Theater Electrifies Wilted Actors So They Can Thrill Audience

Recharging Oneself with Energy There Is Terrifying as a First Experience But It Revivifies Joan Sawyer and Her Fellow Artists in a Most Amazing Way and They All Take Treatments Regularly — Entire Theatre May Be “Charged” as Result of Test.

This is an honest-to-goodness story, though a press agent is its inspiration and a vaudeville house its place of installation. If you are one of the many who have been reading extraordinary claims for an electrical room lately installed at the Palace Theatre, and duly advertised by Walter J. Kingsley, publicity man for that house, don’t lay it aside as a fake. It’s even more than good advertising. It belongs in the category of the truth that is stranger than fiction.

The electricity in that electrical room is the genuine article, just as the lemonade out in front is made from real lemons; just as the flowers that bank the stairways to the balcony are real flowers and not the “everlastings” made of cleverly colored and subtly scented tissue paper.

All of which may be straws in the wind to indicate that a new genius of press agent has arrived. Once we yielded our attention to the enormity of the “whoppers” these aforesaid gentlemen launched; now it seems we are to “right-about-face” and give equal credence when they astonish us out of our wits by making preposterous claims — and more than proving them.

Re-Charging Talent.

As for this Investigator, she was prepared to humor the joke; to help along the clever idea of a story, even if the subject of the story hadn’t been visualized. Judge then the surprise when she found the narrative to be charged with genuine electricity, the kind re-discovered by Mr. Edison, and right on its job perking up wilting vaudeville artists; restoring lost voices, bringing lovely dancers out of swoons, embracing in its life-giving qualities the youngest clown on the stage, small Irving Foy, as well as rejuvenating the two oldest clowns in the profession, Norcross and Holdsworth, who together have 160 years to their credit.

Mr. Kingsley reached for a key, not unlike the one pictured as giving admittance to Bluebeard’s chamber. There was a slightly hurt tone to his voice when the Investigator suggested that he just tell her about what an electrical room would be like — if such a Utopian scheme were working behind scenes.

“But it is,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Joan Sawyer had just finished dancing her “Artist’s Dream” with Nigel Barrie. Mr. Kingsley, as he led the way behind scenes was explaining that they had all been anxious for fear Miss Sawyer wouldn’t be able to finish the act.

“She often faints,” he said. “I’ll show you what it does to her.”

An Exhausted Dancer.

A knock on her dressing room door.

“I’m all in,” came the reply.

“Come, take a treatment!” he suggested.

“There’s somebody out here who doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as the ‘pep’ room about the place.”

“It might help me,” she agreed. Then: “But I’m not presentable.”

“Nobody’s going to look at you. Come on!”

When a dancer isn’t presentable she means she’s got a lot more clothes on off the stage than she has on. Joan Sawyer, in a Turkish bath robe, half slippers, her brown hair down her back, her make-up still on, came out and we got into the lift together. She was so exhausted she had to lean against the side of it and to be supported while the host unlocked the door of the rejuvenating room.

It is a room of coils and copper screens and switches and gigantic meters. Not at all a dangerous looking place until the machinery gets going. Suddenly the electric light switch was turned off. The room swam in Stygian blackness. A click here, a click there —

“Give me your hand.”

Z—z—z—z—

Like Storm in Woods.

But one can’t write electricity!

Have you by chance ever been overtaken at midnight in a Southern pine forest by an electrical storm?

If so you know the terror of the elements. You know how the ozone, freed, goes to your head like champagne; how the lightning prances and darts and plays about you — one minute, singing that this is your time to come; the next, leaving you for some remote corner a hundred feet away. And the whole set to swaying, cracking pine trees and reverberating thunder — and all in a sea of curiously charged currents. And then, when it’s over — do you recall how the air was cleared and you went on your way revivified by the terrific experience.

