The New Plays

The Attacks and Counter-Attacks of Our Autumn and Winter Dramas

DOROTHY PARKER

WITH an onrush which—for lavishness and verve—can only compared to that characterizing the advance of Spanish influenza, the Autumn plays burst upon us. So thick and fast did they come that several feeble comedies and one or two weak dramas were trampled on in the mob and passed away before help could be summoned.

There was simply no keeping up with them. The nights were packed with premieres. Ten of them were crammed into one week, and rather a slow week it was, at that.

The suffering among the first-nighters was intense. As for the critics— Mr. De Foe, Mr. Reamer, Mr. Nathan, et al—they simply couldn't make up their minds, on any given evening, which opening they might, with the least degree of suffering, attend. Panting, with eyes starting from their sockets, they tore frantically around from one theatre to another, to fall, sobbing with exhaustion, into their accustomed seats on the aisle.

But, try as they would, they were always a lap or two behind. Even as they dashed off a review of one play, the managers would unleash three more on them. There has been nothing like it since the days of the Gold Rush.

FROM my couch, in the sanatorium, I pen these few poor lines. I am a little better now. In fact, they say that, with careful nursing, I may pull through. If no one ever mentions the words "Over Here," or "One of Us," or "Crops and Croppers" in my hearing, I still have a fighting chance. I feel stronger already—it is the blessed peace that is doing it. For a whole week, there have been no new plays. I am almost able to look back calmly on the frenzied past. Some incidents I can even recall with pleasure—there was "Lightnin'," I remember.

I went to see "Lightnin' " with dread in my heart. I knew that Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon wrote it, and I knew it was so successful that Tyson planned retiring on the advance sale of seats for it, but I distrusted it nevertheless. I had heard that it was one of those homely plays, and I suspected it of scenes in which Mother would place the guiding lamp in the settin'-room winder, and in which Nellie would lay out supper on the red and white tablecloth. I knew, too, that the principal character was an old man, and I was firmly convinced that bits of rustic philosophy would be recited in age-cracked accents; and I fully expected an abundance of quavered optimisms about everything's always turning out for the best, if we just do what the Good Book says.

WELL, I was all wrong. It grieves me deeply to find out how frequently and how violently wrong I can be— it doesn't seem reasonable, somehow.

"Lightnin' " wasn't what I expected it to be at all. From the moment I entered the Gaiety

Theatre, it kept my mind off the war and my bills, and I'm deeply indebted to the author, and to Frank Bacon's performance of the title role, Lightnin' Bill Jones. I don't mean to try to tell you about how good he is—I know you have heard all about that from everyone who has seen him. People go about acclaiming him as a second Joseph Jefferson,—although I can't help feeling that a good deal of the acclaim is founded on his distinctly Jeffersonian hat, just as people looked at Rupert Brooke's collar and cried, "Another Shelley!" But that's none of my affair, of course. If they think it nicer to call him a second, instead of just saying how good he is on his own account, let them, that's what I say—I'm for free speech.

Somehow, I have heard very little excitement about "Someone in the House." It slipped unobtrusively into the Knickerbocker Theatre, when everybody was looking at a lot of other openings, and nobody did anything much about it, one way or the other. All I knew about it was what I could glean from the billboards— that it was a "melodramatic comedy", whatever that might be, and that it had taken the united efforts of three people, Larry Evans, Walter Percival and George S. Kaufman, to write it. And then I went to see the thing, and they completely sold me on it. It wasn't so much the melodramatic part that intrigued me, as we say in Greenwich Village; the melodrama is the good old crook masterpiece with the society burglar and the Hammond necklace and all that. No, it's the comedy that got me. It's the best time I have had in, lo, these many weeks—ever since the current theatrical season opened, to be perfectly accurate.

