The New Plays

That Is to Say, Those That Were Not Killed by the Spanish Influenza

DOROTHY PARKER

THERE is always this to be said for the epidemic of Spanish influenza—it gave the managers something to blame things on. Whenever a manager saw that all was practically over with a play, he hid his aching heart under the guise of a noble solicitude for the public welfare, and, with an air of "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done," announced that the play would be removed, owing to the epidemic. If you are one of those who must ever go about the world finding good, in everything, hold the thought that the Spanish influenza has helped many a play to make a graceful get-away.

It was a thin month for the drama, one way and another. There was one dark Saturday night when seven plays slunk out into the Great Unknown, among them "Someone in the House,"—and I liked it so much, too—and "I. O. U.," a dainty trifle in which, as a climax, Jose Ruben branded Mary Nash on the shoulder with a red-hot iron. Though that Saturday marked the crisis, the lean days are not yet over for the plays. Several of them are tossing fitfully, and two or three seem barely able to stagger through the week. It looks as if the managers would have to call in the aid of influenza again, to get them decently off to the warehouse.

THERE are still a few rays of light, however, even in the gathering gloom of the season. There is Tolstoi's "Redemption," for instance—although "ray of light" isn't exactly a happy term for it. It isn't what you might call sunny. I went into the Plymouth Theatre a comparatively young woman, and I staggered out of it, three hours later, twenty years older, haggard and broken with suffering. It won't fill you all full of glad thoughts, and it isn't just the sort of thing to take the kiddies to, but won't you please see it, even if you have to mortgage the Dodge, sub-let the apartment, and sell everything but your Liberty Bonds, to get tickets? Go and see it, so that you may come out and proclaim to the world that at last you have beheld a perfectly done play.

A more extraordinary production I have never seen. It is difficult to speak of "atmosphere" and "feeling" without sounding as if one wore sandals and lived below Fourteenth Street, but you just can't mention Robert Jones' scenery without using the words. I never realized that so much atmosphere could be worked into one production. Ana it is gained with such seeming ease, too—gained by suggestion rather than by painstaking detail. The final curtain rises on "a corridor outside the courtroom"; Mr. Jones' scene consists of a bare, flat wall with two doors—that is all, yet it gives one a sense of mystery, of hopelessness, of unescapable tragedy. There is an unforgettable picture of the gypsies' house, with the gypsies grouped about a fire, and another of a drinking den in the slums—this last gruesomely dark save for the feeble table-lights that shine on the ghastly faces of the drinkers. I humbly remove my hat—the bill for which I received for the third time, only this morning —to Mr. Jones. He is indubitably There.

Of John Barrymore's performance of the chief role, I can only say that, to me, it was flawless. I have heard people say that it was all too much in the same key, and I have heard other people observe that it was perhaps a little over-dramatic; but then, I thought it should have been both those things. Fedya's life was all in the same key, and he was just the sort of person who would have done things dramatically. I thought Mr. Barrymore consistently fine; his death scene, where he leaps in agony like a mortally wounded animal, was simply remarkable.

There's only one thing I could wish about the whole play—I do wish they would do something about those Russian names. Owing to the local Russian custom of calling each person sometimes by all of his names, sometimes by only his first three or four, and sometimes by a nickname which has nothing to do with any of the other names, it is difficult for one with my congenital lowness of brow to gather exactly whom they are talking about. I do wish that as long as they are translating the thing, they would go right ahead, while they're at it, and translate Fedor Vasilyevich Protosy and Sergei Dmitrievich Abreskov and Ivan Petrovich Alexandrov into Joe and Harry and Fred.

IT'S a long jump from "Redemption" to "Tea for Three," Roi Cooper Megrue's comedy at Maxine Elliott's Theatre, but you should earnestly endeavor to make it, if you haven't already. So far as I was concerned,'it was the big event of the present season. It doesn't seem possible that the same man who wrote it could have perpetrated "Where Poppies Bloom." Mr. Megrue must have one of those famous dual personalities, that are so invaluable as movie plots. In a season where the plays average one good line apiece, carefully saved till the middle of the third act, laboriously led up to, and spoken as light-heartedly as if it were the Oath of Office, "Tea for Three" stands out conspicuously. With a few neglected acknowledgments to the Wilde estate, the dialogue is by far the most brilliant of the new plays. It is crowded with good lines, brought in as casually as if they had caused absolutely no trouble to the author—he could go on doing it for weeks at a stretch if he liked.

