It was an opinion of the philosophic Bacon that women “will sooner follow you by slighting than by too much wooing.” That is an opinion shared by many and one which observation perceives to be grounded on fact: some women will. It is the basic idea underlying the play by Messrs. Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes, called “The Boomerang,” which Belasco produced at his New York theatre, August 10, 1915,—and which, slender as it is, has proved one of the most richly remunerative of all his ventures. In that play a youth, Budd Woodbridge by name, loves a girl, Grace Tyler, so unreservedly that she finds him wearisome and is inclined to repel his devotion and bestow her affections upon another youth. Young Woodbridge so peaks and pines under his mistress’ disdain and the pangs of juvenile jealousy that his mother fears that he is passing into a decline and insists on his consulting a physician. That physician, Dr. Gerald Sumner, finds the young man depressed, irritable, and in extreme nervous distress. He questions him shrewdly and soon ascertains the nature of the distemper for which he is desired to prescribe. He rather cynically undertakes to cure the youth and his directions are obeyed. His patient is sent home and put to bed; a daily hypodermic injection is ordered of a mysterious, vivifying serum (in fact, water), and a young woman nurse, beautiful and peculiarly kind and sympathetic, is employed to administer the injection and to amuse and cheer the unhappy sufferer, who is obediently responsive to her angelic ministration. The capricious Miss Tyler, seeing her adorer apparently succumbing to the fascinations of the lovely nurse and finding herself rather slighted off, discovers that she cannot live without him and Woodbridge’s amatory anguish is soon in a fair way to be assuaged. The relevancy of the title of this farce, “The Boomerang,” is revealed in a dictionary comment on that implement of Antipodal warfare which declares that: “in inexperienced hands the boomerang recoils upon the thrower, sometimes with very serious results.” This is illustrated by the fate of Dr. Sumner, who, having been scornful on the subject of love and jealousy, becomes violently enamoured of the charming nurse and for a time suffers much because of her affectionate tendance upon his patient,—until, at last, he learns that her regard is really fixed upon himself.

This play was designated as a “comedy,”—and, if Dr. Johnson’s definition of a comedy as something to make people laugh be accepted, that definition is plausible. The piece is, in fact, a farce and, in my judgment, rather a slight one; but it was so exquisitely stage-managed and so admirably acted that it passed for being something far more substantial and worthy than, intrinsically, it is. With the view that it is slight and merely ephemeral Belasco emphatically disagrees. “I maintain,” he has declared to me, “that ‘The Boomerang’ has a vital theme, of universal appeal, no matter how much you may ridicule it: I mean Calf Love. Everybody has had it—and, while it lasts, it’s terrible. No matter how much we may laugh at the boys and girls suffering from juvenile love and jealousy, we sympathize with them, too. That’s why everybody in the country wants to see our little play—why men and women have stood in line all night (as they have done in many places) to buy tickets for the performance. I believed in the little piece from the very first. I wish I knew where to get another as good!”

One of many scores of letters received by Belasco, commendatory of this play and its exemplary presentment, came from perhaps the most generous of contemporary patrons of the Theatre and it may appropriately be quoted here:

(Otto H. Kahn to David Belasco.)

“The Boomerang” was originally produced at The Playhouse, Wilmington, Delaware, April 5, 1915. This was the cast: