PLAYS, YES; BUT NO CLASSICS

PERCY HAMMOND

a critic's explanation of why the broadway producers seem all to be saturated in gloom

In the words of a poem by Miss Amy Lowell: The cat and I,

Together in the autumn night,

Waited.

He greatly desired a mouse,

I an idea.

Neithor ambition was gratified.

Until, that is, Mr. Wallace Irwin the novelist telephoned to say that the Englishspeaking Drama, most prolific of the art-forms, was disappointing him by its failure to breed a renewable "classic". Mr. Irwin complained that in the swarms of theatrical entertainment creeping and buzzing around about us none is of the stalwart or endurable type. Mere ephemerae, said he, they spread their evanescent wings and vanish, leaving few traces of their existence. While Music, Lit'rature, Painting, Sculpture, and the Dance produce masterpieces not only for an age but for all time, the Drama is as transient as urban architecture, content to have its tall stories razed periodically and replaced with structures equally impermanent.

Defining a "classic" another Lowell has said, I am told, that it must be "neither ancient or modern; always new and incapable of growing old". It must be as attractive in May as in December—paraphrasing a notable troubadour-statesman—as vigorously eternal as the decalogue, La Gioconda, the Meditation in Thais, the songs of Edgar A. Guest. It must persist, like Sex, in its appeal, abashing Kronos with its indifference to Time's vicissitudes, as fresh and pleasing to one generation as to another. Gifted with the immortality of the human soul it should be able to migrate to and fro, and to be as welcome in 1929 as in 1928. With the Brook, as quoted by Lord Tennyson, a "classic" can boast without fear of successful contradiction that

Man may come and man may go,

But I go on forever.

I have no data at my finger tips to tell me how long it has been since the Drama gave birth to a deathless offspring. Such an opus as Abie's Irish Rose, of course, promises to be incessant, and it may be that play-goers of a hundred years from now will attend its revivals with enthusiasm. More probably it will be as cadaverous as Comus, The Knight of the Burning Pestle or (E dip us Rex, and will be performed occasionally. So far as my research goes the only play since Goldsmith and Sheridan/ that hints of the evergreen is Mr. Barrie's Peter Pan. That classic of the cosmic nursery seems to abide as a lonely example of the perennial Drama. It lasts, a satisfying wonderwork of the Drama—and the Drama is assuredly the moron of the muses—; and it had stamina enough to overcome, not long ago, a performance by Miss Marilyn Miller, a shrewd, pretty, and graceful Broadway toe-dancer.

Recently we drama-lovers were all afire with admiration of Journey's End, Street Scene, Strange Interlude, Holiday, and Let Us Be Gay. They were the immediate successors of Broadway, Coquette, Rain, The Front Page and Paris Bound. A season or two before we were in a ferment about The Show Off, Craig's Wife, Aren't We All, The Constant Wife, Enter Madame, Miss Lulu Bett, and Diamond Lil. It is but an aeon or two since we celebrated The Henrietta as a picture of life in a great city; Arizona as a duplicate of the romance and intrigue of a frontier army post; George Ade's The Country Chairman as a reliable account of rural politics; and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray as a warning to women with pasts. When I was in swaddling clothes Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan was a "hit", and Belasco and DeMille were appetizing the populace with sweetened slices of existence. You do not remember Raffles, the first of the crime dramas with the handsome, bow-legged Kyrle Bellew as the heroic cutpurse; or Trilby, with Wilton Lackaye as the false-whiskered hypnotist. Neither does any one else. But in their fleeting day they were as important as The Bachelor Father and Congai were a season or more agone.

Where, one may aptly inquire, are the plays of yesterday? Have they been blown away, like Villon's girls by the wintry winds of change? Where are In Mizzouri, Hell-Bent fer Heaven, Desire Under the Elms, The White Slave, Dynamo, Alias Jimmy Valentine, and The Hairy Ape? All of them were full of edification and amusement, sometimes happy, sometimes blue, and they were good fellows when they had it. They may be found, I fear, in the Potters Field, pigeon-holed so securely that posterity will never be able to enjoy them unless it dances upon their graves. The best they can hope for is to be exhumed in 1940 or thereabouts and made the butt of such jocular ghouls as Christopher Morley in his merry, macabre exhumations in Hoboken.

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It saddens me, an addict of the Theatre, to think that my descendants will look upon Journey's End as their grand-dad now does upon Shenandoah or Secret Service—to know that its tragic, poetic and realistic photograph of Moloch in his most sentimental and hideous aspects will be to posterity as ridiculous as Uncle Tom's Cabin or Ten Nights in a Bar Room. I can hear them laugh at Lieut. Osborne's recitations from Alice in Wonderland and at Capt. Stanhope's tipsiness as he fortifies himself for battle with the milk of the war cows. How they will chortle at this record of the past.

