Not At All Dressed Up

Listing the Costume Play as One of the Greatest Liabilities ot Our Theatre

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

THERE was, or may have been, a time in the history o>f the American stage when ,JL tJlc costume play was the favorite. That day saw Mansfield's introduction of Cyrano dc Bergerac, John Drew in patriotic knee-breeches, dramatizations of all manner of romantically clad affairs, from A Gentleman of France to Janice Meredith. That day, for the nonce, is done.

For, of all things a present day audience resents and puts on trial, clothes of a past century come first. We have no appetite for buckskins, and an Elizabethan ruff is an immediate millstone around the neck of the play. We have to reclothe Hamlet in contemporary costume to gain him contemporary relish. Elsewise, he remains so much Shakespeare.

We arc all interested enough in stage clothes, Heaven and the programs know. We exult in that memorable and so durable double-breasted dinner jacket of Mr. Norman Trevor's. We fling up ecstasies to greet each new appearance of Miss Ina Claire in a new triumph of tailormades. We rummage gladly behind the backs of any dramatis ferson'ae to discover whence have come the shoes, brassieres and hosiery which constitute the intimate end of drama. For these are glamorous items of that theatre which will always interest Americans most: the theatre of an ideal here-and-now.

We jest at pasts who know so few ancestors. The only*costume play which finds it easy to succeed in our midst is the one which revels in an incongruity of ancient dress and modern lingo: The Firebrand, for example. We loved the gleeful, vengeful impertinence of that mixture, the vain sword-and-cloak strophes of old Florence tripped up and sent sprawling by flip joshes and preposterous farce. It was all so successfully out of key with its costumes, which was just what we wanted it to be.

"\\ THEN Ashley Dukes's exquisite romance

v V of the Regency, The Man With a Load of Mischief, was performed here, quite everyone blamed its fiasco altogether on its actors. But there was another element of doom which none of us admitted, our general incapacity to enter into that pretty and courtly spirit which the dressing of the play did its best to evoke. Had Mr. Dukes used, say, the method of The Firebrand and put his noble gentry to discussing their old English affairs in the latest terms ot Times Square, he might have pricked our sense of the unfitness of things wide awake and won many prosperous chuckles. Of course he would not then have written a consummately delicate and graceful comedy—but 1 presume that is a minor matter.

We have no one in America so adept as Bernard Shaw at this game of placing new wit and colloquial wisdom in the mouths of old costume plates. He is the only playwright capable of reminding us, by his use of the formula, that everv little flapper is a potential Cleopatra, that Joan of Arc lives on and on in the prejudices and exaltations of every SearsRocbuck town. The panoply of history, royal robes, cuirasses and cocked hats have been a definite aid to the magnification of Shaw's definitely accomplished satires.

Everybody wavered between mild admiration and gentle distrust of The Buccaneer, that most literary of the collaborations of Messrs. Stallings and Anderson. But, of a sudden toward the close of it, there came a scene when robustness was nicely punctured, romance shuffled off, and an English monarch was shown having the very devil of an inane and borcsome time. This the audiences loved; loved twice as much as pirate bombardments or tropic passions. For this was treating the fuss and fine feathers of the old Stuart days to the twit we knew at once they deserved. This was the note of comfort, the assurance that, then as now, fools could be found in velvet, nitwits could loll in the high places.

Fhe centuries that are gone provoke our theatre only to show them up. Fhe footprints on the sands of time are chicken tracks to us. Show us a play costumed in Roman togas, and we take it in terms of Cluctt-Peabody shirt-tails, liven-when we agree to be serious about doublets, greaves or short-hose, we find them bothersome to the reality, excitability, understanding of the piece at play. We honor no drama we cannot snatch out of historical cotton-wool and transcribe into modern setting.

