REPERTOIRE 
 
 AMERICAN TOUR 
 SEASON 1902-3 
 
 V. LIEBLERg? CO. MANAGERS 
 
 ISSUED BY 
 
 MEYER BROTHERS & CO 
 
 PUBLISHERS OF 
 
 “THE THEATRE” 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
ELEONORA DUSE. 
 
_ IGNORA ELEONORA DUSE 
 
 ^BEYOND QUESTION OR DISPUTE 
 Hthe FOREMOST ACTRESS 
 m IN THE WORLD JK JS& 
 
 Was born in Vigevano, Italy, a little village on the Lom- 
 bardy-Piedmont frontier. Her parents were in very humble 
 1/1V circumstances, the meagre salary obtained by the father as a 
 oJJ strolling player scarcely providing the family with the bare 
 ' necessities of life. 
 
 The child Eleonora early gave indication of preternatural histri¬ 
 onic talent, a talent that her grandfather, Luigi Duse, then manager 
 of the Garibaldi Theatre at Padua, was quick to discover, for on 
 the occasion of a brief visit to the village home he casually remarked 
 to Eleonora’s parents, “Take good care of that child, she may make 
 you rich some day.” This remark fell upon willing ears, and, at the 
 age of twelve, the tiny heir to future greatness accompanied the father 
 on one of his tours, playing a small part in the company with which 
 he was engaged. At fourteen she was given leading roles, and two 
 years later she was summoned to Verona to play Juliet before a large 
 open-air assemblage, on a festal occasion of national significance. 
 The rendition was marvelous in its strength, and the morning found 
 the village maiden famous, for all Italy knew of her achievement. 
 
 Offers of engagements of an extraordinary character flowed in 
 upon her, and in a brief period of time we find her installed in the 
 great Florentine Theatre at Naples, a theatre in which Salvini, Ristori, 
 and Alberti had won their greatest triumphs. The vast auditorium 
 was thronged with the culture, wealth, and elegance of the great city, 
 who accepted the Duse’s performance as surpassing anything they had 
 witnessed in a decade. This was the birth of her real fame—a 
 fame that has never since waned, not for a single day. 
 
 Following the conquest of Italy, playing brief engagements in 
 rapid succession in all the great cities, she became filled with the 
 audacity of victory, and being denied recognition at the great 
 Dramatic Festival in Vienna, for which extraordinary preparations 
 had been made by the Princesse de Metternich, she leased the Karl 
 
Theatre for her own use and took the Austrian capital by storm ; and before the 
 incident had closed Signora Duse’s performance was substantially the only dramatic 
 festival in Vienna. All the world knows of her superb triumph in Paris, despite 
 the organized effort to compass her extinction, and how she afterwards drove through 
 Berlin and London with the artistic world chained to her chariot wheels. 
 
 This is Signora Duse’s third visit to America, but never before was she the 
 Duse of to-day, for to-day sees her in perfect physical health, and at the very pin¬ 
 nacle of her career, and hence capable of exerting her powers to the utmost, and 
 with an absolute knowledge that when thus exerted no other artist living can pro¬ 
 duce such results. To the ordinary artist such a conviction, whether justified or 
 not, would doubtless be a very consoling one. In the mental domain of Eleonora 
 Duse they have no abiding place. She exerts herself in a role because she lives the 
 part, and she could not avoid throwing her whole soul into it if she tried, no more 
 than she could avoid being a great actress if she tried. She is in love with those 
 D’Annunzio roles she has included in her American repertoire, and those who see 
 Signora Duse in any one of them will not go away dissatisfied. 
 
 Th ose who are familiar with the weird and yet marvelously beautiful tales 
 which D’Annunzio has written, and who know and appreciate the genius and grace 
 of the gifted Italian, will have no difficulty in comprehending just why she should 
 desire the D’Annunzio brain to conceive, and the D’Annunzio hand to limn, for 
 stage portraiture, the soulful characters of which his pen has so pathetically told. 
 Who else can bring to the thrilling stage spectacles the atmospheric environment in 
 which they can alone, and should alone, live ? Do you know the sad yet strangely 
 beautiful story of the “ Dead City,” the City of Pelopides, amid the dead bones of 
 which the five persons who figure in the play dig and delve, and ponder, and live 
 among the people who inhabited it in the centuries agone ? Who but a D’Annun¬ 
 zio could properly put upon the stage the strange scenes his own visions have cre¬ 
 ated ? Who but he could put into the mouths of these people dialogue befitting ? 
 Who else could conceive, and carry to conclusion, a plot so mystifying and so 
 enthralling ? Abnormal these may all be, but in their deviation from the ordinary 
 lies their chief charm. 
 
