The Theatrical Callboard

Critical Notes Before the Curtain Rises

KENNETH MACGOWAN

IN a little less than four centuries England has nourished just two great playwrights—and all for the apparent purpose of supplying Broadway with something better than the usual still-born dramas of the late spring. The playwrights, I need hardly say, are William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon and Bernard Shaw of Adelphi Terrace, London, W. C. 2. On a single night of late April they persuaded the so-called American National Theatre and the New York Theater Guild to launch As You Like It and The Devil's Disciple against one another. The results were not only the conjunction of the greatest stars in the British dramatic heavens, and the most promising of American producing organizations, but other convocations and likenesses were observable. As You Like It made the fifth and last long-run contribution to the Shakespeare craze of the season. The Devil's Disciple, lone representative of the playwright who once wondered if he might not be in some respects "better than Shakespeare", is the second drama from the repertory of Richard Mansfield which the Theater Guild has put on this season. Peer Gynt was the first. Oddly enough, Shaw's excursion into farthest New Hampshire in 1777 and Shakespeare's into the mythical Forest of Arden are both supplied with scenery and costumes by the man most active in renewing the beauty of the American stage in the past four seasons, Lee Simonson.

The Equity Players

THE Equity Players are finishing off their first season with a "dramatic festival" which may do something to reestablish the fortunes of that organization. Time was when financial failure was the hall-mark of artistic success in New York. Since the rise of the Theater Guild and Arthur Hopkins things are different. The fact that the Equity Players will end their year with a sizeable deficit is quite as disturbing as the fact that they have found no plays of unusual distinction. Their great virtue was that they tried to discover American plays. Their great mistake was that they did not realize the difficulty of finding such plays and winning an audience at the same time, and that they did not produce enough tested Continental dramas, such as the Theater Guild lives upon, to provide a financial backbone for their season.

The Equity Players' original plans for an ambitious festival of classic revivals each spring have shrunk considerably. Three of the company that acted Sheridan's The Rivals for the benefit of the Players' Club last year are doing the same for the Equity Players. This gives us Francis Wilson's Bob Acres, James T. Powers' David, and Violet Heming's Lydia. To bolster up the appearance of a "festival" Edith Wynne Matthison and Charles Rann Kennedy have elaborated into acted drama the readings of Antigone which they have been giving from various lecture platforms about the country; Antigone supplies a matinee obligato to the week of The Rivals.

Lastly the Equity Players finish off their season on May 14 with their fifth production for subscribers and public, Laurette Taylor in Sweet Nell of Old Drury. Because it is a revival, it may be figured into the spring festival, but actually it is a piece of cheerful old fustian put on for as long a run into summer as the taste of the public will permit. Ada Rehan played Paul Kester's drama in 1900, when Maurice Campbell's production of Mistress Nell with Henrietta Crossman was at the height of its success, and there were those who saw in Sweet Nell a deliberate example of what vaudevillians call a "copy act". The Theatrical trust had thus tried to match Hackett's A Royal Rival with Faversham's Don Caesar's Return, Belasco's Madame Butterfly with Madame Chrysanthème, and his The Music Master with The Second Fiddle. Nowadays such imitations are more or less routine methods in the theatrical business.

A Negro Salome

UP in Harlem and out in Chicago a Negro company has been playing Salome. The director, a white man named Raymond O'Neil, managed a little theater in Cleveland before the idea came to him of putting out colored actors in an "art repertory". There was plenty of talent for him to draw on, quite extraordinary talent, for the Negro takes to the stage with uncommon avidity, his voice is remarkable in its quality, and he is seldom given a chance to display his vitality and his flavor in plays of serious value. O'Neil found "straight" actors, motion picture players, cabaret dancers, washerwomen's daughters, and barbers, and he let them out into art.

It was a very curious kind of art. Wilde's tragedy wasn't so far from the expected, for color is no bar to impersonating an oriental. But imagine Molière's or a German expressionistic

drama played by Negroes. O'Neil is wise enough to exploit the racial quality of his players, instead of trying to hide it. He makes Scapin a nondescript farce with the cabaret dancer hurtling through the middle of it, and the other players translating the French lines into their own idiom. When I saw O'Neil in Chicago he was planning a Comedy of Errors with the two Dromios dancing in to jazz music, and the whole thing done with a sort of circus tent background and a few props in the middle. I heard Iokanaan's voice as I had never heard it before—aweinspiring in its resonance—and I was quite prepared to believe that negro vitality could reanimate Moltere or Shakespeare.

The Kamerny Players

EVEN more bizarre—in another way— is the Russian company which is working its way across Europe, headed, by all the signs, for America. This is the Kamerny Theater, the expressionist playhouse managed by Tairoff in Moscow. Already Paris and Berlin have seen and marveled. On the whole, the reception has been remarkable, for these Russians produce their plays in what is probably the most radical fashion to be met with anywhere in the world. Cubism and futurism mingle in their backgrounds. There isn't a single square inch of realistic representation to be found on their stage. Even the costumes of the characters are conceived in terms of cylinders, triangles, prisms, or rolls and segments of oilcloth. The Kamerny (or Chamber) Theater acts an adaptation of Racine's Phedre, Romeo and Juliet, Salome, an oldtime masquerade, Princess Brambilla, the French operetta, Girojlé Girofla. Whatever the medium, comic, tragic or musical, the company plays with equal capacity and vigor. Tairoff's direction and Mme. Koonen's acting attract the most attention, but behind all the bizarrerie of the performances, the critics note that the whole company plays together with the same ceaseless vitality which they found in the Moscow Art Theatre. Nothing else except the human voice seems to unite the two companies.

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Early Openings

ATE spring or early summer promises a musical comedy with libretto by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, called Helen of Troy, N. Y., which LeMaire and Jessell will produce. The same firm is to do another show with a mock-historical title, Louie the 14th, an importation from Vienna.

The Shuberts have a new musical show for the English star, Teddie Gerard, Bal Tabarin, as well a.?, In the Moonlight, a vehicle for James Barton.

The Charles Frohman Company is trying out a play by David Gray called Goodness Knows made from his story The Self-Determination of the Lennoxes. Henry Miller is doing the same by Lee Wilson Dodd's The Changelings, with the far from negligible assistance of Blanche Bates, Ruth Chatterton, Laura Hope Crews, John Miltem, Felix Krembs, Geoffrey Kerr, and Elmer Brown. New York would like to see on the billing of the play when it comes to Broadway: "Original Philadelphia Cast".

Henry W. Savage has another musical comedy from the admirable author of The Clinging Vine, Zelda Sears. It is called Minnie and Me, and Mitzi Hajos plays the lead.