Rainey shouted at his father: "Ye're an ould fool, that's what ye are; a damned ould fool!" At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly—though I should be sorry to think it—the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, "The Playboy of the Western World," was put on the American stage, men laughed—generally at the wrong time—out of the hopeless confusion of their minds. The "Playboy" was admittedly an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one missile—which looked strangely like a piece of pie—at the
