which they had hoped to escape! (It failed to stop, as scheduled, to replenish its water tanks.) The bank, recognizing Peter's bravery, gives him a raise, enabling him to marry his fiancée, Myra Thorpe.

By now a reader will recognize some similarities between the plots of Morton's Jeff and Leacock's Sunshine in Mariposa. With an interest in dramatic economy, both playwrights ignored Zena Pepperleigh, attached Peter to Myra, and eliminated Martha, Mrs. Jefferson Thorpe.

Was Leacock's revised view of Mariposa 'suggested by Michael Morton'? Was Leacock, alert to the failure of Jeff in October 1916, trying to prove, egotistically, in the spring of 1917 that he could do the same thing better? I do not now the answers to these puzzling questions. I know nothing about Leacock's relationship with Jeff; in 1916 and 1917 he was certainly in Montreal, busy teaching and writing, and he was on friendly terms with Cyril Maude in London in 1921.¹² Sunshine in Mariposa was apparently never produced, although one would expect Leacock to have been anxious to see it performed.

A further footnote to Jeff has its own confusions. The Dramatic Mirror for 2 April 1921, p577, carried the brief announcement that this play, 'tried out several years ago by Cyril Maude,' was in rehearsal in New York. The producer was Sam H. Harris and the star Robert McWade. The Billboard for 26 March 1921, had a similar, briefer note, but a later issue, 2 April 1921, of this journal was more valuable. Here (p23) I learned that the same people were rehearsing 'Michael Morton's new comedy The Talkin' Shop, inspired by Leacock's Sunshine Sketches.' This play was scheduled to open at the Apollo Theater, Atlantic City, N.J., on 11 April 1921. (The content of a paragraph in The Dramatic Mirror for 16 April 1921, p654, is similar.)

The review of The Talkin' Shop in The Billboard, 23 April 1921, was disappointingly brief. (The Dramatic Mirror did not review the play.) The Talkin' Shop appears to have been a rewriting of Jeff, because the reviewer referred to 'the bunco game, a country purchaser of wild-cat securities, and the honest boy who robs a bank ....' His distaste for the play is reinforced by its short life. By 16 May 1921, Sam Harris had replaced The Talkin' Shop at the Apollo with Zizi.

The only subsequent dramatization of Sunshine Sketches known to me is a two-act musical comedy Sunshine Town by Mavor Moore, first performed in 1954 and occasionally subsequently.¹³ It is a sentimental, much condensed retelling of the Leacock story, with several pleasant, clever songs. There is a strong emphasis, with Leacockian cynicism, on the Peter-Zena romance, the whirlwind fundraising campaign, the burning of the church, the sinking of the Mariposa Belle, and the great election. I regret Mavor Moore's omission of Jefferson Thorpe's stock speculations, and I cannot approve of one of Mr. Moore's inventions: Jeff's complicity, with Josh Smith, in setting the fire which destroyed the church.

The paragraphs above may leave one wondering why the stage versions of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town have had such a sad history. The earliest dramatization (Jeff) was created by a minor English playwright, but put on stage by a distinguished English actor. Despite a few kind words from American and Canadian theatre critics, it disappeared within three weeks. In slightly different guise it later had another three-week life. Surprisingly, Stephen Leacock himself proved to be insufficiently skilled as a dramatist to translate a very successful story from one medium to another. Mavor Moore's unpublished musical version of Sunshine Sketches is of much interest, but the condensation of several major episodes, the omission of Myra Thorpe, and the diminution of the role of Jeff make this adaptation not wholly true to Leacock's intention. Sunshine Sketches cannot easily be adapted for the stage, but it is strange that Jeff and his fellow townsmen and women have had to wait so many years for a television presentation.

Notes

JEFF, A PLAY, 'SUGGESTED BY STEPHEN LEACOCK'

Robert G. Lawrence

1 Elements of Political Science (1906), Literary Lapses (1910), Nonsense Novels
(1911), Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Behind the Beyond (1913), Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), and Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
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2 DAVID LEGATE, Stephen Leacock Toronto, 1970, p82
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3 The review of Jeff in the Buffalo Evening News, 6 October 1916, p13, included a cast list: Thorpe, Cyril Maude; Joseph Smith, the hotel-keeper, Eugene O'Rourke; Peter Parsons, John Junior; Gillis, the bank caretaker, Martin Mann; Tony Weston, the Cuban, Claus Bogel; Lawyer McCartney, Charles Stedman; Henry Mullins, the bank manager, James Kearney; Sam Hurrcomb, the swindler, Manart Kippen; Jim Elliott, the druggist, Frank Andrews; Johnson, the billposter, John Beck; Ned Glover, the hardware man, Ben S. Mears; Andy, the hanger-on, Ross Birchett; Detective Masson, J. Fred Holloway; First detective, Philip Sanford; Second detective, Harry Hammill; Myra Thorpe, Muriel Martin-Harvey; Toppie, Myra's chum, Betty Sorel; Mrs. Simms, Jeff's housekeeper, Jennie Weathersby. All of these actors were American except Mr. Maude and Miss Martin-Harvey.
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4 There appears to have been some kind of temporary war between the Toronto newspapers and the major Toronto theatres after 30 September 1916. For varying periods of time the newspapers carried no advertisements, promotional material nor reviews for the Grand Opera House (where Jeff appeared), the Royal Alexandra Theatre, and a few other houses. Saturday Night continued to include the usual theatrical material, and the Mail and Empire did review Jeff (10 October 1916), although it was not advertising the play.
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5 Montreal Daily Star, 7 October 1916, p 13
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6 The Reference Department, McLennan Library, McGill University, provided me with a photocopy of this review.
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7 CYRIL MAUDE, Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude London, 1927, p276
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8 Maclean's, May, June, July, 1917
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9 CURRY, Stephen Leacock Garden City, N.Y., 1959
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10 Op cit
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11 DAVIES, Stephen Leacock Toronto, 1970
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12 CURRY, p154
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13 Sunshine Town has never been published. The author kindly loaned me a typescript of the play.
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