Just how this effect, to which author, players, stage setting, and the collective enthusiasm of the audience itself all contributed, was brought about is not easy to explain. There was nothing unique or startling in the stage setting - the living room and part of the veranda of a comfortable house in a Russian provincial town, much such a roomy old frame house as you would find in Columbus, Ohio, or Evansville, Ind. Interiors just as realistic have not infrequently been built up around the bathos with which Mr. Belasco has made his fame.