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 It
has, perhaps, struck some reader of the daily papers that Adah Isaacs
Menken, a person at whose name he may have smiled as he casually saw
it placarded upon a play-bill in the Park or elsewhere, is mentioned
in letters from Paris as being very successful, and exciting great
public interest. When she plays in New York do the correspondents
of the London and Paris papers devote a paragraph to her? Certainly
not, because her coming and playing and going here are unremarked,
except by those whose business it is to follow the story of the stage
from day to day, or by those who habitually resort to the theatres
where she plays. Nor are the paragraphs in the foreign letters to
be viewed as advertisments, any more than their notices of Patti.
But who is
Adah Isaacs Menken? is the question which many a reader of these
lines is asking. She is an actress of the strictly physical school.
My form is my fortune, Sir, she said. Her great triumph is in the
part of Mazeppa, in which play she appears as the hero bound upon
a fiery steed. Mazeppa, indeed, is a man, and Menken is a woman.
But flesh-colored tights drawn over her luxuriant form, with a short-skirted
tunic about her waist, enable her "to disfigure or present" the
noble figure of the victim. The criticisms of her acting, we have
observed, are mainly confined to discussions upon the length of
her skirts. Indeed, the whole performance, which it has not been
our fortune to witness, seems to consist of that kind of display
for which concert saloons with female waiters are chiefly distinguished.
It has, therefore, not hitherto made a sensation in the city of
New York. La Menken has not yet played at the French theatre, and
was unknown upon the boards of the late Academy. Ma, in Hispania!
But in Paris it is another thing.
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