Victor Mapes (10 March 1870 – 27 September 1943) was a playwright, stage manager and director. He was elected to The Lambs in 1908 as a Professional member.
Mapes was born in New York City on 10 March 1870. He belonged to an old New York family. He attended Columbia University, where he proved an excellent athlete and graduated in 1891 at the head of his class. He became a journalist, and the next year spent time in Paris, where he studied drama at the Sorbonne. He lived in Paris from 1892 to 1896. In May 1895 his play La Comtesse de Lisne was staged at the Theatre Mondaine. He was Paris correspondent for The New York Sun.
After returning to New York, Mapes became stage manager at the Lyceum Theatre for Lamb Daniel Frohman in 1897. Later that year he resigned to become drama critic for the New York World. He wrote under the pseudonym of “Sidney Sharp”. When his first American play, A Flower of Yeddo, was produced Mapes resigned from the World.
While writing plays, Mapes became general stage director of Daly’s Theater in New York, and in 1904 became manager at the Globe Theater in Boston. In 1906 he became director of the New Theater in Chicago, which opened in October that year. The theater was founded by a group of leading Chicago citizens with the aim of producing worthwhile plays for limited runs without elaborate scenery or costumes, and without promoting stars.
Mapes’s best known works are The Boomerang (1915), and two plays written in collaboration, The New Henrietta (1913) and The Hottentot (1920). The Boomerang, produced by Lamb David Belasco and starring Lamb Arthur Byron and Martha Hedman, ran at the Belasco Theatre for 522 performances. It has been called a “sunny, youthful, spirited play”, with excellent performances by the leader actors. Boomerang was written in collaboration with Lamb Winchell Smith, The farce Hottentot was written in collaboration with Shepherd William Collier Sr.
Victor Mapes died in Cannes, France on 27 September 1943.