And the thing is done so perfectly, too. Haslort, as the amateur author of a play for the benefit of a war charity, and Lynne Fontanne, in a part that is a perfect dramatization of F. P. A.'s Dulcinea, do the best bits of characterization that have been seen in these parts in many a day. You have to keep telling yourself all through the evening that they're just making believe—they are not really that way at all. Robert Hudson, who reminded me so much of Harry Fox that I expected him to burst into song at any moment, is pleasantly effortless as the crook, and Julia Hay is charming as the heroine. You could go right on down through the cast that way and never find an error, except that I do wish William Mack had a little more to do. The part he has now doesn't even cut in on his evening.

OVER at the Comedy, which has been all done over in honor of the event, John Williams is producing Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband"— invariably spoken of as "The Ideal Husband" by the same group of intellectuals who always refer to "The Doll's House." The company is one of exceptional brilliance (see advertisements) with Constance Collier, Beatrice Beckley, Norman Trevor, Julian L'Estrange, and Cyril Harcourt among those present. Constance Collier, many critics said, was hopelessly miscast as Mrs. Chevely, but she played the lady just as I have always pictured her, so I was perfectly happy. Beatrice Beckley has the thankless job of playing Lady Chiltern, one of those frightfully virtuous women of Wilde's who can't utter the simplest observation without dragging in such Sabbatical expressions as "we needs must". Norman Trevor, as Sir Robert Chiltern, seems to have adapted a new technique; the idea is to see how quickly he can get through his speeches. He broke all previously existing world's records in the second-act tirade about women's love. I thought that Julian L'Estrange reached the highest point of the whole production. He played Lord Goring apparently without an effort, taking the whole thing quite calmly, uttering his epigrams as if he had just happened to think them up that moment.

Somehow, no matter how well done an Oscar Wilde play may be, I always am far more absorbed in the audience than in the drama. There is something about them that never fails to enthrall me. They have a conscious exquisiteness, a deep appreciation of their own culture. They exude an atmosphere of the New Republic— a sort of Crolier-than-thou air. "Look at us," they seem to say. "We are the cognoscenti. We have come because we can appreciate this thing—we are not as you, poor bonehead, who are here because you couldn't get tickets for the Winter Garden." They walk slowly down the aisle and sink gracefully into their seats, trusting that all may note their presence, for the very fact of their being there is a proof of their erudition. From the moment of the curtain's rise they keep up a hum of approbation, a reassuring signal of their patronage and comprehension. "Oh, the lines, the lines! they sigh, one to another, quite as if they were the first to discover that this Oscar Wilde is really a very promising young writer; and they use the word "scintillating" as frequently and as proudly as if they had just coined it. Yet there is about their enjoyment a slightly strained quality, almost as if they were striving to do what should be expected of those of their intellect. It isn't the sort of enjoyment that just sits back and listens; it is almost as if they felt they must be continually expressing their appreciation, to show that no epigrams get over their heads, to convince those about them of their cleverness and their impeccable taste in drama.

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WELL, anyway, be that as it may— speaking of scintillating lines very naturally reminds me of "Daddies," John Hobble's play at the Belasco, because, so far as I can recall, there isn't a single one in it. "Daddies" is one of those things that are just simply too sweet for words. -It starts right out being sweet the moment the curtain rises, and it gets steadily sweeter and sweeter as the evening advances. In fact, when you go to see it, it's just as well to bring the bicarbonate of soda with you. The plot concerns a sweet white-haired mother, who longs to hear "the patter of little feet about the house," and therefore wishes a collection of sweet little orphans on her unmarried son and three bachelor friends of his. She certainly gets her wish; the patter of little feet is heard about the house from half-past eight till eleven o'clock. There are no less than five child actresses and actors in the production. They prattle and they romp and they climb up on people's laps, and they do everything but say their prayers in their little nighties—and I was expecting that even that might happen at any moment. One of the infant prodigies, little Miss Lorna Volare, is rarely absent from the stage. The play is made timely and appealing by calling the children "war orphans," but somehow, that part of it didn't grip me particularly. No one seemed to take the orphan business especially seriously, or to be very much worked up over it. The actors explained, vaguely, that the little dears had been left orphaned by the war, but they didn't seem to take much stock in it themselves. Jeanne Eagels made) a long appeal for war orphans, but, although she recited it very prettily, in her charmingly modulated voice, she didn't take it much to heart—indeed, she was most impersonal about the whole thing. To me, "Daddies" was not particularly stirring as an appeal for the orphans of war; but, as propaganda for birth control, it was extraordinarily effective.