The plot itself doesn't matter, especially— it's just a background for the epigrams. It's something about a husband who cannot understand his wife's inclination to see any other man. He is finally brought around by the shock of seeing the suicide of his—and her— greatest friend (wonderfully played by Arthur Byron) reported on the first page of the Evening Telegram. Being just the sort of person who believes everything he sees on the first page of the Evening Telegram, he suffers agonies of remorse, and, in the joy of seeing the friend walk in—never better in his life— promises to do all sorts of considerate things, including leaving town for a month or so, and everything ends happily. It's one of those plays to which one can't help inventing a fourth act, on the way home. For instance, I'd like to know just how that idea of having the husband leave town would work out. My personal theory is that he would have found an empty apartment and a note on his wife's pincushion when he got back.

The comedy is beautifully done, without the least apparent struggle. Not pnce do you see the wheels go round-—it's hard to realize, in fact, that you're witnessing "acting," that you haven't walked in on the private affairs of some regular people. There are only three principal characters, played by Margaret Lawrence, Arthur Byron, and Frederick Perry, and I doubt if there are three other living people who would have fitted into them so well.

AFTER "Tea for Three," life held but little for me. For instance, there was "Information, Please!", the Cowl and Murfin collaboration in which Jane Cowl officially opened the charming new Selwyn Theatre. It is a comedy of the topmost stratum of English society—the exquisite breeding of the characters is shown by their extreme rudeness to the servants—with one of those eccentrically brilliant heroines who strains to talk like "Dodo" but can't quite make it. Miss Cowl is the heroine —a young woman with the disposition of a jaguar, who continually shrieks at her maid, thinks of no one but herself, spoils everyone's plans, makes a most outrageous nuisance of herself generally, and yet is told, every few minutes, by some member of the cast, that just to be near her is to love her. It is indeed absorbing to hear her, in her role of the English noblewoman, ejaculating "Whad d'yer mean?" at short intervals. Diverting, too, is Orme Caldara's performance of the Irish M. P., played with an intermittent brogue. The remaining members of the cast do all they can to make English society what a movie director's conception of it would be.

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I MAY be hypercritical, but I certainly can't understand what they all see in "Sleeping Partners," the comedy from the French of Sacha Guitry. On the first night, I wouldn't have given it a week to live. But then, perhaps I wasn't in exactly the right frame of mind for it. I had endeavored with a blind, childlike faith, to reach the theatre in the subway, and I became hopelessly involved in the shuttle system. I simply couldn't get out of the thing—for what seemed hours, I wandered hopelessly about under the city, feeling like Jean Valjean. It seemed as if I would have to spend the remainder of my life underground, and there was one moment of frightful despondency when I nearly hurled myself under a passing train and ended it all. So when, spent and footsore, I eventually did reach the Bijou, I wasn't in exactly a receptive frame of mind.

"Sleeping Partners" is one of those farces which provides the author with an opportunity to do some fancy skating on thin ice. But that's not what I mean, I don't object to skating on thin ice, in the least; what I do object to is sitting through thin farce. There are long stretches of time in "Sleeping Partners" when I yearned for a pack of cards, so that I could play Canfield to pass the evening away. I admit that H. B. Warner was delightful, and I liked Irene Bordoni, but I didn't seem to care particularly much what happened to them,—possibly because nothing whatever did happen, either to them or to anyone else, at any time during the performance. But, of course, that's all a purely personal matter, and the farce is still running on—the advertisements say it's doing nicely, too—so don't let me prejudice you.

"Nothing but Lies," at the Longacre, was another great blow to me. I am one of those to whom Willie Collier means everything; if he just comes out on the stage and clears his throat I writhe with laughter. No matter what he's in, I like it, as a rule. But Aaron Hoffman's farce was too much, even for me. The comedy is of the subtle order in which the characters are named "George Washington Cross" and "Anna Nigh." There is the most incredibly awful prologue (thank Heaven, I missed most of it, owing to the taxi-driver's pause to exchange good wishes with a motorman) in which Ananias and George Washington sit in a green light and make jokes about Brooklyn. The last act, they tell me, is even worse than the prologue, but I saw it in a daze. Just before that fatal act, they raised subscriptions for the Liberty Loan, raising so many thousands that I, whose mind cannot grasp any sum of money over $3.75, was slightly dizzy for hours afterward. To me, Mr. Collier's Liberty Loan remarks were the best lines of the evening.