Life moves with such rapidity that our fleetest playwrights find it difficult to remain in the race. Breathless they follow in a weary procession, stumbling through the foot-tracks and crying in the tag of What Price Glory?—"Wait for Baby!" Even Street Scene, though deified by the irreverent Pulitzer Prize Committee, will soon be as passe and faded as the plays of Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Bernard Shaw, Clyde Fitch and Bronson Howard. Every time I see a work by Samuel Shipman, Sidney Howard, Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly or Philip Barry my pleasure is mitigated for I know the Black Camel is at the stage door, prepared to transport it to oblivion.

Galsworthy, Maugham, Noel Coward, Pirandello, Ring Lardner, Messrs. Hecht and MacArthur, Belasco and Max Marcin are for the moment only. All of them, of course, are ambitious to do another Peter Pan. Not for the money, .but for the kudos. Now that the Drama is hand-in-hand with Wall Street banks of an esthetic disposition we may hope that it will cease to dillydally and lay something aside for what Broadway knows as a rainy day.

Producers of the Drama are noted for the ease with which they despair. Their calling, though bright-hued upon the surface, is joyless beneath; their life is replete with anxieties. There are few smiling men among them, and even the most prosperous impresario will wring his hands at the merest provocation. That sad fellow you see at Ziegfeld premieres, his head bowed down with weight of woe, is Ziegfeld himself, a prince of recreation, bidding hope begone and welcoming sorrow. Mr. Brady is renowned as a breastbeater and Mr. Tyler heaves doleful sighs whenever he ponders the state of the Theatre. George White and Earl Carroll are known to their intimates as Hyssop and Wormwood. I have seen Morris Gest, on the eve of a triumph, inconsolably disconsolate, great tears coursing down his pallid cheeks in briny rivulets symbolic of dejection. So wise and potent a sovereign as Mr. Erlanger is sometimes subject to spells of morosity; and Messrs. Shubert, despite their prowess in the carnivals often suggest that behind their masks lurk faces anything but gay. Unlike these and other mourners is Mr. Belasco who is always cheerful; as are John Golden, A1 Woods, and the Big Six of the Theatre Guild. But in Mr. Cohan's plastic physiognomy there are tragic lines, emblematic of a bitter pessimism; and having tea with Gilbert Miller is like having tea with Job.

It is not surprising that our presarios are steeped in gloom. Harassed by many devils their lot is not an easy one. They must suffer the annoyances of ticket speculators, the artistic temperaments of actors, the rapacity of labour unions, the stupidity of authors and the ambiguous tastes of audiences. The Cinema barks at their heels and the Actors' Equity Association disturbs them with socialistic demands. Railroads refuse to transport their product from Broadway fields to suburban market-places, unless at rates verging upon the extortionate. Recently they have been howling about a new attack upon their unguarded preserves—the employment of their most competent artists by the talking cameras. The greedy moviephones, they say, are gorging themselves with Broadway's ablest performers until the cupboard is almost bare. Unless something is done at once to stem the desertions there will be a famine of actors, leaving the Drama to starve for want of interpreters.

Mr. Greneker, a sagacious executive of the Shubert Theatrical Corporation, tells me that there are 10,000 actresses, to say nothing of actors, unemployed in the Times Square district. The figures seem fantastic, and I should doubt their accuracy if I did not suspect that they include hundreds of stage-stricken young women who are of the Theatre if not in it—talented vestals fired with an ambition to show themselves upon what the late Mr. "Swamp" Montgomery called the "dido counter". With that enormous reservoir of genius and personality to draw upon why should the producers worry? Here they have a chance to flux the clogged channels of dramatic expression with freshets of newcomers. The defection of many frayed celebrities who have tired us by their frequent appearances can easily be made up from the hosts of brilliant semi-pros and amateurs. I shall not be astounded if, among the tired little girls who beseech the managers for an opportunity to be exhibited upon the rostrums, another Jeanne Eagels, Leonore Ulric, Sophie Tucker, Katharine Cornell, Frances Starr, Madame Bernhardt, Ruth Chatterton or Ina Claire will be discovered. Included in the 10,000 petitioners there surely are several potential Marjorie Rambeaus, Lynn Fontannes, Mae Wests, Ethel Barrymores and Laurette Taylors. When John Barrymore and Lionel absconded to Hollywood and the lucrative lens-life the Drama lost its most adequate practitioners. But their places have been filled and we miss them little more than we do Thomas Meighan or Tully Marshall.

The producers should disregard forebodings and stop their ears to the melancholy owl-songs of catastrophe. Stars shine through the cypress trees, and no matter how grim the omens they have but to persevere. Always there will be enough actors and actresses, playwrights and plays. An obstinate art, the Drama will last as long as there is a public unwar) enough to patronize it.