Of course, it is wonderfully done, especially by Bruce McRae and John Cope, who is restfully bitter in the midst of the thick, syrupy sweetness. But even he succumbs to the general saccharinity in the end—they make him appear in the last act in horse reins, being driven by the relentless Miss Volare. It isn't a play, however, that allows much scope for the well-known

Belasco realism. We are asked to believe, for instance, that men some twenty years out of college immediately start to snake-dance and burst into college yells every few minutes, as soon as three of them gather together to dine at the house of a fourth—it's before dinner that this takes place, too. There is also a slight stretching of the probabilities when the servants are supposed to be simply overcome with delight at the idea of having ap assortment of children come to live permanently in the house.

Oh, there's something I forgot to tell you about "Daddies." It's a tremendous success.

TF you feel that you've been sleeping entirely too well lately and you really need a few good wakeful nights, by all means go to the Lyric and see "The Unknown Purple," by Roland West and Carlyle Moore. It ought to keep you awake for weeks to come. Here is something that will effectually remove your mind from your troubles for an entire evening, and fasten it on something even more gruesome. My hair still rises slowly and silently on end whenever I think of that last act.

The play is all about a scientist who has discovered a purple ray which renders him invisible. He has been put in prison by the plots of his wife and her lover and, when his term is up, he devotes himself to revenge, swearing to ruin the man and strangle the woman —he doesn't strangle her, though, which rather disappointed me, for any woman who would wear that green dress and that purple hat should have been strangled immediately—and his invisibility helps him to carry out his pleasant plans. And I am here to state that until you have seen a necklace tom from a woman's neck by an invisible hand, a safe opened, papers removed, and like little pleasantries perpetrated by the same invisible hand, while a sinister violet light plays about the stage, you don't know the ultimate thing in thrills.

Richard Bennett gives a most remarkable performance of the kindly scientist who, after he is sent to prison, becomes the relentless avenger, and Helen Mackellar as the wife is, to put it mildly, great. And those unseen members of the company who work the purple light and who make chairs move, doors open, and curtains part by some mysterious means, ought certainly to go on the annual list of the twelve best performances of the season.

THERE was one thing that made "The Unknown Purple" decidedly more difficult the night I was there— that was the audience. The first act, you see, is divided into two scenes, and during the first scene, played in almost entire darkness, the late-comers were not seated. No, they were held up at the back of the house till the second scene got well started and then they burst forth, wild with delight at being free once again, charging for their seats in a flying wedge, coming down the aisles much as the water comes down from Lodore. You could hear them from all parts of the orchestra shouting to each other, with gay camaraderie, "Here we are, Fletcher, I've found our seats—here's K," or "Come along, Hildegarde, and look out for that step— I just fell over it." Then, when they did get settled, they were all immediately seized with violent colds. They coughed and sneezed, singly and in unison, with a whole-heartedness seldom displayed in such a mixed gathering. It was like spending an evening in the Nose and Throat Hospital.

I don't know how you felt about "The Woman on the Index," Lillian Bradley's and George Broadhurst's play at the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre, but I liked it. I went about quite brazenly saying I liked it, too, until I saw how up-stage the newspapers were about it, and then I subsided into a meek silence, fearful that I had betrayed my hideous ignorance. It's a melodrama, of course, but then I don't mind that, do you? Its prologue is one of the most startling things I've seen in some time, crowding into its fifteen minutes a murder, a robbery, the branding of a lady with the red-hot barrel of a revolver, and sundry other indoor sports. After that busy quarter of an hour, the rest of the play—just an unusually complicated spy-drama—is rather an anticlimax. There is a distinct novelty in it, though; the spy is not the conventional German, but a Turk.

