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The Theatre
George Jean Nathan
THE GROANS, ALAS, CONTINUE.—There is no blinking the fact that, within the period covered by this review, the New York theatre has offered next to nothing that has justified anyone in spending his money on it, much less squandering a month of his life writing about it, however handsome the honorarium. In overwhelming part, what its stages have hawked has been the most afflictive kind of junk imaginable; and what minimum of purely relative and decidedly qualified merit has been placed on tap properly has not got within striking distance of anything but the most superficial sort of theatrical reviewing. So far as the high-toned art of dramatic criticism goes, any pretender to its exercise might better have remained at home lying in the cellar alongside the applejack barrel.
As is usual under such circumstances, we have engaged the spectacle of absurd overpraise, on the part of the genial reviewers, for the small portion of drama that has not been downright impossible. (I say usual, as we have long been accustomed to a confusion—after an extended period of dramatic drought—of comparative virtues with real quality.) The overpraise in question reached its height in the instance of the Messrs. Kaufman's and Hart's Merrily We Roll Along, culminating in Mr. Gilbert Gabriel's astonishing spasm: "You have not seen in several seasons a finer play; seasons will probably pass before you see another!" Among the plays you have seen in the several seasons to which our brother refers, you may parenthetically be reminded, have been Mary of Scotland, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Moon in the Yellow River, and Richard of Bordeaux—along with plays by Shaw, Barrie, Maugham, O'Casey, Pirandello, Yeats, Galsworthy, Molnar, Rolland, Robinson, Sierra—which gives you a rough idea.
The reviewers who see in Merrily We Roll Along a drama of exceptional authority are herewith graciously privileged by me to pleasure themselves with their own opinion—I am notoriously a fellow of swell manner^—but, unless I am more than customarily beef-witted, what they mistake for exceptional drama is actually simply exceptional showmanship. And that is something that is most often pretty likely to dizzy a reviewer unless he steadies himself with a few sharp shots of critical discernment. The aforesaid exceptional showmanship is present on this occasion with both feet. Mr. Kaufman's direction, staging and casting are remarkably good; the performances he has adroitly got out of a lot of hitherto run-of-the-pack actors are surprising; the stage settings by Mr. Mielziner are excellent; and Roxy Himself could learn things in the way of tricks from the Music Box's jugglery of first night audiences, even when it's raining. What is more, the play itself is a pretty good show, with enough personalities, nifties, cuss-words and sex tartly added to guarantee it popular success.
But, so far as drama of any repute goes, it is—and this is the point—third-rate stuff. It attempts to impress us with the tragedy of a potentially important playwright who, compromising with himself and his early ideals, gradually becomes a cheap and contemptible hack. It fails to impress us with any trace of tragedy because the authors have been unable to invest their protagonist with the slightest evidence or symptom of importance; they insist that he might have been important through the mouths of other characters, but not one single thing that he himself says or does—aside from a moony youthful testimonial to his high aspiration —indicates for a moment that he ever was or ever might be anything more than a pitiable ant. There can be no real tragedy without a fall from the heights, and their protagonist falls merely from a lower rung of a little step-ladder.
The play, in addition, is replete with such snuffy hokum as the hurdy-gurdy in the street below grinding out its gay tunes in counterpoint to sober action on the stage (shades of The Easiest Way!); the mention of various prominent figures in the community by name (Lew Dockstader used to hire someone in each town he played to prepare a list of such names that would guarantee an audience-nudge or laugh); the device either of sagely predicting, in a scene laid in the yesterdays, something— usually an invention—that the audience recognizes as having since actually happened, or of denying with humorous bumptiousness that it ever could happen when the audience knows that it has (vide When Knights Were Bold, Berkeley Square, etc., etc.); and—as God is our judge—old plush-dressed and ostrich-feathered lovable Irish Mrs. Riley, mother of the successful stage star Althea Royce, nee Annie Riley, who comes to the big party after the opening night, gets a bit boiled, and embarrasses the snobs, to say nothing of the haughty butler, with her outspoken reminiscences and loose language (shades of a couple of hundred neo-Boucicaults!).