This, in brief, is the nearest thing that the electrical room at the Palace may be likened to. It is a fearsome and an awesome thing. And though it may not be as dangerous as it looks and sounds (Mr. Kingsley declares it isn’t in the least dangerous, provided there’s some one on hand who knows which switch to turn on), the average person is likely to sympathize with the negro in the orchestra that plays for the Joan Sawyer dances, when he rolls his eyes and swears:

“Not on yer life, boss. I doan need no sich resurrectin’. I got plenty ur life widout tamperin’ wid de Debbil’s pitchforks in dat ’lectrical room!”

Joan Is Revivified.

Now this is what it did to Joan Sawyer: She was limp as a morning glory at high noontide when she went in. She could scarcely speak above a whisper. The process of getting the thing going is so terrifying that even one who has been there before clings timidly to a friendly door — “in case it should catch fire, you know.”

Miss Sawyer clutched the door. Mr. Kingsley, copper conductor in hand, something after the fashion of an orchestra leader’s baton, stepped boldly in between the copper screens and continued to boom forth his invitation:

“Come on in! The current’s fine!”

The current was zigzagging its forked tongues from the resonator; it leaped from copper screen to copper screen; the whole room was tingling and alive with it. Mr. Kingsley stood on the rubber mat and repeated his invitation. The electric light switch, turned on, revealed Joan Sawyer in process of revivification.

“I don’t know whether it’s my mind or not, but I do feel better,” she laughed.

“Come on in,” begged Mr. Kingsley; “take a regular treatment!”

To take a regular treatment means holding to Mr. Kingsley’s hand while he holds with the other hand the copper baton near the resonator, catching the electricity from it after the fashion, shown in old prints, of Benjamin Franklin drawing electricity from the thunder clouds.

A Second Hand Shock.

“Come on in,” Joan Sawyer called to the Investigator. And as she said it she touched the latter with her finger tips. An electric shock that went with this touch influenced the Investigator’s mind to study it at long range with somebody else on the experimenting rubber mat.

“It doesn’t shock you near so much as that,” Miss Sawyer explained, “if you stand in here and take the current direct.”

Five minutes more and Joan Sawyer stepped from off the rubber mat, a rejuvenated creature, a morning glory with the freshness of the dawn. There was a new sparkle to her eyes, her lips now had a color other than the rouge of make-up. Her very hands were tingling and pink.

“I may be just kidding myself,” she said, “but whatever it is, I do get a lot of strength and new life from here. I’ve been going to a physician for electrical treatment all winter and paying him ten dollars for a treatment that’s about one-hundredth part as strong as this.”

Mr. Kingsley insists that no physician in New York can give so strong a treatment, because there isn’t a private plant in New York where such a tremendous amount of electricity is available. This current comes direct from the street service.

“They know it down at Herald Square when we are giving a treatment in here,” Mr. Kingsley said; “there one may see how much electricity is registered as being used, aside from the amount ordinarily used for city purposes.”

Whatever This Means.

Now it would take an expert electrician to wade through the technical terms that are used to describe this high power machine. The current is received at the transformer — 220 volts, A. C., 60 cycles. Transformer is 3,000 Watt, closed core, dry type. There is a variable secondary on these two windings, one of 20,000 volts and the other of 30,000 volts. There is also a condenser consisting of a six and one-half gallon Leyden jar filled with a saturated solution of salt water.

Connected with this condenser is a large resonator, three feet high by nine inches in diameter. This resonator has a variable primary winding of the heavy wire type consisting of 141 turns of No. 8 aluminum wire. The secondary winding of the resonator is 2,500 turns of No. 22 wire. The voltage of the transformer is 1,000,000 volts.

“That’s enough electricity to do what with?” asked the Investigator, to whom technical terms meant nothing.

“Enough to send a wireless to Moscow,” replied Mr. Kingsley.

“Enough to do electrocuting wholesale?”

“That screw” — he indicated a fixture on the wall — “turned in the wrong way, is strong enough to burn a person to a cinder in a second. And yet in the hands of one who has electrical understanding, it’s all as safe as walking to one’s own breakfast table.”

