And sometimes I think it was, in a way more creative because more self-fashioned.
In any case, truth — existing equally but in different mediations in pumped-up florid rhetorical expressions as well as intimate, “naturalistic” ones, in drawing rooms and hovels– will out.
Writing about Tallulah in 1938, Helen Ormsbee opined that she was “particularly gifted at using imagination so that she extends the realty of a scene beyond the limits of the stage setting. Every time she comes in or goes out at a door, that next room, that hallway, that sidewalk which cannot be seen, all become existent in the story. She makes you believe that they are there just out of view. From the first moment she steps into a play she brings with her a conviction of the reality of events that have been happening offstage.”