THEY CONTINUE FURTHER.—Among the other exhibits that in certain quarters were handsomely over-greased, although not to the degree of the above-named, were The Distaff Side, by Mr. John Van Druten, Small Miracle, by Mr. Norman Krasna, and Divided By Three, by the Misses Margaret Leech and Beatrice Kaufman. In the first, the usually more dexterous Mr. Van Druten produced only an excessively wordy and meandering comedy deliberately devised, one had the feeling, to capitalize with sweet, old-fashioned sentiment the trade that has been so largely driven from the box-office by the current omnipresent I'll-be-seein'-you-Baby, Go-to-hell-you-punk, general god-damn-buzzard school of drama. An admirable performance of the central role by Dame Sybil Thorndike was the evening's white mark. The second exhibit was still another distillation from the Grand Hotel formula—this time the scene was the smoking and lounge room of a theatre—the chief humor of which consisted in a small child's periodic agonized dashes for the lavatory. The performance of a gangster role by an actor laboring under the aperient-water moniker of Spurin-Calleia was commendable. The third play also relied upon a woman's desire to negotiate the lavatory in quick order for some of its humour. The rest of it was taken up with a repetitious and inert paraphrase of one of the oldest themes in the French drama of yesterday: the mother who has a lover and the torments of her young son, affianced to a prim sweet one, when he learns of the fact and of the further fact that it is the lover upon whom he is dependent for funds. The writing in general was of the species that embraces, among other things, wistful allusions to roses in the country on the part of the lovers and grimacing allusions to the tightness of her Paris gown across the posterior on the part of the comedienne. The performances of Miss Judith Anderson and of a brace of youngsters, Mr. James Stewart and Miss Hancey (let us hope subject to change without notice) Castle were deserving of better material.
So much for the stuff that many of the reviewing gentlemen found to their taste. Now for a few samples of the delicatessen that no one could swallow.
Spring Freshet was still another dish by Mr. Owen Davis—which has come to be sufficient criticism. Writing plays seems to be a disease with this Mr. Davis. As they arc all eminently sour and as most of them have lately lost money for their misguided producers, to say nothing of time, sleep and money for Mr. Davis himself, it is something of a puzzle why, at this late day in his life, he should continue to go on writing them. Particularly when we read in his charmingly frank and very engaging autobiography that he believes that his critics are often not far from wrong in their opinion of his work. Mr. Davis is evidently a good sort, personally. If only he will now emulate the example of the late Augustus Thomas in his later years and let the drama, that has passed him by, alone, one of his critics, at least, will vote him an even better sort. Spring Song, by two members of the Spewack family, was a dose of East Side aluminol in which fat old Freiberg, the neighbourhood butcher, made coy love to the Widow Solomon, the while her young daughter Florrie, betrothed to Milton Goldfarb, got herself seduced and with child by one Sidney Kurtz, to the grief of momma, Freiberg, Mrs. Birnbaum, Mrs. Ruben, and all the other friends of the household. Dream, Child, by J. C. Nugent, was an exvaudeville character-actor's idea of up-todate legitimate theatre comedy. The elderly Mr. Nugent, poor soul, seemed to imagine that, since he had enjoyed a reputation for writing and appearing only in what are known as "clean" plays, he might floor his old customers with his remarkable modernity by including in this latest opus a couple of saucy reflections on sex.
* Roll, Siveet Chariot, by Paul Green, must be listed in a class apart from the above-noted rubbish; it had a certain dignity of intention, at least, and a certain experimental courage. But the attempt to contrive "a symphonic play of the Negro people" was none the less a sad critical—and dramatic-theatrical—failure. For all the high aim, the result was muddled dulness, as Mr. Green's imaginative and dramaturgic gun contained little more than a blank cartridge. Mr. Green's stage Negroes, though he may know the real Negroes of his Southland well and intimately, too often in his plays seem merely white actors blacked up out of a makeup box which Mr. Green has lifted from Eugene O'Neill's dressing-room. Or maybe it is James O'Neill's. Dance With Your Gods, a storehouse morsel by Kenneth Perkins, dealing with voodooism, also displayed sweet intentions but got nowhere beyond them. Order Please, a pickle by Edward Childs Carpenter, disclosed no intentions higher than the sill of the boxoffice wi.ndow, and Bridal Quilt, by Tom Powers, also seemed to me not worth even this brief line of comment.
■ As for the Theatre Guild's initial production of the season—James Bridie's A Sleeping Clergyman—one can only wonder why the directors of the organization saw fit to dissipate their valuable resources upon so bogus a sample of drama. Professing to treat gravely of the problems of hereditary strains, it finally reached the revolutionary conclusion that bad fruit on a family tree does not always augur the complete absence of some future fair blossoms. With its wealth of preliminary heaves and grunts, it reminded one of the sideshow Strong Man who laboriously and painfully lifts a cannon ball marked 2,000 pounds which is later lifted by a little girl and revealed to be a painted balloon.
Two more observations and then for a consoling drink. Lost Horizons emanated from the scenario mills of Hollywood and was tinkered into theatrical being by gentlemen who apparently have ambitions, as yet unrealized, to get to Hollywood as fast as they can. That they will get there, along with their play, even sooner than that is unmistakable. Personal Appearance is Mr. Brock Pemberton's contribution to American dramatic art. Composed by one Riley, it discloses itself to be a couple of hours of wisecracking concerned with the anatomical urges of a movie actress on an exhibitionist tour of the provinces. The reviewers proclaimed it almost worthy of Moliere, which privileges us two consoling drinks. Gladys George, however, deserves commendation for her amusing performance of the leading role.
(Mr. Nathan's Theatrical Check List on page 68)
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