"Liliom," the Roughneck, and Drama Less Refined

HEYWOOD BROUN

With the Suggestion that, if Anybody Dramatizes Ellis Island, Only English Need be Used

LORD DUNSANY once made the excellent suggestion that there should be devised for dramatic purposes a new language to be known as dialect. It would serve, he suggested, for the peasants and commoners in any of his mythical kingdoms, for Whitechapel folk, low comedy Irishmen, Scotch ballads, French waiters, scenes in Chinatown and the ghetto, and in fact wherever there seemed to be any reason why the characters should speak with some particular tang of their own. Such a plan would do much to simplify the work of actors and also of critics. For instance, as a violent convert to the charms of Franz Molnar's Liliom I would like to say something in rebuttal of the one complaint which has been recorded against it. I see by the papers that Eva Le Gallienne who plays the part of a Magyar servant girl does not use an authentic accent. Unfortunately, I have not the slightest idea of what a Magyar accent ought to be like, particularly after it has been translated into English.

As a matter of fact, Miss Le Gallienne plays without accent of any sort and leaves it up to the audience to supply the dialect mentally. This seems to be a good scheme. Since Miss Le Gallienne supplies a diction so good that it is possible to hear every word she speaks, except in the prayer scene where she purposely mumbles, it seems little enough to ask that the audience for its part should supply the begorras, or the cheerios, or the lawdy-lawdys, or whatever particular accent seems to them to fit the role.

Dudley Digges for his part plays the highwayman of Central Europe in straight cockney, and plays it exceedingly well, while Schildkraut has just the slightest trace of German accent. This may seem a confusing combination, but I must confess that, until the question was introduced by reviewers more sharpeared than myself, I noted none of these factors. For me the spell of Liliom proved so strong that it might have been played in pidgin English without distracting attention.

The Uses of Fantasy

MOLNAR'S play is not only among the most engrossing of the season, but it serves to prove, if indeed it needs any proving, that no technical rule of play writing can stand up against any one who brings a vital notion to the playhouse. It has generally been understood and preached by the students of craftsmanship that the author who wished to develop a fantastic theme must begin early in the evening to establish his atmosphere. Seventy-nine per cent of any audience which goes to see a play by Barrie is drawn by the fact that it thinks he "is just so whimsical, my dear, I love him", and yet he thought it wise to help out the mood of Mary Rose by herding soprano singers under the stage and touching them off whenever supernatural things were about to happen. Molnar's scheme has been bolder and simpler. He begins with an almost wholly naturalistic story of underworld life. Julie, the little servant girl, runs away with Liliom, the roughneck bouncer of the merrygo-round. They live together and he loafs and beats her. Still he is overjoyed to hear that she is going to have a baby, and to lay up money against the event he joins a criminal friend in an attempt to hold up the paymaster of a factory. The police rush in and Liliom, trapped, kills himself.

Up to this point Gorky might have written most of the play, though to be sure he would have ironed out a good many sentimental touches which Molnar permits himself. In the main, however, it is as I have said, realistic. If the final curtain came down upon the death of Liliom, the play would have been hailed as an interesting but sordid story of the underworld. Molnar has other interests. The realistic treatment does not solve all his problems. Particularly he rebels against the dramatic convention that anything is actually settled by having the leading character kill himself. This he feels is begging the question. He wants to go on with the story and so he does by sending Liliom to Heaven for trial. Then he brings him back to earth again. Molnar feels that he has to get behind and beyond anything so stark and inarticulate as death to find out and to show the true inwardness of Liliom. We do not know the man fully until he has spent fifteen years in the plane of cleansing fire and come back to earth for a single day to see his wife and child. He comes back under the express advice of the Chief Magistrate to do one kind deed before he returns to court again. Fifteen years of fire have not been enough to make Liliom, the roughneck, pliable in the ways of virtue. Being good embarasses him frightfully. To be sure, he has stolen and brought down from Heaven a star for his child, but he makes his proffer so awkwardly that she refuses and he slaps her hard upon the wrist in sudden irritation. He has never had any inhibitions about anger. And yet the child does not feel the blow and wonders. It is then that Julie understands and we, too, in the audience.

"How can any one hit you hard like that and not hurt you? Is it possible?" asks the child.

"It is possible, my child," answers Julie, "that some one might strike you, and even beat you, and beat you, and beat you, and not hurt you at all."

We know then what was in the heart of Liliom all the time no matter how badly he may have translated it into words and even deeds.

Eva Le Gallienne, for all the fact she may be a shade too finicky in speech, seems to me ideal as Julie. Hers is not a very long part; she has a great deal of standing al>out to do and of listening and in all such service she is gorgeously eloquent. Indeed the pictorial appeal of Liliom is continuously engrossing. The settings mark the best work of Lee Simonson who has managed to be ingenious without ever once sacrificing beauty. Nor does he descend at all to prettiness. One never feels that a strong breeze would set all the colors to tumbling and rock the great railroad embankment. These pictures enfolded before us in Liliom are all living and deep-rooted things.

Joseph Schildkraut as Liliom is just a little too ingenious. He creates the impression of being over rich in accomplishments. Now and again they seem to stand like hurdles in the path of sincerity. Just after the first performance of Pagans a reviewer rebuked the critics of New York for not appreciating Schildkraut. He pointed out that the young continental actor had played no less than one thousand roles. It shows in Liliom. Mr. Schildkraut is never quite content to play just one role. He does too many things. Most of them are excellent and his performance ought to be set down as interesting and arresting. Few, if any, of our actors could better it, but it is not quite vital, certainly not as vital as the play itself.

