Are Actors People?

"Kempy" Seems to Argue the Affirmative and Provides One of the Most Amusing Plays of Season

HEYWOOD BROUN

ONE of the most convenient theories of the American dramatic critic is sent sprawling by Kempy. Annually, every reviewer in good standing is expected to write an essay bewailing the fact that playwrights are too close to the theatre to know anything about life. This assumption is generally followed by a trumpet call to the farmer in Iowa to leave his plough in order to record his impressions of life in three acts and thereby save the American drama from mere theatricalism. As a matter of fact it was our purpose to write such an article at this time. We have done so for a number of years, and it is disturbing to be jarred loose from a habit. Now it is impossible. Kempy stands in the middle of the broad avenue with upraised hand. We must stop with the best grace which we can command.

The havoc wrought in a favorite conception by Kempy is particularly severe, because by almost ever)' rule of past experience it ought to serve ever so neatly as a horrible example. It is a play by an actor and, more than that, a play by two actors. The presumptive case is strengthened farther by the fact that one of the pair has been in vaudeville for more than thirty years and has written hundreds of those short entertainments known as "dramatic sketches." We haven't been to vaudeville for two years, but a dramatic sketch used to be a thing in which a lady performer came out and said, "While I am waiting for my husband, who has gone to a minstrel showat the Elks, I will just sit down at the piano and run over a few of my favorite songs." And then she would. Later there was generally a burglar with complications.

Out of Briggs by Vaudeville

"CAN any good thing come out of vaudeville?" we wondered before the curtain went up on Kempy. One minute and twentyeight seconds later we knew that it could. The new play by j. C. Nugent and Elliott Nugent has practically the same quality of easy familiarity with middle-class life in America as a Briggs cartoon. Much of it seems kin to the happenings in an "Oh Man!" strip. Throughout the evening we watched and waited for symptoms of vaudeville virus. We expected to find the comedy breaking out into gags. It did nothing of the sort. There was one rather laboriously transported joke about plumbers and authors of musical shows and, perhaps, three or four more during the evening, but almost all the entertaining lines of the play rested on their plausible relationship to a character in a given situation.

Not only was the Nugent family responsible for writing the play, but it has largely contributed the players. The cast is full of Nugents and all of them are excellent. J. C. Nugent, one of the authors, plays a cross old man as nobody has played such a part hereabouts since the death of William Sampson. Elliott Nugent, his son and collaborator, gives an altogether charming performance as Kempy, the hero of the play. Kempy is a young man who has read the books which explain how it is possible for a masterful person to get everything he wants. He finds that he can do it and that it is a terrible gift. Ruth is the three star final Nugent of the cast. She impersonates a sub-flapper with grace and skill. Grant Mitchell brings his pleasant authority to the interpretation of the comedy but, though he is featured on the program, his role is distinctly secondary, and it is quite obvious that he is hiding his light as a favor to somebody.

Kempy suggests The First Year more than any other recent play. It is a little more fantastic and has not quite the same finish and assurance which Frank Craven has contributed to his comedy, but it is a resolute move in that direction. The story has to do with a young man and woman who marry upon impulse and repent in haste. Kempy came to the Bence home to fix a pipe, but there he discovered that Katherine Bence was the author of Angie's Temptation. When he read that book over in the Y. M. C. A. in France, he vowed that if he ever met the girl who wrote it he would marry her. And Katherine was willing because. Kempy was the only person she ever met who had liked her book and believed in her. They went across the river and were married.

Half an hour later Kempy was observing that thev ought not to allow books like that— anyway not in the Y. M. C. A. By that time he knew that it was not Katherine Bence whom he loved but Ruth. Playwrights like masterful man who generally get what they want. It is no trouble at all to arrange an annulment in the last act which straightens out everything.

Belated Successes

SEVERAL of the plays within the last month have been so amusing that it seems pertinent to inquire what delayed them. One of the belated successes which has come to town is Partners Again by Montague Glass and Jules Eckert Goodman. It is rather a pity that these playwrights do not put one of the Potash and Perlmutter plays into Lancashire dialect or wild Irish, because, although countless numbers have laughed at Abe and Mawruss, there has not been any very widespread recognition of the fact that here is art as well as entertainment. Partners Again is one of the funniest of the series, but it sticks a little more consistently to the surface than some of the others. There are times when the partners may be found exchanging lines rather than talking. Occasionally the give and take has almost the aspect of a sidewalk conversation in a vaudeville act. But even those portions of Partners Again which seem just vaudeville are such good vaudeville that they are intensely amusing. We feel that Mr. Glass can do better and we think he should. We don't know why. No play of the year which we have seen has aroused such a terrific tumult of laughter. But of course there are plays so funny that laughter does not seem enough. These wear a little better.

There are occasional flaws in the laugh making technique of Partners Again. Curiously enough, Glass and Goodman fall occasionally into the rudimentary mistake of first stating their joke and then explaining it. "Where would you have been now," asks a character, "if you had taken a $100,000 and put it with Henry Ford when he started?" To which Mr. Potash replies, approximately, "We would still be in Sing Sing, because we couldn't have gotten hold of $100,000, then or now, without stealing it."

Barney Bernard has always given a perfect performance in the role of Potash, and he does it again. Alexander Carr is also brilliant as Perlmutter. His value is less in the reading of lines than in his pantomime. Few actors hit so frequently upon the right gesture. More than that Carr contributes a grace which is sometimes beautiful and Partners Again needs some such sort of aesthetic to give a little variety to its humorous intent.

The best play of the month is Fanny Hawthorn but then it is hardly a play of the month. It becomes immediately upon production a play of "our time". It seems a little late in the day to dispense with the title Hindle Wakes. To be sure, it was not a good name for the American market. Everybody supposed that Hindle was asleep, but had left a call. As a matter of fact, its values have been but little affected by its ten year siesta away from the American stage. Indeed, in some senses, it seems rather less a propaganda play than when Stanley Houghton first wrote it. In its first appearance there were a good many who were so shocked by the doctrine it expounded that they could hardly pay more than casual attention to the tale itself.

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Entirely apart from its theme Hindle Wakes (or Fanny Hawthorn, if you will) is likely to maintain its place in the theatre because it is without doubt one of the most expertly carpentered plays of our day. One never detects the author in the act of whistling to his characters or snapping his fingers in order to get them off the stage. And the classical feature of peripety—everybody knows that it means the turning of the tables—has never been more perfectly achieved than in the scene in which Fanny suddenly turns upon the people who have been laboriously planning out the rest of her life and declares that the young man is not good enough for her. She has no intention of marrying him. She would rather be a free woman than an honest one.

The piece is again played with rare skill. Several members of the original cast reenlisted. Whitford Kane is again the Chris Hawthorn and Herbert Lomas steps back into the role of Nathaniel Jcffcote, as readily as if he had never been away. Eileen Huban is now the Fanny Hawthorn and she gives a good performance, but we think we liked Miss Emilie Pollini better Miss Huban is just a shade too sullen. Her revolt may be confused with mere bad temper.

The Bronx Express has been translated from Yiddish into English and something has happened on the way. A poetic idea has become commonplace in the process. No translator nor adaptor can be blamed for The Goldfish. In any tongue it would still be a bad play. The same thing holds true of What The Public Wants even if Bernett did write it. Still he did manage to do rather better than the author of Go Easy, Mabel.