More Moral Victories

Two New Plays by Eugene O'Neill in Which the Playwright Sides With His Characters Against Fate

HEYWOOD BROUN

OF course, a critic ought not to be dogmatic about anybody and least of all about Eugene O'Neill. His plays come out almost as rapidly as the reviews, and what is written this afternoon may not apply in any manner to the five-star sporting final O'Neill drama issued a few hours later. For a time we thought we had captured a complete specimen, and that we could stick a pin in it and say this is Eugene O'Neill. But no metal can touch him. He is flexible, fluid and alert. Growth is still on him. Unlike most native playwrights, his best is nothing like his worst. There are splendid opportunities for contrast because O'Neill frequently puts both into the same play.

It seems to us that he has done so in The Straw. If the last act of that play is not the finest of his achievements, then it is the first act of Anna Christie, It is worth noting that there is a strong temptation to speak of O'Neill in terms of acts rather than plays. This seems to us just. He still writes episodically. His early experimental days in Provincetown are not far behind him. Our choice goes definitely to the closing act of The Straw because for the first time O'Neill has achieved a real tenderness in dealing with characters. Any one of the fates can be impartial and detached and all that. Such qualities are not enough to distinguish so rare a person as a great dramatist. If it were not for pity there would be no such thing as tragedy. It must be the contribution of the playwright. We know that we cannot expect it from the fates.

With Diff'rent particularly in mind we had set O'Neill down among the neutrals. For a long time he seemed inclined to take the attitude that, having brought a character into the world, it was none of his concern what became of him. If we could find the plays of Cain it is likely that they would be markedly similar to the early work of O'Neill. This aloofness has been abandoned in The Straw. O'Neill has made the fight his own. He has definitely taken sides. His place is in the cheering section among the mortals who defiantly keep up their ninety and nine long rahs as fate sweeps up the field for another touchdown. We can afford to be cheerful losers for humanity, like a Yale football team, never fails to gain the moral victor.

"The Straw"

POSSIBLY this is a pitiful sop, but even so it serves to accentuate the poignancy of tragedy. The emotions of pity and of terror are aroused not so much by the fact that man is defeated as by the fact that he dreams of victory right up to the moment of extinction. The finest tragedy should end, therefore, a little short of annihilation. Its peak can be reached at the point where the gap between man's grasp and his reach is most evident.

We know nothing of the limitations of the dead. Our feelings can be stirred to the utmost only by the living whom we understand.

To our mind The Straw ends upon one of the most thrilling moments which O'Neill has ever brought into the theatre. We cannot understand why people insist on speaking of the play as gloomy. It .does not begin to be as gloomy as Getting Gertie's Garter, or any one of half a dozen plays which make abject surrender by turning their backs upon life and creating a false and silly toy world with which we are supposed to divert ourselves. To be sure, there are scenes in the sanitarium which are depressing, but the cast does not begin to cough as much as the audience.

"Oh, why did you give me a hopeless hope?" asks Murray, the hero of the play, when Miss Gilpin, the nurse, tells him that the girl he loves cannot live. "Isn't everything we know —just that—when you think of it?" answers Miss Gilpin. "But there must be something back of it—some promise of fulfillment, somehow—somewhere—in the spirit of hope itself."

This one may take as the deepest pessimism if he pleases, but to us it seems exultant. Fate can't hope because it knows. We have a gamblers' thrill in life because things are hidden a little while. Very possibly we play with stacked cards, but at any rate it is a game for us and not mechanical bookkeeping of unchangeable fact. Who would be timid enough to change anything as fine as hope for mere immortality? It seems to us that in The Straw O'Neill makes it evident for the first time in his life that even if circumstance prevails against the mortal, nobody can rob him of the knowledge that he is actually the better man.

Before the production of The Straw the hope for its eloquent interpretation seemed to rest with Margalo Gillmore, who had been so fine in The Famous Mrs. Fair. She plays well in the role of Eileen, but she is just a little disappointing. The tumultuous scene at the crossroads, in which the sick girl steals away at night to tell the man who is going that she loves him, does not get its full due. The restraint of Miss Gillmore is admirable. We do not mean for a moment that it would be more intense if she ranted and acted up, but we do feel that the edge of passion is dulled by the fact that she simpers just a little. She makes magnificent atonement in the final act when she fairly tears the heart out of the spectator, but even so she cannot take the chief honours away from Otto Kruger.

