The Theatrical Callboard

Critical Notes Before the Curtain Rises

KENNETH MACGOWAN

UNQUESTIONABLY this is not the year of the Great American Drama, Eugene O'Neill's play about Ponce dc Leon, The Fountain, is postponed to next season, and Owen Davis's Icebound, the Kaufman-Connelly Merton and Jesse Lynch Williams' Why Not?—excellent all of them—seem to be about the best that Broadway can do in home-grown drama. Meantime we go with a pretty good grace to Hamlet, R. U. R., Peer Gynl, Six Characters in Search of an Altthor, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Loyalties, the Moscow Art Theatre, and a dozen other European products, Among the new plays announced for March the most interesting are also Continental. The Comedian, for instance, a play by the Frenchman, Sacha Guitry, in which David Bclasco is presenting Lionel Atwill. This appears to be a translation and perhaps a rather free adaptaLion of Jacqueline, a play of sober values which Lucien Guitry, the father of the playwright, acted with much applause in London last summer. It is the story of the love of a famous middle-aged Parisian actor for a feather-brained and selfish mynx. Act one poses their runaway match. Act two descends to farce and rather obvious humor in a scene of rehearsal. In the last act the wife deserts the comedian because he will not allow her to appear on the stage with him. And as his love for her has grown greatly since the rather larkish marriage, the comedian faces tragedy at last.

"If Winter Comes"

THAT piece of romantic sentimentality, A. S. M. Hutchinson's novel, If Winter Comes, was bound inevitably for the stage. The type-characters—the brilliantly aristocratic heroine, the absurd servants, High and Low Jinks, the Dickensian business partner, the Joblike Mark Sabre, all beloved by hundreds of thousands of readers—shrieked for the stage. Then, too, the trial scene. Arrantly theatrical as it is to the last degree, what actor or what hack-playwright could resist it?

The play has already been done in London and the English provinces, with Owen Nares playing Sabre. The critics found that its success depended not only on the popularity of the novel, but on the audience's knowledge of the plot gained from the printed page. They conceded, however, the extraordinary effectiveness of the trial of Sabre, a scene that Nares acted uncommonly well.

In New York the part of Sabre is to be played by England's most accomplished and virtuoso performer on voice, figure, and make-up, Cyril Maude. Maude is just passed sixty, but he has always practiced the true art of impersonation so skilfully that it is nothing at all for him to jump from the doddering dotage of Grumpy to the young middle-age of Sabre, The England of Hutchinson and the Czecho-Slovakia of Karel Capek, are a considerable distance apart. But the mental kingdoms of Bernard Shaw and of the author of R. U. R. lie considerably closer, In the case of Back to Methuselah and Capek's newest drama, The Makropulos A ffair, they appear to overlap. Both are concerned with the prolongation of human life. Capek pictures it as already accomplished. His central figure is a famous singer who has been living under various names and indulging in various careers for the past three hundred years, all as the result of a charm invented by her father, a court physician. She thrusts herself into the climax of a legal battle that has been going on for a century, establishes her old age by her knowledge of facts connected with the beginning of the case, and ultimately demands the recipe for the charm, which is in the possession of one of the lawyers. Buying it with the fragments that she has left of what is called her honor, she begins to yearn for eternal, peace instead of eternal life. The recipe is ultimately burned, but not before there is a good deal of argument over the desirability of prolonging life.

Capek and Shaw

IN a preface to the printed play— which has been acted at the theatre managed by Capek and his brother in Prague and to which William Harris, Jr. owns the rights, I believe—the playwright anticipates the charge of plagiarism by saying: "The similarity of material is quite superficial, for Shaw arrives at conclusions the exact opposite of those of this play. So far as I can judge, Shaw sees in the possibility of living some hundreds of years an ideal state of humanity, a sort of future paradise. In this comedy long life is pictured as something quite different, as a state with little of the ideal about it, and indeed little to be desired. It is difficult to say which is the right view. On both sides we are without actual experience."

If the Neighborhood Playhouse were only functioning this season we should long ago have seen John Galsworthy's ironic comedy, A Family Man. It was written before Loyalties, acted in London in the spring of 1921, and recently published by Scribner's. The piece is not calculated to intrigue the Broadway manager, since its central figure is middleaged and unsympathetic in the ordinary sense, and it has to do with the very English tradition of the lordly man-of-the-house.

But A Family Man has its points, for all that. The father who finds his daughters running off with Art and young men just when he is to be made mayor of the city, and who finds himself in jail for tapping one of them with a stick in a moment of exasperation, is a rich, humorous, and significant figure. The comedy is sometimes as poor as Galsworthy's comedy generally is, but it is often exceptionally amusing. The situations give evidence on the printed page of that quality of sheer, effective theatre which distinguishes Loyalties. The revolt of the younger generation, which gives it motive power, ought to bridge the gap between the provincial town of Brecoi.ridge in the Midlands and New York.