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The thing was so well done. You know yourself that with a cast including Julia Dean, Amy Ricard, and Lester Lonergan, you can't really have such a terrible evening. George Probert plays the villain with his usual perfection. As long as I can remember, he has been giving perfect performances of particularly low, mean, depraved creatures; and I suppose in his home he's really a nice, quiet, family man, too, one of the vertebrae of the nation.

THE plays of war are still with us, with the proverbial bells on. Over at the Republic, A. H. Woods, who evidently counts that day lost whose low-descending sun sees him produce no play about the Hun, is presenting Marjorie Rambeau in a gentle little divertissement by Roi Cooper Megrue, entitled "Where Poppies Bloom." It is of the school that believes racket is propaganda—there are bombs and pistol shots, and everyone shrieks his speeches to show his fervor. The scene is laid in a ruined chateau, at the front; great holes torn out of the walls disclose views of a dreary waste of battlefield, and a pretty touch, when I was there, was the sight of a stage hand, in his shirt sleeves, crawling across No Man's Land on his hands and knees. If I were Mr. Woods, I'd leave that in and call the whole thing a joke.

Miss Rambeau—whose presence at the front is never clearly explained— plays the role of a woman who discovers that her husband, whom she thought dead, is not only alive but a German. And, oh, the things she says to that man! Really, I never heard a lady go on so. Her accent was most interesting, too; sometimes it was so French that you could hardly understand a word she said, and then again it didn't bother about that for twenty minutes at a stretch. Lewis Stone plays the graceless role of the husband, and Pedro de Cordoba is the lover, who nobly refuses to shoot the spy, I forget just why. Percival Knight is, as always, fine as a British Tommy.

To me, the brightest spot of the evening was the soldier (he was sitting in the seat behind me) who, bursting with the importance of his newly-acquired Camp Upton French, condescendingly translated to his girl the occasional French words of the play. "You heard that guy saying 'toujours'?" he said. "That means 'to-day.'"

"FOREVER AFTER," by Owen Davis, opens the Central, which fills New York's crying need of a new theatre. The charm and cleverness of Alice Brady pull it through—I hate to think what it would be witKout her. Even the scenes where the hero lies wounded in No Man's Land somehow failed to break me up, perhaps because Conrad Nagel, who is supposed to be seriously wounded and faint with exhaustion, speaks in accents lusty enough to be heard on the other side of Seventh Avenue.

"WATCH YOUR NEIGHBOR," at the Booth, is an unbelievably naive thing of spies outwitted by the conventional silly ass Englishman. A lot of nice, open, above-board spies they are, too. They all got together around a piano and sang The Watch on the Rhine so that it could be heard for miles around; and they left the Kaiser's picture lying about; and they did many such ingenuous little tricks. No one could possibly have missed them, not even the hero. Leon Gordon, one of the authors of the piece, plays the principal role, supported by a company of the typical Morosco caste.

TWO musical comedies, "Head Over Heels" and "Fiddlers Three," are holding forth at the Cohan and the Cort, respectively. Mitzi, the star of the former, is tireless in her efforts for the entire evening. There are times, in fact, when, pleasant as she is, one wishes that she would tire just a little bit and go and lie down for a while. The music, by Jerome Kern, was a great blow to me. He evidently wasn't feeling quite himself when he wrote it—or, rather, re-wrote it.

"Fiddlers Three" is one of those comic operas of the sort they used to take you to on Saturday afternoons during the Christmas holidays. They're all there—the merry villagers, the peasant costumes, the comic English nobleman, the ridi lady from Pittsburg— why does the word "Pittsburg" always bring down the house?—and all the rest of them. Only the music and the lines aren't as good as they used to be— or maybe it's just that age has made me over-particular.

There was one thing about "Fiddlers Three," though, that held my attention all through the evening; try as I might I could discern only two fiddlers.

Possibly one didn't have his registration card.