The Conventions of Speech

MOLNAR has told the story of a man who could not quite reveal the extent of his love, while Porto-Riche in The 'Tyranny of Love concerned himself with a woman whose difficulty lay in the fact that she just couldn't conceal the breadth and depth of her affection. Her husband, a scientist, found it wearing. Just when he was quite intent on discovering some new serum his wife would turn up wanting to be kissed. When this familiar French comedy of thirty years ago was first seen in New York in English, at a series of special matinees, it was found to have been adapted a little by Henry Baron. The adaptation consisted chiefly in putting in "New York" wherever the line read "Paris" or "Denver" in place of "Rome". Now it has gone back to its French lpcale again, although the doctor still speaks of being "out of luck."

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rages of potatoes and loud cries of "It never happened in Ireland" when it was produced by the Abbey Theatre Company more than ten years ago. This time there was no hostile demonstration. Perhaps the professional Irishmen decided that the Bramhall was too small

to house a really striking riot and so they left it alone. The play wears well, It is probably one of the few plays of our generation which is likely to survive in the repertory of the theatre. In a measure there was a certain justice in the protest of the rioters, "It never happened in Ireland", for The Playboy is among the dramas which leap over boundary lines. In its surface details Ireland has its part, but the spirit is of something much more universal. Just so an indignant Scandinavian might leap to his feet during a performance of Hamlet and cry "It never happened in Denmark." The present performance is not as good as that which the Abbey

Curiously enough when the play was supposed to occur in New York the part of the American artist who serves as lover was played by Georges Flateau. Now that the artist is again a Frenchman, Brandon Tynan has stepped into the role. However, in consistent support of what has already been said about accent and dialect in plays, I maintain that such trifles are of no moment. Tynan is excellent. After all, you can't have any theatre at all without accepting the convention that Frenchmen speaking to each other talk English and so do Germans and natives of the South Sea Islands. Compromise of any kind is confusing.

In a melodrama of several seasons ago called Three Faces East the German plotters used English while talking to each other even in their secret fastness in Germany, but their passwords were in German. Fortunately when they gave them to the heroine she repeated them in German and then, immediately afterwards, translated them obligingly into English for the sake of the audience.

However, in The Tyranny of Love Estelle Winwood manages to seem a Frenchwoman quite irrespective of the language in which she plays. Her performance as the aggressively clinging vine is capital. Charles Cherry is effective as the doctor husband and Brandon Tynan serves to complete a capable cast in the role of the lover. Time has served to date the play of Porto-Riche a little. The brilliant ironic comedy of the first two acts is not dimmed in the least. So brilliant is the sword play that everybody in the audience is apt to feel doubtful if there will be any such thing as marriage in existence after the run of The Tyranny of Love. But satire is a weapon which makes severe demands upon the mind and muscles of the man who wields it, and by the time the third act begins Porto-Riche cannot keep it up. From this point on the play becomes more and more like the triangle plays from France which we all know so well. Men hiss threats, and the woman falls to her knees and pleads. The importance of banter is quite lost in the triviality of a big scene.

The Immortal Playboy

ANOTHER successful revival went to the credit side of the season's ledger when a little group of young players who have banded together under the name of the New York Repertory Theatre brought Synge's Playboy of the Western World to the Bramhall. This was the play which inspired barTheatre players gave, but it is distinctly a creditable achievement, with Thomas Mitchell winning the bulk of the honours for his performance as Christy.

Modern American drama of the month does not quite bulk up to the mark set by foreign importations and revivals. The one native play produced during this same period is called Just Married and it is one of the many bedroom farces in which all the agitation occurs because a young gentleman under the influence of liquor gets by mistake into the room of a young woman who has gone to sleep. Nobody but the audience knows of the mistake until the next day. Naturally, there is a scene in which the young man wraps a sheet about himself while the young woman screams and faints. It is also inevitable that the young man and the young woman shall pretend to be married and that at the end of the play they shall make this pretence good. None of this sounds very funny, but it becomes my pleasant duty to say that in spite of everything here revealed there are moments of genuine amusement in Just Married. Lynne Overman, a young actor not very well known in New York, is responsible for all the merriment. He is able to play the part of an inebriated man for an entire act and be amusing all the time. This is a record. He is amusing, too, when by the exigencies of the plot it becomes necessary for him to be sober, but by this time the law of diminishing returns has begun to set in.

Music and Mediocrity

OF the current musical shows recently introduced Two Little Girls in Blue is much the best. In it the Fairbanks Twins, Marion and Madeline, manage to look exactly alike without half trying. Nor does it seem to require any greater effort on their part to dance in complete twinship. As a matter of fact, they also sing alike, but we needn't go into that. Two Little Girls in Blue is not overwhelmingly funny and the music, although pleasant, has little individual distinction. The appeal of the piece lies in the fact that whenever the conversation lags somebody comes out and does a dance and does it very well. The suggestion is passed along to hostesses for what it is worth, with the added information that the nautch number of Miss Vanda Hoff was particularly well received.

Phoebe of Quality Street is said to be an adaptation of Barrie's Quality Street. The original play comes to my mind rather vaguely, but I am curious to know just what line of Barrie's was obliged to make way for Edward Delaney Dunn's quip which begins "Has the gentleman had any military experience?" and ends, "Yes, he's been half shot."

Princess Virtue has the beautiful voice of Tessa Kosta and not much else worth remembering. Next on my list I find June Love, and for the life of me I can't remember a single detail of the entertainment. I am under the impression that it is a musical show, and after great and painful deliberation I seem to see a choral number in which all the girls swing golf clubs. It may be also that this was the show in which the girls in the front line wagged their heads toward the southeast, while those in the second bent to the northwest. Whether these memories are accurate or not it seems safe to say that June Love is perfectly harmless.