He is supported by a large company, including Olive Wyndham, and two exWashington Square players, Florence Enright and Robert Strange,—I'm always deeply interested in Mr. Strange, because my brother went to school with him, which is the closest I ever came to knowing an actor.

PERKINS" is the opus in which Henry Miller and Ruth Chatterton are starring jointly, at the Henry Miller Theatre. Its author, Douglas Murray, has conceived the novel idea of having his heroine masquerade as a parlor-maid in order to find out if the hero loves her for herself or for the fortune he will gain by marrying her. I often wonder what would ever happen to a plot like that if the hero behaved in a rational manner and didn't rush right into an affair with the maid, Well, anyhow, there's nothing like that in "Perkins." It's all strictly according to precedent.

The only daring innovation was the property clock, which struck nine just as tea was being served. Tea is constantly being served throughout the comedy; it is the climax of every act.

The piece has a charming single setting—so many plays have a thrifty way of using but a single setting, these days —of a country cottage by a well-trained sea, which sea swishes only during the love scenes. Mr. Miller plays the role of a virile young farmer from the Canadian backwoods, a part which he interprets by making himself up to look startlingly like Wilton Lackaye; and Ruth Chatterton, as the heroine, sings her lines very prettily.

I don't know how you would feel about it, but I liked Haddon Chambers' comedy, "The Saving Grace." Of course, ten minutes after you leave the Empire Theatre you've forgotten just what it was all about,—but anyway you have the impression of having spent a pleasant, quiet evening with some charming people. Somehow I can't -help liking anything that has Laura Hope Crews in it; I am one of the six people who could even sit all the way through "Romance and Arabella." Everyone in "The Saving Grace" is good—Cyril Maude and Cathleen Nesbitt particularly, of course, and Annie Hughes, as the maid, comes in for honorable mention.

NO one else seems to have been much upset by "The Riddle: Woman," at the Harris. In fact, the newspapers spoke very highly of it, for. the most part. So I must again conclude that I'm all wrong, for I could hardly bear it. It is the work of Charlotte Wells and Dorothy Donnelly, who "acknowledge indebtedness for their idea to a Danish play by C. Jacobi"—and a charming little idea they're indebted to C. Jacobi for, too. It concerns a man who has ruined two women in the cast and who doesn't mean right by a third. The scene is laid in Denmark, which ought to give everything a lofty-browed atmosphere, but doesn't. It didn't even seem sordid, to me—it was just stuffy.

Mme. Kalich is, of course, wonderful, but she has no real opportunity in the play. The only dramatic moment is that of the last act, when she chokes the villain, to get back "the letters." And even that wasn't so thrillingly dramatic—I couldn't help feeling that if the villain had really tried, he could have put up a much better fight. • Crystal Heme has a monotonous part, and Robert Edeson stands out with obtrusive health against the neurotic background. The cast contains two of the most virulent young lovers ever beheld —they bubbled, and chased each other around tables, and were so exuberant that I prayed—in vain—for the scenery to fall on them, and quiet them down.

I am still puzzling over the exact meaning of the title. The only riddle, to me, was why the ladies in the cast all fell for Mr. A. E. Anson.

Way down South, in the Greenwich Village Theatre, something very pleasant is going on. Mr. and Mrs. Coburn are presenting "The Better 'Ole," by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather and Captain Arthur Eliot, with an occasional burst of music by Percival Knight and Herman Darewski. It is a series of scenes showing incidents in the lives of Bairnsfather's immortal Bill and Bert and Alf. It is by all odds the most amusing of the war plays—even the racket of its trench scene couldn't spoil it for me. Mr. Coburn, Colin Campbell and Charles McNaughton are great as the three heroes. Mr. Coburn's make-up, in particular, is marvelous, even to the grimy hands. Think of all the actors who would have played Bill with spotless hands and gleaming finger-nails! By all means, go to "The Better 'Ole"—even if you have to take the subway to get there.