The Jest, for instance. You have probably been thinking all this while of The Jest as an exception to ruin my whole rule. But The Jest, Benelli's sorriest play, was popular here because the melodrama of it struck an absolutely modern note—a note so strong, so frank and cruel, that it could drown out the floridity of its Renaissance surroundings. A Grand Guignol note, in short, not half so Florentine as Apache. The jangle of incongruity may not have been merry, this time, but horrible and raucous—yet a fortunate jangle, just the same. When satins and sword-belts only have the result of intensifying the horror of a plot too gritty and unbearable for ordinary twentieth century street-clothes, we arc all too ready to appraise and applaud them.

"ir^UT late theatrical years have warned us IIP that practically all costume plays are costume plays because they are too dull and plodding to be anything else. At least, that is our excuse—and ever so many dramatic romances about the Roundheads and Royalists, the French and American Revolutions, old days in the White House, on the pirate poop-decks and the Southern slave marts, have lugubriously justified that excuse, have met our apathy with a worse one. Name a truly fine and stirring costume play bv an American of the last—or any other—generation. I cannot. I absolutely and firmly decline to begin with Clyde Fitch's Nathan Hale.

And that, again, is another cause we have for complaint against the run of costume plays: they may deal, evidently, only in grand operatic motives. Wearing gauntlets, they must be so awfully large-handed about patriotism, honour, true love, glory, chastity and such subjects of virtuous and long-winded aria. The average blank verse of costume plays—and what can be more muflling than average blank verse?—is content to dole out these High-C sentiments in a Grade B style. Fhe complacency in which faith, hope and charity thump along to celebrate costumed holidays is enough to make skeptics and slangists of us all.

Hence our new-found patience with romantic twaddle when they set it to a sufficient amount of music. Plays long since in the storehouse of distaste are bouncing back into popularity as books of spectacular operettas, and we are being more than docile about them. We are being rhapsodic. We are evincing all that grateful relief which possesses the soul of a host when a rather absurd and old-fashioned guest finds himself at last in the right seat. We won der why we never realized before that If l were King was an ideal, in fact, an almost incomparable musical comedy.

Music is so sly a solvent. It dissolves rant, cant and platitude into gracious unimportance. And—why, 1 know not, but it has been true from Pergolesi's day to Friml'smusic loves the accompaniment of finery, swells the grander ior a lot of lavish dress and aureate incrustation. Almost anything produced under the highly' capitalized supervision of the Messrs. Shubert will convince you of that phenomenon.

"AIXT'ORDS, merely spoken words, have the v v dictionary's own time trying to conjure up the beauty of days gone, the fire of tragedies already out of reach, out of mind. Nor, Max Bccrbohm notwithstanding, have Americans any such zeal for words as words that they will meet them half-way and pace them to the goal. Nothing so instantly destroys a native audience's cordiality as long and solemn speech. Now, where would most costume plays be without solemn speeches? In the waxworks.

But, speeches or no speeches, the waxworks seem to be the end and late ot all these romantic dress-parades. Especially of the historical ones. They so rarely exercise the courage of a scoff. If Lord Nelson occurs to one of them as a fit subject, what a lay figure of a Lord Nelson lie will be. If Andrew Jackson is up for commemoration, what a polished bit of Old Hickory they will* turn him out. Just recently there was a first-night here of a pseudo-poetic piece extolling one of the two thieves who died crucified, immortalized, on Calvary. Being romantic drama, it had to trundle the magnificent wretch through all the stock situations and ponderous deliberations of its sort, until the last patch of human skin on him had been smothered under lambrequins of formality and dramatic ritual.

Dress him as Adam, as Cocur dc Lion, or Beaucaire, a man's a man for a' that. But, unle-s you let him be in the same shirt-sleeves the audience wears by day, you'll have to prove it. We somehow demand the colloquial in costumes as well as in words. We are too much aware of our today's sartorial triumphs to bother to rummage in yesterday's wardrobe. Clothes make the play for us—but costumes arc as apt as not to kill it.