Complicated Love Affairs and Whimsical Decisions

Several New Plays Noted, With a Just Censure of Producers Who Mutilate Them

HEYWOOD BROUN

FOR some reason the American theater has never produced many consistent performers among those who write for it. But even so, we are a little amazed that the best play and the worst one among the early season arrivals were both written by the same man. Vincent Lawrence, who is pretty nearly a newcomer, is the pied author. In Love with Love is his good play, and Two Fellows and a Girl is the bad one; and the gap between them is so great that we have not yet been able to figure out just what might account for it.

Mr. Lawrence is having his big year. In addition to the two plays already here, there is by report a third one, wandering about New England, waiting for a good moment to come in. We are told that all his plays begin with a girl who is trying to decide between two or three or four suitors. That seems to be a very good idea for a playwright. There is enough in even a fairly meager situation to keep an author busy for one lifetime, if he is really going to get all around it and under it and into it. Mr. Lawrence's situation is not meager. In fact, he has already got a dull farce and a brilliant comedy out of it, and there still wait for him the comedies of the woman who marries all her suitors, or one after another, of the woman who will marry none of them, and the corresponding tragedies of the woman who marries them all, and of the one who scorns them.

We are able to give all these suggestions to Mr. Lawrence so free-handedly because we have already learned from him that the mere scheme of his play is not enough for him; that, in fact, he may take any or all of our ideas and do them so badly that we can use them right after him without even a very desperate chance of being caught.

Certainly, if we had been asked beforehand whether we should rather see the comedy of the woman who chose her husband by flipping a fifty cent piece and learned five years later that the method was inferior, than to see what happened when, driven by the insistencies of two rival suitors, she ran for rescue to a third, we would have demanded the first one, by all means.

Yet it was precisely this first plan that went to pot in Two Fellows and a Girl, and the second that grew and prospered in In Love with Love.

The Producer's Insistent Collaboration

IT is not a mere disposition to unpleasantness in us which leads us to dwell somewhat on the faults of Mr. Lawrence's first and worst play. For one thing, it was the first to appear. For another, it was presented with so much confusion of purpose, and so many odds and ends of good stuff stuck out on it even after its visible pruning, that we think we may be able to lay some of the blame for it on another doorstep than Mr. Lawrence's.

George M. Cohan was its producer. Mr. Cohan has the reputation of laying harsh hands on an author's works when he feels that he must. We are therefore going to make the experiment of reviewing Two Fellows and a Girl, as if the program had read "By Vincent Lawrence and George M. Cohan".

Mr. Lawrence's beginning was as we have described. The girl couldn't decide, and the two fellows were both pretty pressing. The play opened on the very night that both had decided that they "had to know now". So the girl flipped the coin. The first act ended with the departure for parts unknown of the fellow who didn't get the girl.

The second act opened with his return—or, to be exact, with his telephone announcement of his return, and the conversation that the girl had with her husband over what his behavior would probably be.

As Lawrence wrote the play, from this point on, it was the play of a woman who discovered, in a turn of this conversation, that her husband found nothing but cause for great amusement in her idea, confidingly stated, that of course the other fellow had come back to see her; to have one more sight of the one great love of his life. To this husband of five years' experience, a romantic secret of this description was enormously comic, and "just like a woman".

Lawrence's woman took this standing up, but Cohan's woman couldn't. Lawrence's woman said the equivalent of "Is that so" and reached firmly for the returning man, tied him to her hand and foot, and held him out to her husband, breathless with battle, and demanded, "Now how funny is it that some man should be in love with me?"

Of course the Lawrence play couldn't end there. The thing was potentially tragic, and the tragedy was only partially averted by ploughing up the intelligence of the husband to a point where he could understand some of his own guilt, and promise to improve himself.

The Dangers of Arbitrary Revision

BUT a play with certain tragic aspects is not a crime, nor even necessarily a failure. We imagine the reason George Cohan would not have such a woman was really a little better than merely the prospect of her being unpopular. Inasmuch as he took her from Mr. Lawrence at the point where she was just about to do something definite on her own, and made her back into a puppet who didn't do anything, we are obliged to surmise about his motives. We think he wanted to make sure, in the language of the theater, that she "did not lose the sympathy of the audience". We think he thought a woman who deliberately roped in a man not her husband for purposes of window display would not only estrange an audience, but would offend something in them which it was important and virtuous not to offend.

If Cohan complains that we are going pretty far in assigning him motives which he has had no chance to affirm or deny, and then falling to and scolding him for having them, we have the excuse that his production must be explained on some grounds, and that we have given him the best we can think of. We are not, for instance, wholly dependent on the accident of knowing, from outside sources, that the play Lawrence gave him and the one he produced are two different plays. By sleuthing just a little, from our seat in the Vanderbilt Theater, cut off from all outside communication, we were able to see that the characters in this piece were not those originally designed for this story. If we were walking in the country and saw a Georgian courtyard, great stone steps and a granite foundation all surmounted by a portable house, we should certainly know what we should know.