His is an extraordinary performance. Recruited for the play at the last minute, he came to the first night not knowing all his lines, and we think he should be careful in future never to know them much better. He fumbled a little for words once or twice, which did not help, but he had to keep his wits open to make his intent clear even when he could not quite give the line. When he did remember he was so grateful that the words popped out with enthusiasm and with gusto. Having no solid bulwark of knowledge to fall back upon, Kruger was compelled to pray for inspiration and it poured upon him. We have seen nothing so vivid as his work in the final act. Perhaps he played on impulse. That was just what the role needed. We hope the actor is not going on to become "set" in the part.

Pauline Lord as Anna Christie

O'NEILL'S other play of the month, Anna Christie, also inspired a notable piece of acting. Pauline Lord lifted a fine career a little higher by her portrait of the woman who comes out of a dingy and sorry past in the middle west and finds something cleansing in the sea of her ancestors. Still, we liked the role most in its unrepentant moments. The first act, in which Anna is bitter rather than apologetic, is much the best in the play. She has a fine moment again in the third act when she steps between the two men who are fighting over her destiny and makes them sit down and listen while she tells what she has been and claims a freedom out of the very dregs of her degradation. This strength is largely lost when O'Neill sets the woman to moral whimpering; "It wasn't my fault" and all that sort of business. One may run down sin justly from many angles, but much of it is bold and confident and we wish that O'Neill had left Anna more brazen up to the very end.

The wild Irishman who captures her love is tainted a little by fiction. He is bred out of Life by Synge. There is just a suspicion always that the playwright is at his elbow coaching him in some of his speeches. Another factor which adds a literary flavour is the manner in which the sea is brought into the play. Speech after speech tells what the sea has done for or against somebody or other, and yet its share in the proceedings is never very obvious. The ocean does not rush in upon an unbridled tide. O'Neill has whistled for it upon appropriate occasions, and seemingly the sea has lost the steadfastness which was among its characteristics in the days of Canute. This is a biddable ocean. It comes when it is called.

This month just past has been notable rather more for the work of native playwrights than imported ones, but Sacha Guitry is represented again and this time by the lightest sort of comedy. Indeed it is difficult to keep The Grand Duke as light as the author intended and still avoid paining and shocking American audiences. Guitry has taken as his theme some variations of the notion that heartbreak is among the most hilarious experiences of man and woman. The character played by Lina Abarbanell, for instance, is that of a woman who is trying to revive an old love and who meets every rebuff with merry laughter. It is hard for us to understand that. Our plays and our ballads have trained us to take love very seriously. Perhaps the emotion itself is pretty much the same all over the world, but in the theatre a definitely American standard has been established regarding it, and Guitry slaps this standard in the face.

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He has worked out what seems to him a happy, although ironic, ending by arranging that the Grand Duke shall bring about a match between his former love and a rich old man. He feels that it will be convenient. Guitry thinks it is a good joke, but it is hard for us not to be aghast. David Belasco has been mindful of American susceptibilities, and has coached his actors to play for sentiment whenever the slightest opportunity presents itself. They do not stress this to the point of obscuring the comic values of the piece, but it does play hob with the irony. We all begin to get tender about the actress and her Grand Duke, and hope that something will come of it. The fact that he already has a wife in Russia has been established, but we rather expect that a telegram will arrive announcing another Bolshevist outrage. The solution offered by the playwright is not satisfactory. At any rate, if you felt about it at all as the reviewer did you wanted the little actress to have her Russian straight and not through any devious arrangement by marriage to somebody else. Our emotions in the matter were particularly enlisted because we thought Miss Abarbanell was so conspicuously excellent. Lionel Atwill we liked, but the role does not fit him so neatly as that in Deburau.

Tarkington is off to an excellent start in The Intimate Strangers. He has begun his comedy as a discussion of the relative attractions of the oldfashioned woman and the flapper, but the theme is somewhat sidetracked when the play gets down to a polite farce chase for a family Bible which shall establish the lady's age. As in the other Tarkington play of the year, stamina is wanting. Even the lightest of comedies must have a rugged constitution.

The Perfect Fool ought to establish Ed Wynn as the funniest of all our musical comedy entertainers. He relates one of his most dramatic stories about the man who saved the Slovak army from the invading Silesians by swimming across the river and stealing all the tickets from the railroad station. Wynn wrote his stuff himself and he is accordingly nominated to proceed twice to the head of the class.