p. 495 | The Theater as it Is

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 9, 1882

The Theater as it Is.

IN its best estate the theater, in New York, attended by the "first class" people, men and women, is thus described by the Sun newspaper. Yet if a religious paper denounces the stage, the cry of bigotry and Puritanism is set up at once. Those who do not frequent the theater depend for their knowledge of it on the daily papers, and this is what one of them says of the most fashionable theaters in New York:—

"At Wallack's during the past week young girls, with their attendant swains, chaperoned by grave and dignified matrons, have listened with unblushing faces, and, indeed, with every indication of intelligent interest, to one of the most objectionable plays ever acted in English. Vice and immortality, degraded womanhood, and corrupted households are bad enough, even when veiled beneath an outward semblance of decency, but when an actress is called upon to use all her art in the reproduction of a debased and vicious woman, and when bad things are called by their worst names, and no attempt at the thinnest whitewash is made, then it were better that young girls should be left at home, as nothing can be gained to mind, morals, or manners by watching the progress of such a play, and, above all, by seeing it in company with young men."—The Lever.