The Leak in the Sieve

Some Notes on the Difficulties of Making the Drama Behave in New York

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

AT INTERVALS in this and recent seasons, preachers in their pulpits and editorial pundits in their sanctums, whenever at a momentary loss for something to say, have always been able to turn gratefully to the subject of indecency in the theatre and go right on talking until something really important to talk about occurred to them. There is the question of censorship, for instance. "Is it wise?" they ask. "Would it be healthful?" or "Would it be intelligent?" Some, I fear, in their heart of hearts, even ask "Would it be fun?" But here I myself mean merely to raise this question: "Would it be possible?" To which, with, I trust, no faintest suggestion of gloating, I am compelled to answer "No".

Compared with the task of one who had to censor the theatre in New York, the Dutch lad who held back the waters and saved Holland by placing his finger in a hole in the dike had a comparative sinecure. It would be like holding back the waters in a colander.

That out of the present volcanic upheavals of old, thick-crusted standards of morals and taste, some doughty functionary may emerge to try it is altogether possible. I do not know what the title of his job would be, but since, at this writing, he is no more than a threat, it might do to call him His Imminence. The heavy-footed approach of His Imminence is dreaded, of course, because, during his reign, we might see in New York just such fatuous rulings as have made the Lord Chamberlain's play censor such a dreary joke in London for so many years. There that precious factotum has, by banning so true and beautiful a play as Young Woodley, shown himself the intellectual equal of his notable predecessor who would not permit performances of The Mikado for fear of hurting some feelings around the Japanese Embassy.

IT WAS to ward off any such comic relief that all concerned set up in New York, a year or so ago, the institution known as the Play Jury. This was a panel of reputable and adult citizens of the town from whom, whenever a play was complained of by any taxpayer feeling contaminated by it, the District Attorney might draw a jury of twelve and send them to see it. A vote would then be taken. If only nine felt that the play was soiling the pure minds of the citizenry, its curtain would be automatically rung down.

This seemed to me then (and still seems) an admirable shock-absorber. Then The Captive was produced at the Empire—that slightly tear-stained study of abnormal eroticism which has been so huge a success in New York as well as in Paris and Vienna. From its first aghast audiences, complaints poured in upon the busy District Attorney. Thankfully he turned them over to the Play Jury. They went to see The Captive, survived the fearful experience, took a vote and found that not enough of them felt New York would be any the worse for its being suffered to continue. Whereat many of those whom this decision frustrated not only exercised their immemorial privilege of cussing the court but, with the true instincts of lynchers, demanded execution anyway and a swift substitution of some censorship more rigorous. This, it seems to me, is as though those of us who regretted the Fall-Doheny acquittal were to demand the immediate abolition of the jury system.

However, I wish here merely to suggest how mighty hard His Imminence will have to work. For no censorship can be effective unless an eye is kept on every playhouse, every night. Though moralists, dramatic critics and even producers never seem to remember the fact, a play is a living, fluctuant thing with no fixed form at any time and no character except such as the actors may impart to it from night to night. They can and do change the whole import and complexion of a scene the moment the author's back is turned and could do as much whenever the censor looked the other way.

THUS, when the scandalized Admiral Plunkett became the most amusing person in America by his efforts in New York to suppress What Price Glory? much of the saltier idiom of that magnificent play withdrew from the text only to filter back word by word when the excitement had died down. And when the Play Jury was scheduled to inspect and perhaps suppress They Knew What They Wanted (the fine Sidney Howard comedy which afterwards won the Pulitzer Prize) the foul-mouthed profane old vine-grower, as played by Richard Bennett, became suddenly addicted to exclaiming "Gracious me!" or "My Golly", or even, in moments of extreme passion, "For mercy's sake"—and then, when word seeped about that the play had been sanctioned, relapsed happily into the vernacular in which the piece had been written.

