"I'm a Good Girl, I Am"

Ladies With One Virtue and None Come to Broadway Playhouses to Express the Holiday Spirit

HEYWOOD BROUN

FROM the very moment each of us becomes articulate he is taught not to be impudent. Few are staunch enough to come through this training unimpaired. Accordingly, since it has been hammered out of us, we all love impudence. We like the young person who does not need to wait for the doctor's order to stick out her tongue.

The constantly recurring comedy of bad manners is built upon this deep lying sympathy of the world for the little rebel. The family has many branches and representatives in our theatre. There was, you may remember, Daniel Vorhees Pike of The Man From Home, Peg, and the Playboy, and LiUom and now Kiki. The type is international.

Kiki is at least a first cousin to Peg. On the surface she is a somewhat tougher person in spite of a certain reformation which the character has undergone in being transferred from the French of Andre Picard to the English of David Belasco.

Fortunately the reformation is not sufficiently thoroughgoing to hurt. A few New York critics have been shocked and horrified by the fact that in the last act Kiki announces that she is "a good girl." We do not agree with those who maintain that her character is necessarily ruined by this device. It is a conventional piece of frippery which has come to be so prevalent in the American theatre that no one pays any attention to it. In the big third act of The Man Who Came Back the heroine used to reel out of her bunk in an opium den to proclaim to the audience that whatever minor foibles she might have acquired she was still chaste. Moreover, the general understanding among matinee audiences in this country is that Camille was a manicure girl. Those who look on these slight changes of the adapter as evidences of rampant puritanism mistake the intent. Nothing more than gallantry is intended. How can a gentleman say anything but "Naturally, my dear," to a heroine who protests her innocence. There is no harm in keeping up an illusion just so long as nobody believes it.

Sweets and Sours

IT does not seem to us that our Kiki varies in any important respect from the delightful baggage who has fascinated the audiences of France. Only a phrase stands between them, and in the American version it is introduced late and with becoming apologies. Lenore Ulric makes Kiki loose enough to please the most exacting. She has created a gamine type of marvelous merriment, and yet she is able to make the rowdy little French chorus girl a person poignantly appealing in her final scene. Miss Ulric has never done anything half so good. Indeed few actresses have. Like most live and vital things, the performance is not flawless. There is a brief scene at the end of the second act which mars the mood of the play. Here for the only time during the evening the flat of the satiric sword is turned upon circumstance. For about two minutes Miss Ulric forgets that Kiki is a person and makes her a funny person. The rest of it seems to us to be the best acting which we have seen in New York this season.

Indeed, Miss Ulric is so good that she is likely to stand in the light of the playwright. It seems simple to say that the actress is everything, and yet Andre Picard has done an exceedingly skilful job. The theme is more than familiar in our theatre. It reappears at least six or seven times in any season, but we do not remember any native dramatic treatment of the gamine which is as good. Picard does not allow the sentimental possibilities to get out of hand. He watches his play as carefully as if it were a salad dressing. Nothing sweet goes in without an equal dash of salty cynicism following immediately after. You are never sure whether he wants you merely to be amused at Kiki or to be somewhat more deeply touched. He makes this doubt redound to his advantage. Many a playwright has worn out his public by allowing it to know just what he is about at any given moment in his play. We do not want to be too sure of our creative artists.

Here we feel is the difficulty of Miss Zoe Akins. She has allowed herself to be identified with what may be called a line of drama. It is showy stuff and at first it seems to have fibre as well. Although we have grown into certain misgivings about Declassee it would be foolish to pretend that it was not without great theatrical effectiveness. But it was not real, and the longer Miss Akins persists in following the same type of story and treatment, just so much harder will she find it to maintain the illusion. She was able to say "Let's pretend" with great infectious enthusiasm when she wrote her play for Ethel Barrymore. She clothed her people in long skirts and eloquence, called them "the mad Varicks" and then let them rant on their way rejoicing.

It was capital ranting. A good deal of it goes a little way, but there is not enough of it in all the world for a long journey. The mood is not sufficiently elastic, we think, to stretch all the way from the "mad A'aricks" to the "bad Venables." In watching The Varying Shore we were moved by a Victorian mood to quote Strachey's Queen and exclaim, "We are not amused."

The only novel feature of the play is that it begins at the end and moves backward. Certainly this did not appeal to us. On the contrary, it was depressing, for it seemed a tragic symbol of the career of Miss Zoe Akins herself in our theatre. Papa of several seasons ago is, perhaps, the best thing which Miss Akins has done. The same retrogressive movement is to be observed in Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, which begins with an act which is worth all the rest of the show put together.

Still the admission must be made that Miss Akins has departed from tradition in some respects. Julie Venable differs a little from Kiki and some of the other heroines whom we have mentioned. Unlike the more familiar type Miss Venable has all the virtues except the one which goes by that name. Each act of the play deals with one of her lapses, and the author has been insistent to point out that each of them is sacrificial. We are not willing to accept the theatrical dictum that for a woman there is only one important sin, but it seems just as sentimental for a playwright to do a drama about a poor, dear, unfortunate courtesan. The very good women and the very bad ones of our theatre are too much alike to be interesting.

Superfluous Crises

"BEFORE The Varying Shore has ended Julia Venable has been betrayed so often that it does not really seem very important. Miss Akins has forgotten an important technical rule laid down by Professor George Pierce Baker or Aristotle or somebody in which he maintains that, dramatically speaking, two betrayals are only half as good as one.

Miss Elsie Ferguson makes a lovely picture as the heroine of the play by Miss Akins, but of course upon this occasion she ought to be making not a picture but a play. It seems to us that she lacks vocal variety. Perhaps her great success recently upon the screen has made her forget that words are also important. She attempts to do too much with facial expression and gesture. She clenches her teeth upon too many lies and tries to colour them even before they have been spoken. The best thing which may be said for The Varying Shore is that it does possess moments of eloquence, but most of these are smothered.

In our opinion Miss Zoe Akins has an extraordinary talent for the theatre. We wish she would get rid of the bushel.

The Theatre Guild has an interesting bill from the French as its present attraction. The Guild has done worse and a good deal better in its time. The best of the two plays is The Wife with a Smile, by Denys Amiel and Andre Obey. It is labelled as a tragi-comedy and on the whole lives up to the requirements of this interesting and rather unusual mood. Our complaint against the play is that it depends too largely upon a trick. Early in the action we see the loaded revolver and then for the better part of two acts each one of us is kept in suspense wondering to himself, "When are they going to shoot the thing off!" This doubt and this over-centralization of attention rather detracts from other elements in the play which deserve to be closely observed. After all the piece is more than a trick play. It is an unusual and searching comedy of married life, but the one lone revolver is enough to make it seem above everything else a stunt play.

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The Wife with a Smile enlists Arnold Daly and Blanche Yurke, and both give interesting performances. On the first night Daly served as a model for all young actors both by example and indirection. In the farce number on the programme, Boubouroche, he was almost as ineffective as he was good in the earlier play. In one he made faces and in the other he didn't. This seems to be the distinguishing characteristic between the good and the bad Daly.

William Gillette has come to town in a melodrama called The Dream Maker, which is generally good fun although not quite inventive enough to last all through the evening. As long as Gillette is able to think up startling improbabilities, or rather adapt those of Howard E. Morton, on whose scenario the play is founded, everything is delightful. At the end things begin to happen about as you think they are going to and then diversion wanes, However, Gillette himself continues to wave from beginning to end. He gives an extraordinarily adroit performance.