 Consider for a moment the strange plot that constitutes the warp and woof of 
 “The Dead City.” The blind wife, Anna, longing for death that her husband 
 may be happy in the love of another, for whom he has formed an unholy passion. 
 That other is Bianca Maria, whose brother, Leonardo, has been tempted by the 
 charms of the girl into a love that is even more guilty and shameless than that 
 
IN FRANCESCA I)A RIMINI 
 
which fills Alessandro’s breast, for he, too, loves 
 Bianca Maria, his own sister ! What strange 
 and morhid complications are these ! But such 
 a spirit of self-sacrifice pervades it all, a nobility 
 of soul that clinches onto one’s sympathies despite 
 the promptings of reason. Bianca Maria compre¬ 
 hends to the full the wrong that is being done 
 Anna, and she confesses to her own brother her 
 love for Alessandro. Leonardo is stricken with 
 horror, but while seeing no relief for the terrible 
 situation save in the death of Bianca Maria, he 
 says naught of his own unhappy love, and when 
 he afterward strangles her by the spring way up 
 in the mountains, she dies with no knowledge of 
 her brother’s iniquity. Even Alessandro, who is 
 seemingly the most heartless and cruel of any, is 
 not wholly insensible to right and justice, for, 
 having followed the brother and sister to the fatal 
 spot, he does not complain at Leonardo’s cruel 
 solution of the problem. And when the 
 blind wife breaks in upon the group it 
 is only to fall by the body of Bianca 
 Maria, and lament her untimely death, 
 wholly forgetful of the love that Bianca 
 Maria had borne her husband. And so 
 real and extreme is Anna’s anguish, that 
 in her throes of mental torture the 
 scales fall from her eyes, and the bless¬ 
 ing for which she had so long prayed, 
 to be worthy the love of her husband, is 
 vouchsafed her. 
 
 And all this weird combination of 
 circumstances has for its abiding place 
 the tombs of Pelopides, the home of 
 Leonardo, the archaeologist, who has 
 passed his adult life in groping among 
 the buried graves of the dead city. 
 
The story of Francesca is one with 
 which the general public is more familiar, 
 but it is of the same sad strain, the same 
 thrilling, enthralling nature. The betrothal 
 of the lovely Francesca, yet in her child¬ 
 hood, without her consent, and practically 
 without her knowledge, to the deformed 
 and brutal soldier, Gianciotto, in order 
 that the military strength of the houses of 
 Polentani and Rimini may be strength¬ 
 ened ; the sad fate which leads the crook- 
 backed lord of Rimini to send his handsome 
 brother to do his wooing for him ; the 
 natural result of the meeting of the two 
 young hearts, and the fatal ending of it all, 
 is a story that has lived in legend and 
 printed tale from time immemorial, and 
 on the stage for three-quarters of a cen¬ 
 tury. What a story for a D’Annunzio to 
 grapple with ! Have little doubt but that he breathes into the strange tale the 
 breath of life, and in his presentation the old familiar characters, indeed, live again. 
 
 The character of Gioconda Dianti ap¬ 
 peals in a different way, and although the 
 spectator is conscious of the fact that she is 
 in the wrong, and has little claim on the 
 auditor’s sympathy, yet, like Lucio, he finds 
 himself listening to the song of the siren, 
 and, like Lucio, he finds himself irresistibly 
 yielding. 
 
 In La Gioconda it is the wronged and 
 ruined wife, Sylvia, who holds up her maimed 
 hands to us, hands maimed in defence of her 
 husband’s honor, but it is the sculptor’s model 
 who triumphs, while the unfortunate wife is 
 compelled to endure desertion as well as her 
 physical injuries ; not only the desertion of 
 husband, but the desertion of her child as well. 
 
IN FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, 
 
IN STREET COSTUME. 
 
I N ADDITION to Signora Duse in her repertoire, Liebler & 
 Company’s offerings for the dramatic years of 1902—03—04 
 will include—Miss Viola Allen in Hall Caine’s “The Eternal 
 City”; Kyrle Bellew in “A Gentleman of France,” beside those of 
 his former repertoire; a dramatization of Mary Johnston’s 
 “Audrey”; James O’Neill in a new play, “The Honour of the 
 Humble,” by Harriet Ford; Hall Caine’s “The Christian”; 
 Madame Gabrielle Rejane in her repertoire ; Sig. Ermete Novelli, 
 the great Italian tragedian of the day, in classic repertory; Edward 
 Morgan in a new play ; Vesta Tilly, the English comedienne, in a 
 new play ; and the American actor and humorist, Ezra Kendall, in 
 a play based on a poem by James Whitcomb Riley, dramatized by 
 Herbert Hall Winslow. 
 

 
 
 
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