A. E. Thomas

Albert Ellsworth Thomas. [Born] 1872. Playwright.

So much of a New York older than I ever knew was in A. E. Thomas’ life that in telling you of him I cannot be sure that I will get it right. He was, you will remember, the author of a score of plays, most of which, I suppose, most of you saw, notable for playful sentences and pointed dialogue.

And many of you also know, probably, that he was the brightest wit of that very notable company that gave color and character to the life of the town when this century was young, its tempo leisurely, and New York was still Old New York. Out in Minnesota we read about this, but I never saw it. I never saw Maude Adams in “Peter Pan” at the Empire Theatre, nor “The Sultan of Sulu,” nor even Otis Skinner, except at our Twelfth Night here. But A. E. Thomas was himself a part of all of it, on what was then called the Rialto, and, as Irving Brock has written, “not the least urbane and accomplished of the crew, who looked as if he had stepped out of a painting by Velasquez.”

“Those by-gone days and those by-gone ways had something worth remembering. And the men who made them what they were are also worth remembering.” A. E. Thomas is worth remembering—for he used “wit as the edge tool it is and not like the matches scratched on the outside of a box for the sake of the flash and the noise” as is, I’m sorry, the fashion of my contemporaries.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1947 Memorials