Much less likely to reach Broadway but interesting for all that, is Savanarola, the play which has followed Johannes Kreislcr at the Theater in der Koeniggratzerstrasse in Berlin. It is nothing more nor less than a visualization of the brilliant group of studies of the Renaissance in dialogue form which the French writer Gobineau made under the same title. The play opens with Savanarola's youth and shows him beginning his idealistic attempts to reform the Church, It ends with the death of this amazing religious and political fanatic at the stake, The principal theatrical interest, in the production seems to derive from the expressionistic settings and costumes, These are the work of a young Russian, Paul von Tschelitscheff, who provided dicors for Der Plane Vogel, Berlin's imitation of La Chauve-Souris. Violent lines and curves dominate the backgrounds, and the costumes are made of stiff materials so cut and sewed as to give the actors the appearance of marionettes, an appearance heightened by the character of their movements. The Pope is simply a huge idol-like figure with holes in it through which the player thrusts his head and arms.

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The last work of the long life of William Winter was the preparation of an extraordinarily elaborate two-volume Life of David Belasco. It is no model of writing; I doubt if any of Winter's work has any standing in craftsmanship. It is often absurd, venomous, or fulsome in its criticism. But it is, nevertheless, a very valuable record of the activities of a manager whose career has been filled with a remarkable array of incidents and accomplishments. There is, for instance, the following statement from Belasco with regard to his reforms in lighting:

"I confess that I have at times felt some annoyance when I have been informed by young writers in the press,— who were not born until long after I had made great improvement in lighting,— that in dispensing with footlights I have 'imitated' Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Max Reinhardt, and various other so•called 'innovators'. Such statements are nonsensical. My first regular production without 'foots' was made in 1879, when I staged Morse's Passion Play in San Francisco. And I did without them in other productions, at the Madison Square Theatre, in The Darling of the Gods, and in Adrea."

Earlier in the Life is a quotation from Belasco which describes his first meeting with an actor whom he was to take out of burlesque fifteen years later and make into a tragic star:

"There was an usher at the Bush Street Theatre—a bright little fellow with a most luminous smile. He is still small, and his smile is still luminous. I did not then know his name, but I had heard that among his family and friends he was quite an entertainer, being able to sing, to mimic, and to recite. One day I was at home, in my front room on the top floor, when I heard a voice. I leaned out, and there on the corner, standing on a box which scarcely raised him above the gaping onlookers, was the little usher from the Bush Street Theatre, reciting to a curious crowd. I went down and stood near until he had finished. Then I went up to him and asked him his name. 'Dave Warfield', said he, giving me the smile that lived long afterwards in Herr von Barwig, during all the rehearsals of The Music Master, and that was our first meeting."

The new movement in the theatre has so far invaded the universities that young scenic artists are now coming forth each year from the academic grove to do battle with Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson, not to mention Gordon Craig. Much scenic work of an cxceptional quality is done these days for the college shows that used to pick up settings that would have disgraced Colly Cibber, Some of this is to be seen in a production of Tchekhoff's symbolic drama. The Life of Man, which the Harvard Dramatic Club is to bring to New York in mid-April for a week's engagement in a Broadway Theatre. This austere and remark -able play was given a private performance by the Washington Square Players six or seven years ago, but this will lie its first production commercially in America. This will also be the first time that a college dramatic club has risked open competition with Broadway for even so short a time as a week--a sign of how sturdy and confident the young idea has grown in at least one university.

The Harvard Dramatic Club makes the adventure frankly to show off a novel production of a novel play, and not its own acting ability. The method of staging is as radical as that which Robert E. Jones—himself, like Lee Simonson, a Harvard graduate—devised for Macbeth. Here again a few fantastic set-pieces— simplified and distorted in a way to arouse the imagination of the spectator —are placed in the middle of an otherwise empty stage bounded by curtains.

New Theatres

"ART theatres" and repertory theatres will be springing up all over the place before next season is far through. Otto Kahn announces that he will build a simple but huge playhouse for Morris Gest to use for the exhibition of exceptional native and foreign products. In the announcements the emphasis has been laid upon the development of comparatively unknown American talent; but it is highly probable that the theatre will be opened with the long-promised visit of Max Reinhardt, the great German director. The Theatre Guild likewise announces the building of a new theatre to house its rapidly developing enterprise, and in this house—perhaps in conjunction with its present theatre, the Garrick the Guild may at last present a single permanent company in a repertory of old and new plays. Rumors of other ambitious ventures abound, but the most concrete is probably the scheme of Robert Milton for a modified form of repertory theatre which he has been talking of for two seasons. In addition the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Provincetown Players may resume work next season, bringing up New fork's attempts at achieving an art theatre to half a dozen counting in the Equity Players and leaving the Yiddish Art Ihcatre out in the extra-lingual cold.