It was a jubilant Sam Clemens who appeared before the PARK THEATRE audience on opening night, to give a curtain speech. The speech was full of the typical Twain humor: exaggerated and often satirical. But, as you will see, the seeds of discord were already sown in the personal conflict between Clemens and Raymond.
NEW YORK WORLD
September 17, 1874I thank you for the compliment of this call, and I will take advantage of it to say that I have written this piece in such a way that the jury can bring in a verdict of guilty or not guilty, just as they happen to feel about it. I have done this for this reason. If a play carries its best lesson by teaching what ought to be done in such a case, but is not done in real life, then the righteous verdict of guilty should appear; but if the best lesson may be conveyed by holding up the mirror and showing what is done every day in such a case but ought not to be done, then the satirical verdict of not guilty should appear. I don't know which is best, strict truth and satire, or a nice moral lesson void of both. So I leave my jury free to decide.
I am killing only one man in this tragedy now, and that is bad, for nothing helps out a play like bloodshed. But in a few days I propose to introduce the smallpox into the last act. And if that don't work I shall close with a general massacre.
I threw all my strength into the character of Colonel Sellers, hoping to make it a very strong tragedy part and pathetic. I think this gentleman tries hard to play it right and make it majestic and pathetic; but his face is against him. And his clothes! I don't think anybody can make a tragedy effect in that kind of clothes. But I suppose he thinks they are impressive. He is from one of the Indian reservations. Oh! I can see that he tries hard to make it solemn and awful and heroic, but really sometimes he almost makes me laugh. I meant that turnip dinner to be pathetic, for how more forcibly could you represent poverty and misery and suffering than by such a dinner, and of course if anything would bring tears to people's eyes that would; but this man eats those turnips as if they were the bread of life, and so of course the pathos is knocked clear out of the thing. But I think he will learn. He has an absorbing ambition to become a very great tragedian.
I hope you will overlook the faults in this play, because I have never written a play before, and if I am treated right maybe I won't offend again. I wanted to have some fine situations and spectacular effects in this piece, but I was interfered with. I wanted to have a volcano in a state of eruption, with fire and smoke and earthquakes, and a great tossing river of blood-red lava flowing down the mountain side, and have the hero of this piece come booming down that red-hot river in a cast iron canoe; but the manager wouldn't hear of it; he said there wasn't any volcano in Missouri—as if I am responsible for Missouri's poverty. And then he said that by the laws of nature the hero would burn up; his cast iron canoe wouldn't protect him. "Very well," I said, "put him in a patent fireproof safe and let him slide—all the more thrilling—and paint on it, 'This safe is from Herring's establishment,' same as you would on a piano, and you can pay the whole expense of the volcano just on the advertisement." But the manager objected, though he said heaps of pretty things—among others that I was an ass—and so I had to let the volcano go.
