MISS STARR'S SUCCESS IN "THE SECRET"

Henry Bernstein's Play as Presented by David Belasco

Clayton Hamilton

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fifth article in a series that embodies a new idea in monthly criticism. The writer of these critiques visits all the current plays, but instead of treating all of them, he selects for detailed analysis that one play which he considers most worth while.

HOW strange it seems, and new, to go to the Belasco Theatre to see a play by a dramatist of international reputation! Mr. Belasco is a wonderful producer. He has a genius for making the unreal seem real. That is the reason, probably, why in the past he has preferred to produce plays which were untrue to life. They gave him an opportunity to exercise his genius. At any rate, he has very rarely presented the sort of play that did not need his ministrations.

"The Secret," by Henry Bernstein (whose first name is misspelled upon the program) is the kind of play that requires the producer to leave it alone. It seems a little surprising that Mr.

Belasco should have chosen to import it to America; but he should be doubly congratulated, on that account, for having done so. No attempt has been made to "adapt" the piece: the text has been translated faithfully, line for line. Furthermore, the scenery has been carefully copied from that of the original Parisian production: not a line, not a color, has been altered. For once in his career, Mr. Belasco has allowed an author to have his way.

When "Israel" was presented in America, Mr. Charles Frohman required this same author to substitute a wedding for a suicide at the final curtain-fall. Tempora mutantur. If this sort of change goes on, it will soon become safe for serious-minded people to go to the theatre in America.

M. BERNSTEIN is hardly a great dramatist, in the highest sense of the word. In temperament he seems discomfortingly cold and hard, and even somewhat cruel. He has power, without kindliness; he lacks the ingratiating touch of human sympathy. He is strongly a logician, but not at all a poet; his masculine quality of intellect is not alleviated by a feminine alloy of sensibility. In other words, though he has the clever brain, he lacks the big heart, of the dramatist who is truly great. Yet, as a technician, he has fairly earned an unique and undisputed eminence. He is the one contemporary dramatist who has succeeded in combining the thrilling theatricism of Sardou with that psychological analysis of character which later authors have learned from the grim, deep poet of the North. He has shown that Sardou's structure of situation can be made to sustain a study of character as searching in intent as Ibsen's. This, whether or not we may like the result, is a great technical achievement.

WE DO not always like it; and the reason is that M. Bernstein lacks the final faculty of making us care about his characters. We see them suffer, and we observe that their reactions are true to life; but we never feel their sorrows as our own. With this author, the structural pattern is of prime importance; and, in order to find people who will fit into his pattern, he is obliged to delve among characters so unusual in their psychological equipment that they awaken in us a response of surprise instead of a response of recognition. But it is always less satisfying to the sympathies (if a homely illustration be permitted) to discover that our wife is not the sort of person we had expected her to be than to recognize that she is indeed the sort of person we had thought. In the theatre, as in life, the emotion of recognition is more "sympathetic" than the emotion of surprise.

As a maker of plots, M. Bernstein is supremely clever; and yet, all his plots have been constructed in accordance with a single formula. He always builds his plays in three acts, and relies upon his second act to produce his big sensation of surprise. In his first act he invariably exhibits a dilemma,— that is to say, a problem which is equally capable of two (and only two) solutions. Three-quarters of his second act is then devoted to the logical pursuit of one of these solutions. This carries him to his climax. There is a moment of suspense, which is capped by some such line as, "There is, however, one thing more"—then, in a swift and crashing scene, he suddenly shows that the second solution was, after all, the true one. His third act is devoted to a critical exposition of all those points which have been made to seem mysterious in the previous conduct of the plot.

THIS formula represents, of course, the latest development of that tradition of "the well-made play" which has been handed down from one craftsman to another since it was initiated by Eugène Scribe. M. Bernstein's most important innovation is his device of reserving the exposition till the final act, and making the audience wait for it with an everincreasing intellectual suspense. This device is a veritable addition to theatric craftsmanship. But it is, of course, mainly by the "seesaw" structure of his second acts that M. Bernstein has achieved his popularity.

The formula which has just been explained might be applied with equal pertinence to a study of "The Thief," or "Israel," or "The Attack," or any other of M. Bernstein's plays. At the present time, it is most interesting to observe its application to "The Secret."

CABRIELLE JANNELOT, the heroine of "The Secret," is presented to us as a charming and amiable woman. She has been pleasantly married for several years to a thoroughly good fellow; and we first observe her in an intimate view of her domestic life. We like her at sight; and we like her husband, Constant Jannelot, because he is so happy with her. The most intimate friend of Gabrielle is a widow, named Henriette Durand. After the death of her husband, Henriette had entered into an illicit love-affair with Charlie Ponta Tulli. She and Charlie had intended, and expected, to marry each other; but, owing to a mutual misunderstanding, which neither of them had ever fully understood, their relation had been broken off.