With the movies, there is no such problem. As the man said in some story or other which I have forgotten: "When I censor a photoplay, it stays censored." A movie that will be seen by untold thousands can be carried in a satchel and purified with a pair of shears. Each Commonwealth in the Union has its own board of censors and its own set of standards. It is true that the wide variation in these standards causes some vexation to the great minds of Hollywood. And truly, when one is giving one's all to the direction of Heat 'Through the Ages or Red Hot Grandma, it is a trifle trying to have to keep in mind the fact that what New York will regard as purer than snow may give Pennsylvania a fit of the vapors.

Admittedly, it is most exasperating to know that the completed picture must pass eight and forty separate sentries, each with a different password, each sentinel all wrought up by local irritations. In one state, for instance, the local irritation can be traced to the perverse circumstance that the governor's sister is a rabid movie-goer and that each picture must be censored with her sensitivities in mind. I have sometimes thought that a pretty essay on the subject might bear the title of "The Boiling Point of the Governor's Sister".

Then, in Pennsylvania, the censors are notorious!}' squeamish. There a. kiss of sufficient duration to seem more than: a passing peck at the lips of a loved one arouses all their most repressive instincts. The mere sight of a door closing on a room into which a man and a woman have just entered makes the censors of the Keystone State as suspicious as a mean old Supreme Court. In the titles, unseemly epithets, if any, must be printed in tiny, tiny type and Philadelphia will not allow its unsullied young to gaze upon even so pastoral and innocent a scene as that of a cow being milked. Such exquisite delicacy somehow capriciously recalls an old day when that zany, W. E. Hill, regretfully declined a wedding invitation on the ground that he made it a point never to go to weddings. They were so suggestive.

TAM not, however, trying to question whether movie censorship is intelligent, wise, necessary and healthful. I am merely pointing out that it is possible. To be sure, even in this comparatively easy form, the spirit of censorship sometimes blunders. It was thus that a quite flagrant and outlawed ejaculation was allowed to pass the gates through which the magnificent Big Parade came swaggering into New York.

The appointed committee assembled to pass on it. I do not know the personnel of that committee and have never seen it in conclave, but I can imagine the four-wheelers trundling the lady members up from their homes around Gramercy Park, and I suppose the committee's whip summons the men by tapping on the windows of the Union club and waking them up. At all events, the censors assembled and The Big Parade was unfurled. When the hoodlum word—so innocent in form, so bawdy in import—made its appearance, one of the gentlemen of the committee choked, spluttered and finally found wind to say, "Of course, that must come out". One of the older and gentler women turned to him, wide-eyed and genuinely interested. "Why?" she said. At the prospect of having to explain it to her, he broke down, and in the ensuing confusion the word passed through the door and into the theatre.

OF course even in the movies the decrees arc sometimes evaded, and forbidden stretches of film arc occasionally slipped back into place when no one is looking. But this difficulty is as nothing compared with that of the censor who must control a form of expression in which the medium is made up not of celluloid but of sinful human beings. It is ridiculous to think of controlling the theatre by merely passing on the manuscript when, night after night, there is repeated on the living stage that story of the stage-hand who had always wanted to be an actor and had vowed that, if ever his chance did come, he would not throw it away by mumbling dully as the actors did. He would say the most unimportant line with feeling. And then his chance did come. One night, when one of Shakespeare's historical plays was in progress, a minor player, who had only one line to say, was found missing when his scene came. The harried stage-manager grabbed the aspiring stagehand, shoved the line into his hand, flung a cloak around him and thrust him on to the stage. He was to walk towards the throne, fall on one knee and speak. He walked towards the throne, fell on one knee and spoke. And how! Into that little, negligible line, which the missing player had spinelesslv made nothing of, he poured a world of bitterness and scorn which had been accumulating in him for twenty years. The scene ran as follows: The King: "Speak, Sirrah. Who waits for me without?" The Stage-hand: "Sire! 'Tis Don John— • the Bastard!"

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