The House of the Second Chance

A Program Suggested by the Triumphant Revival of a Theatrical Failure

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

YOU will find no pleasanter or more inexpensive amusement for an idle twilight hour than lavish speculation on how you would play the role of Maecenas in the American theatre. If you have reread Alice Adams so recently that you are not quite ready to go back to it and if there is no passer-by to sit down and play a few games of cribbage with you, you can always put your feet on the table and dwell pleasantly with the thoughts of what you would do if you were Otto Kahn.

After first taking the precaution to catch your Stanislavsky, you would, of course, establish a repertory theatre in the hope that some day it would mellow into such a fluent, flexible troupe as the great Moscow Art Company of fragrant memory. Then you might build a little one-ring amphitheatre in an outof-the-way corner of the town and turn it over to some wily fellow who could pattern it after the Cirque Medrano in Paris. Or you might build a jewel of a playhouse, name it the Savoy for old time's sake, and endow under its roof the long, patient loving process which would, in the end, give us a troupe and an orchestra equal to playing the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Such a troupe will no more come into existence unaided than the Metropolitan Opera House did.

BUT for my own part, I would be more indined, in a moment of magnificence, to set aside a house dedicated to revivals. Revivals, of course, we have always with us. Every spring when the sap stirs in the sleeping trees and the bridle paths throw their dogwood blossoms to the April winds, your theatrical manager feels stealing over him the impulse to go back over his yellowing programs and see if he cannot recapture an old success. Then a Floradora or a Leah Kleschna comes groggily back from limbo and insufferable fledgling playgoers, fresh from New Haven, look wonderingly at their fathers and mothers. But in my theatre only failures will get another hearing. It could be a modest theatre standing quietly in a side street. And it might be called the House of the Second Chance.

The production of any play is so hazardous a collaboration between playwright, player, producer and playgoer that when a performance is attended with disaster, the weakness, obviously, cannot always be traced to the play itself. But theatrcfolk are all as superstitious as sailors and when once the notice of failure has been posted on the fateful bulletin board beside the stage door, they are not wont to explore the causes. That the failure might have been traceable to the fact that a gentle comedy was lighted as if it were an automobile show or to the fact that the role of the lissome, fragile seductress was entrusted to a battered, visibly middle-aged actress, self-deceived as to the havoc the years had wrought in her face and figure—such misgivings are lost in the rumble of the truck that bears the scenery to the storehouse.

Sometimes, in the mortuary audience that scatters from the theatre door, one onlooker may have had the discernment to see that a fine play was butchered there on the stage that night. And if such an onlooker be also a producer, he may feel an impulse to come to the rescue. But such an impulse is obeyed only when courage goes along with discernment—a combination rare in the American theatre. Or in the publishing business. Or, for that matter, in Wall Street.

As a tentative program for the first few seasons at the House of the Second Chance, I suggest for consideration such revivals as these:

The Gods of the Mountain, a thrilling play by Lord Dunsany which could use all the space in the Yale Bowl but which was choked to death in the narrow confines of Stuart Walker's Portmanteau.

The Garden of Paradise, a play wrought by Edward Sheldon from Hans Christian Andersen's talc of the little mermaid.

Magnolia, a comedy of life on the old Mississippi by Booth Tarkington—a charming play hurled at New York with Hazel Kirke scenery, automobile show lighting, and acting that ranged from the merely raucous to just a soupcon of jambon.

The Silver Box, an early piece by Mr. Galsworthy which Charles Frohman produced in the days before Miss Barrymore had found her present public and which he deserted with unseemly panic at the end of the second week.

The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw's play which Granville Barker, when he produced it here during his season at Wallack's nearly ten years ago, weighted down by casting his wife for the beautiful role of Jennifer Dubcdat—a collision suggesting in its effect the impact that results when a safe is thrown into the firemen's net from a twentieth story window.

Magic, the Chesterton opus which Mr. Shaw has memorably described as Fatty's First Play. It was a triumph in London and, through the incompetence of its production, a dire disaster here.

S. S. Tenacity, the finest play of the contemporary French Theatre—a rueful comedy, as French, as clear, as simple and as beautiful as the note of the Angelus sounding through the sunset along the valley of the Loire. It was done to death here—a heartbreaking instance of the kind of misdeed that can be perpetrated on a side street in New York.

Hassan, the lovely, overwrought play by the late James Elroy Flecker. It was finally brought to New York, heaped with unfortunate scenery and subjected to some of the most preposterous caterwauling that has been proffered in the place of acting in our time.

Les Hannelons, Brieux's best play, which was beautifully acted but unfortunately housed when it was staged in New York under the title Madame Pierre.

Mary Rose, Barrie's masterpiece, a play with more genius in it than any piece written for the English theatre since The Temfest. A playgoer who was unaware of that fact after merely seeing Mary Rose as it was staged and acted in America could hardly be blamed for his lack of discernment.

SUCH revivals as I propose are not, of course, without precedent. The dauntless Arthur Hopkins gave a second hearing to The Deluge, but with a company of such indifferent merit that the response was inconclusive. Then the fame and the fortune of the Coburns, such as it is, derives largely from that bold, intuitive gesture they made in 1916 when they picked up a play that a disheartened Broadway manager had cast into the dustbin and brought it back to town for a year of plaudits and prosperity. That play was The Yellow Jacket.

And a still more recent defiance of an old and foolish taboo has now given the eventful Theatre Guild a good running start on its seventh season. In the first audience that applauded so rapturously when Molnar's brilliant comedy, The Guardsman, was produced at the Garrick in October, there were few who were sufficiently learned in the annals of the theatre to know that this was the same play which had failed ignominiously when Harrison Grey Fiskc produced it at the Lyceum back in the Autumn of 1913. Then it was called Where Ignorance is Bliss, and the roles, now fortunately in the hands of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, were then recklessly entrusted to William Courtleigh and Rita Jolivet. It must be admitted that Mr. Courtleigh was not Mr. Fiske's choice for the role but that when its actor was overtaken by illness on the very eve of the premiere, Mr. Courtleigh, with only a week's preparation, leaped heavily into the production. After a first performance, which resolved itself largely into a nervous antiphonal duet between the unhappy Courtleigh and the prompter, there was probably no one in the audience who did not know that the trucks would soon be backing up at the stage door to get the scenery. But I hope there was someone there who turned to an incredulous friend and said: "Some day this play will come back to New York and you won't be able to get near the box office." I hope there was such a prophet in that audience because it is pleasant to think of anyone so rich in the chance to say: "I told you so!"

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The Guardsman is a comedy played out in the home of an actor and actress. They have been married six months and his knowledge of her populous past gives him so disturbing a clue to the periodicity of her emotions that he fears her ear is cocked for the step of a lover . . . any lover ... in the hall. In an agony of jealousy, he decides upon a course of action that will serve at once to keep his home inviolate, to test his wife's fidelity and to demonstrate to her that he is a better actor than she has ever been convincingly willing to admit. So, disguised as a mildly barbaric Russian general, he comes a-courting at his own hearth, and in the lovemaking that follows you have something of the acute dramatic interest and the human poignancy that marks another wooing in another play. In a sense you have the wretched, lovesick Cyrano back again in the shadow under Roxane's balcony.

In The Guardsman, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are equal to all the demands of this high comedy and by their performances suggest afresh how safely and how inevitably the American theatre will rely on them during the ten years that lie just ahead.