HER GREAT MATCH
Her Great Match represents the international play of to-day. It stands also for social comedy and it is representative of the work of its author in his best period.
Clyde Fitch was born in Elmira, New York, May 2, 1865. His father was a captain in the United States Army during the Civil War. He attended the Holderness School, New Hampshire, and graduated from Amherst College in 1886, and was already noteworthy in his college days for his interest in costume and rather luxurious accessories of life. He determined from the beginning to devote himself to the stage, and settled in New York, supporting himself by giving readings and tutoring while waiting for recognition. This came first when Richard Mansfield produced his Beau Brummel at the Madison Square Theatre, May 17, 1890. This picture of the Georgian dandy remains one of his most characteristic conceptions. Notwithstanding the success of this play and that of Frederic Lemaitre (1890), in which Henry Miller starred. Fitch had to wait and work hard before he attained a secure footing. He succeeded, however, in becoming probably the most prolific and the most successful of American playwrights. He was indefatigable in his exertions and produced in twenty years thirty-two original plays, besides twenty-three that were either adaptations from the French or German, revisions of other men's work, or dramatizations of novels. He lived surrounded by every luxury, and he made frequent trips to Europe, and died at Chalons-sur-Marne, September 4, 1909. At the time of his death, three plays, The City, A Modern Marriage, and The Manicure Girl, were in rehearsal.
The early work of Clyde Fitch was tentative, but when he produced The Climbers, January 21, 1901, he entered upon a more definite period of workmanship, and showed himself a master in delineation of the actions and motives of people moving in social relations. This social consciousness had been in his work from the first, but Beau Brummel is not so significant since it reflected the manners of an earlier day in England, and was a play of types rather than real people. What is of the most significance, Fitch did not limit himself to social satire; his greatest plays have in them a central idea, which unifies the drama and gives it body. In The Stubbornness of Geraldine, played after a tryout in New Haven, at the Garrick Theatre, New York, November 3, 1902, by Mary Mannering,—the theme is the fidelity and trust of a woman for the man she loves. In The Girl with the Green Eyes, produced by Clara Bloodgood in the leading role at the Savoy Theatre, New York, December 25, 1902, the central idea is that
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