Some years have elapsed; and Henriette now confesses to Gabrielle that she finds herself falling in love with Denis Le Guern, who desires to marry her. Denis has requested a personal interview with Gabrielle; and this is arranged by the two women. In this interview with the best friend of his beloved, he shows himself to be a simple and straightforward man. At the risk of seeming disingenuous, he tells Gabrielle that he is incurably jealous— that he regards Henriette as the holiest of women, and that he could not ask her to marry him unless he were assured that there was nothing in her past that could possibly disturb this conception. Gabrieile enthusiastically reassures him; and he asks Henriette to be his wife. After Henriette has accepted him, Gabrieile advises her to tell the whole truth to Denis. This is precisely the advice that would have been given by so wise a man as Ibsen, before that mental reaction which resulted in the composition of "The Wild Duck"; and yet we wonder a little why, having talked with Denis and observed him to be unreasonably jealous, Gabrieile should be so lacking in worldly wisdom as to insist upon a point of honor so dangerously theoretical. At any rate, Henriette disregards the advice; and the act closes with an intimate scene in which Gabrieile confides, for the first time, to her husband the facts of Henriette's old loveaffair with Ponta Tulli.

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IN THIS first act, M. Bernstein confronts us, as usual, with a dilemma. Was Gabrieile sincere, or was she not, in her attitude toward Henriette? And, if she was not sincere, what possible reason could she have had for advising her best friend to undertake an impracticable course of conduct?

The second act proceeds upon the assumption of Gabrielle's sincerity. We find ourselves, several months later, at a houseparty in the country,—the hostess being an aunt of Gabrielle's. Gabrieile and Constant are there; likewise Henriette and Denis, now happily married; and also Charlie Ponta Tulli, who has been insistently invited by the hostess. Denis has become very friendly with Charlie; but Henriette has been reduced to an agony of anxiety lest her husband should discover her former relation with this man she now despises heartily. Gabrieile does her best to relieve the situation; and yet, a few words that slip from her now and then make Charlie and Denis suspicious of each other. A jealousy is awakened, which is only increased by every effort that Gabrieile makes to calm it. Ultimately, Denis comes to believe that Charlie is making love to his wife; and a drastic physical combat between the two men is the result of this development.

IT will be noticed that the pattern of this play deliberately violates one of the most generally accepted principles of theatric craftsmanship—that a dramatist should never keep a secret from his audience. We are forced to conceive the heroine as one sort of person for more than half the play, and then to reconstruct entirely our opinion of her character. But this device, contrary though it is to a tradition of the drama that has always heretofore been honored as an axiom, appears in this instance to stimulate an intellectual suspense which is the leading source of interest in this extraordinary play.

UNTIL this point, we have been permitted to assume that Gabrieile was sincerely trying to protect the interests of Henriette; but now, for the first time, we observe (in retrospection) that Gabrielle's conversations with Denis have subtly paralleled Iago's insinuations in the third act of "Othello". Could she possibly have meant to bring about the catastrophe that now is manifest? . . . No motive is apparent;

and yet we begin to suspect her of having played the devil. In the crashing conclusion of the second act, we sound the depths of her insincerity. It was she who, years before, had instigated that mysterious misunderstanding between Charlie and Henriette. It was she who had made her aunt insist that Charlie should come to the present house-party. It was she who had set the two men against each other. It was she who had imagined, and desired, and planned, and brought about the present catastrophe. But, why? . . . The cur-

tain falls.

THE third act gives us an exposition of the play that we have seen. Gabrieile is pathologically jealous. She loves Henriette, who is indeed the dearest of all her friends; but she has never been able to endure the spectacle of Henriette being completely happy. Whenever her friend has approached the consummation of happiness, Gabrieile has been impelled, by some devil within her, to introduce some rift into the lute. In this final act, there is a profoundly touching dialogue between the two husbands,— Constant Jannelot and Denis Le Guern. Denis has upon his hands a faithful woman who had once been faithless, but Jannelot is confronted with the deeper problem of an amiable woman who is incurably incapable of faith. Each of these men ultimately forgives his wife; but we are curiously required to observe that the crime of illicit love is less difficult to pardon than the crime of innate perversity of disposition.

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THE American production of "The Secret"—as we have already noted—has been copied carefully from the original production in Paris. The hand of Mr. Belasco has shown itself merely in the careful selection of the cast and in the general excellence of the performance. Mr. Belasco has always been able to get more good acting out of a company than any other American stage-director.

THERE is a noticeable divergence, in handling the part of Gabrielle, between the performance of Miss Frances Starr and the performance of Mme. Simone, for whom the part was originally written. The coldly clear and intellectually analytic acting of Mme. Simone is precisely suited to the method of M. Bernstein, whose purpose is not so much to make his auditors care abcut certain unusual events as to make them understand how they came to happen.

MISS STARR'S performance is more sympathetic. She is more ingratiating in the first half of the play, when we still believe in Gabrielle; but she is less convincing in the second half, when we should be shown the woman as the veritable devil that she is. Of these two conceptions, it is needless to remark that Mme. Simone's is the truer and the greater; but it might, of course, be argued that Miss Starr's is better adapted to the demands of the American theatre-goer. In America, we still paint our devils— not to terrify babes, but to soothe those patrons of the theatre who insist on munching chocolates throughout the "necessary business of the play."

This series of articles on Plays Worth While will be continued in the next issue of Vanity Fair. Mr. Hamilton will present, in the May number, a critical analysis of what he considers to be the best play of the month.