So we connect the issue with George Cohan. Somebody drained the life out of Two Fellows and a Girl, because plain traces remained of its having been there; and as it af j eared, it was dead. Cohan may be corrcci in believing that audiences will not accept a play about a woman who is too up and coming. We hope not, if only because active people are more interesting than inactive ones. But we hope not for another reason. We hope there are audiences, here or coming, who won't always be pampering their "sympathies".

How Some Producers Spoil Plays

THIS is an insufficient space in which to go into all the heres and theres of sympathygetting. We should simply like to say that in our opinion it is one of the blights of the whole theater. Also, to get on the Lawrence play that we really liked, we can prove from In Love with Love that the stencils of sympathygetting are the very last that he deserves to have clamped down on his plays. Here is a comedy, presented by William Harris, Jr., in which all the people have been allowed to come in and go out under whatever moral auspices they happened to. be at the moment. Many of them behaved outrageously. In fact, there was hardly one among them who didn't bulge out far beyond what audiences are supposed to be willing to allow in the way of ungraceful behavior.

The girl herself caps off the tale by proposing to a man who doesn't want to marry her, and she won't let up on him till she has him, either. This breaks a rule that is older than time. But In Love with Love has more friends than it knows what to do with. In a moment of down-heartedness we predicted that Two Fellows and a Girl might outstay In Love with Love, and we called for the abolition of all audiences if this should prove to be true. Now we are cheered by finding that, though the Vanderbilt is filled nightly for the Cohan piece, so is the Ritz for the Harris one, and at worst we will have to abolish only half the audiences.

Tarkington's New Play

IF there is little comparison between the two Lawrence plays, there is less between the two companies. In Love with Love is not a perfect exhibit of casting, but is more than half perfect, and it has Lynn Fontanne. Miss Fontanne is an actress of perfect beauty. The season is not yet old enough for us to have whittled out any new adjectives and the old ones are not good enough for her. But we hope for the time when we may be able to do her proper credit for the scene at the end of the play, where she scared the life out of us for fear she would lose her man.

Booth Tarkington's new play, Tweedles, nee Bristol Glass, might be pretty tedious without the help of its actors. Gregory Kelly and Ruth Gordon do more than an author has much right to expect to keep Tweedles from being less an actual Tarkington play than a mere reminder of one. As it is, there are places where we wished everybody would hurry along. But there are also places where we had a perfectly fine time; and looking back, and marking off the one notable exception of Donald Meek, it seems that our good times were all when Kelly or Miss Gordon were there, We wish we could think of some way to suggest that a comedy is fragile, without actually saying it. The more we see of Tarkington comedies, for instance, the more we realize that "fragile" isn't what we mean. And yet we never yet have described a Tarkington piece without saying fragile, not merely once, but three or four times. What we should like to say is that when anything is really happening in one of these plays, it isn't light, or fragile, or inconsequent at all, but is of the stoutest kind of human material, But there are always long stretches in between, when absolutely nothing is happening. This waters the whole thing down.

(Continued on page 114)

(Continued from page 50)

Kelly and Miss Gordon do almost their best work in sustaining Tweedlcs between the Tarkington islands. Donald Meek does his great service in the five minutes when he has superb material. We do not mean to take away from him anything of his rightful glory. He convulsed an audience as we have seldom seen one convulsed by anybody. But, after all, though he might have given a little less, if he had got a great deal less he would have deserved nothing, for Tarkington wrote for him the most effective single scene in the play, The Good Old Days is the current Aaron Hoffman offering. There is no use denying that we laughed at the top of our lungs time after time. It is low-grade stuff, and some of the jokes positively made us sick, but some of the others certainly didn't. It is a Prohibition play, but there is no mistaking the fact that Mr. Hoffman is heartily against Prohibition. His earnestness was apparent, More than that, it was deeply shared by its first-night audience, who, for the first few minutes, interrupted every few lines to endorse the Hoffman sentiments with hearty applause. The Good Old Days was funny enough to swing its spectators from a mood of righteous and thorough indignation to one of almost hysterical laughter. That is probably as good a way as any to fight Prohibition, and certainly it is a pleasanter way to spend an evening than with the fiercer sentiments, The play touches on the war rather alarmingly at the beginning, and we were a little afraid that we were going to have to hear about the German atrocities all over again; but Mr. Hoffman thought better of it. During the first act, the curtain was lowered for ten seconds to indicate the lapse of four years, and the war lapsed at the same time.

George Bickel and Charles Winninger help to make The Good Old Days funny; but Mathilde Cottrelly, who in her time has done better acting than Bickel or Winninger ever dreamed of, was almost a complete loss to the production.