Vaudevillians Love It.

And the vaudevillians love it! At first they were terrified and wouldn’t advance further than the door. Now they walk in boldly before they go on the stage and ask to be “charged” in order to give the performance of their lives.

Mr. Kingsley has many theories about what may be done with electricity in a way to help theatregoers. He has a Utopian dream of the day coming when the whole Palace will be equipped with this device — when the audience will be able to take treatment while they enjoy a performance on the stage.

“I go even further than that,” he said. “I mean to electrify this whole block. A person who simply walks into one of our houses will go forth revivified.

“This is not original with me,” he explained. “Several years ago Professor Maxwell of the public schools was most enthusiastic about installing similar devices in schoolrooms as an aid to dull children. He has a theory that a child’s mind only needs to be wakened to become receptive. Electricity is the best stimulator known. Dull children are usually tired children — children that need every cell invigorated by electricity.”

“Do the effects of the electrical treatment last?”

“They do,” replied Mr. Kingsley, “because they wake up the cells with new life. When every cell in the body is functioning a person is bound to feel a lasting benefit.”

Edison Takes Treatment.

“Mr. Edison has been taking these electrical treatments for years,” he said. “His good health and alert mind, I believe, he credits to the rejuvenating effect of such currents. Experiments have proved that children given daily treatments grow to be wonderfully strong and to have minds proportionately bright.

“Nikola Tesla was the first man to demonstrate the efficiency of high voltages. I talked this experiment over at length and many times with Mr. Tesla in his ‘conning tower’ in the Madison Square Garden, twenty-eight stories up in the air. In fact, every man who knows what we can expect from electricity is in favor of it being used in these new ways to bring undreamed of powers to man.”

As regards magnetizing vaudeville actors, Mr. Kingsley explained that each person had a certain amount of vitality. Many persons, according to him, visit vaudeville houses to become “recharged” themselves. They do not always know why they go, but there’s a refreshing feeling afterward that they notice and mentally record as a means of inducing cheerfulness.

A Cure for Heartache.

“Vaudeville audiences are largely made up of people who have some sorrow they wish to forget,” he said. “The average person does not know that vaudeville audiences are composed, for the most part, of unhappy people. A man who is disappointed in love and a girl who has a similar heartache don’t tax their brains by going to a regular play. They want something quick and lively and changing. Something that will fairly lift them out of their own vapors. A vaudeville performance can do this if anything can.

“We have all heard So-and-so’s wonderful following explained by:

“‘She has so much magnetism that I catch new hope and life from her when she comes on the stage.’ This is true. It is also true that after a time a vaudeville actor under the strain of ‘two-a-day’ feels this force leaving. That is where the electrical treatment comes in. It is given back what is subtly drained from the actor on the stage. Curious, but this is true.

“There is something, too, in the tired business man going to a place where the entertainment is bright and infectious. This man feels the need of being recharged with vitality. He gets it from the stage. Some one has said that no one should go on the stage unless that one has ten times the vitality, the buoyancy of the average person. This is true. For that vitality is drawn on, unconsciously by the people out in front.”

Appeal of “Pep” Room.

“I have known audiences so greedy for this magnetism that the entire bill of performers would be limp and down and out after a performance. This is the appeal of the ‘pep’ room. It is readily seen from this the advantages it would be to have an entire house electrified. Then the audience would get buoyed up and have a treatment without having to draw on the people on the stage for it. That would leave the latter that much more magnetism to put into their work.

“The time will come when every theatre will meet the demand of physical weariness. We may come ‘beat out’ and exhausted; we shall leave buoyed up physically and stimulated mentally — every cell in our minds and in our bodies keen and alert to take up the routine again.

“That, in short,” concluded Mr. Kingsley, “is the mission of the theatre. It should stimulate physically and mentally. And the one great white hope for the American audience — the New York audience — that feeds on any vitality that comes near it, is the panacea for weariness and ennui for fainting bodies and listless minds — the crackling blue flame, the ozone-making electricity.”