The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL THE PLAY By R. DANA...
...The last night of their trip, Sands ties, first, to make Pillick commit suicide, and failing that, to make him write a letter offering Mavis her freedom...
...Minick is a good solvent for distraught tempers— admirably cast and richly endowed with unvenecred trutb.~ 77 78 THE COMMONWEAL November z6, 1924 Conscience Plays dealing with soda...
...ghosts and memories come to haunt his seclusion...
...Their claim is always that their purpose is above and beyond differences of race or nationality...
...During the summer he has made friends with two park philosophers from the neighboring Old Men's Home—one of those dub-like institutions where each man proudly pays his $3oo a year for independence and daily pinochle...
...Due chiefly, I think, to the extraordinarily fine acting of Lilian Foster, a newcomer on the New York stage, Madeline stands out as a character of real importance...
...As the play stands, it is obviously a story of utter disillusionment...
...Nor is there a suggestion of the obvious alternative that if English law fails to give a wife protection against her husband's cruelty and approaching insanity, it ought to be easier and wiser to change English law than to amend the ten commandments...
...It will be a very pleasant experience to see Miss Foster in a play that is worthy of her...
...They want to make him comfortable and happy...
...Decidedly this is not a play of flapperdom...
...As to that, it makes no difference whether the jurisdictional centre is inside or "outside of the bounds of American society...
...As to that all observers arc agreed...
...Fred is not even the male half of own home—only an impatient and are-worn quarter...
...He wants to be independent and "no trouble...
...On the one band, we have the intimate spiritual and institutional life of the Church with its international ramifications...
...Father Minick would like to apply for the next vacancy at the Home, but—and here, to my wind, is the crowning point of the play—be is afraid it will hurt Fred and Nettie's...
...What is this but super-nationalism...
...You like her...
...It has its sting, too—in that it does not attempt an impossible reconciliation of opposites...
...feelings...
...It is quite possible tbat the author intended to show the complete futility of the philosophy of anarchy, its lack of sustaining power, and its destructive effect on the entire life of a man...
...questions, labor agitation and corrupt politics are fortunately not as frequent today as they were some ten years ago...
...THE SOURCE OF KLAN SENTIMENT By HENRY J. FORD The Ku Klux Klan, by John Moffat: Mecklin, Ph...
...and be at length commits suicide by going out into the man-killing storm, repenting one of hk wife's last pbrases—"As long as you've got to die, what difference does it make how...
...It is clear that he thinks the Klan is not wrong in holding that there is an essential incompatibility bctwcen Catholic faith and one hundred percent Americanism, although he does not agrec with the Klan that this has practical importance...
...As the play actually stands, and without any subtle reading between the lines, it is a story of fatalism—the helpless merging of an individual life into some great movement of the cosmos— the acceptance of external realities as the only measure of the value of life—and a pica, if you will, for the most fatal pacifism of the soui...
...Minick is that play...
...We have been waiting, or rather panting, for a play of youth and age that would come to grips with realities, forget juvenile protest and senile density, strive for artistic proportion and achieve sanity...
...Moreover, the power of suggestion in this play might conceivably lead to incalculable tragedy...
...Our nerves are jaded by the exploits of the stage flapper, the stupidity of made-to-a-bad-order parents and the obvious comedy manufactured to mitigate or completely cover up a real tragedy...
...Is it, or is it not one's duty to remove from this earth those dangerous members of society whom the law can not legally restrain or kill ?" The play itself seems to take the affirmative...
...It is, from start to finish, colossal fake...
...Her acting is so good that you are rarely conscious of it...
...DR...
...Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman have written it, wing as the basic material Miss Ferber's story of Old Man Minick...
...For their part, they urge him to stay because they cannot understand how thoroughly congenial he finds the Home —how vastly be prefers men of his own age and the aswrance of daily pinochle to the thoughtless indifference and enforced solitude in his son's apartment...
...For he goes on to say that there is some justification of anti-Catholic sentiment in certain peculiarities of the Catholic Church...
...It creates a false situation, accepts absurd premises, and then proceeds to work upon sentiment and emotion until murder achieves the semblance of heroism...
...Meckilin himself, despite his honesty of purpose...
...Father Minick, stranded with an income of a few hundred dollars a year, comes to live with his son Fred and his daughterin-law Nettie, in their five room Chicago flat...
...To makelt- kM~so would be inexcusable...
...He either fails to share their interests or good-heartedly intrudes on them at the wrong time...
...He then exiles himself to a cabin in the Yuken~ Here in the loneliness and desolation, his mind begins to fail him...
...If one can escape from stereotyped ideas and see things as they arc, it soon appears that thcsc are not peculiarities at all but are the common characteristics of every active ecclesiastical system...
...Geoffrey Sands, Stanton's foreign business manager, knows Pillick's character well, but arrives in London too late to prevent the wedding...
...They have pandered to the gate money dF'~d~ad8H"WiIt&t "'mw ii'lit~tfrjudginent and' frank...
...Conscience has served but one useful purpose—to bring before us a charactcr actress of exceptional ability and personal charm...
...The play is very poor as a play because its characters are so obviously straw men that they fairly stink of insincerity and shant It is dangerous and insidious as a spectacle, because (whatever Ma...
...One or two fatal experiments in bringing them to Nettie's apartment eliminates that compromise...
...It is interesting to see how Conscience, wbich has as its background I. W. W. agitation in the Northwest, tries to meet and absorb the current mood and thus effect a compromise between the old and the new...
...Nettie achieves a state of nerves...
...We can only draw our conclusions from the skilful though visible mechanism by which sympathy for Goeffre~jr Sand's decision is worked up...
...Which is to take precedence...
...In the words of the management's own publicity department, here is the theme of The Fake...
...Lonsdale's private intentions) it arouses sympathy and applause for a murder in cold blood based on the assumed right of an individual to decide who shall live and who not...
...MECK~LLN'S study of the Klan is much the best treatise which has appeared on this subject...
...I say "hint," because Mr...
...1cm of the Klan is the problem of stubborn, uncritical mental stereotypes...
...Without her the play would bc an impossibly dull hodgepodge...
...Most of the dramatists arc now dealing with highly personal problems, particularly problems of character formation, of the conflict of psychoiogical types, and of the turmoil and restlessness in the individual soul...
...Ernest Stanton, an English member of Parliament, marries his daughter, Mavis, to Gerrard Pillick, a drunkard and dope fiend who has a blackmail hold upon him...
...But he has not, as a more skilful dramatist would have done, indicated the contrast of a sounder belief...
...He says truly that "the prob...
...But his ways are not theirs...
...Conscience tells the story of an I. W. W. fanatic, wbo, having been separated from his wife by arrest, and finding on his return six months later that she has fallen by the wayside—not knowing the ausc of his long absence—kills her rather than see her follow the life of pleasure she has learned to love...
...No outsiders are admitted to the Home's community room, and with winter coming, Father Miniek must part company with his park friends...
...It gathers the facts thoroughly, arranges them well, surveys them calmly, and it tries hard to weigh them honestly...
...There are two sets of loyalties constantly bidding for the control of American Catholics...
...A. H. Woods now presents us with a sordid bit of stage mechanism by that hitherto graceful playwright, Frederick Lonsdale...
...Mecklin finds that "the Klan's anti-Catholic propaganda has won for it more members than anything cisc...
...She is not hunting self-expression, but rather home consentsdon...
...The play has wit, pleasant irony, a quiet humor unforced save in one act (even here the touch of farce is not unwelcome) and a happy understanding of both youth and age that give it a mellow softness and comfort...
...The author in writing the play, and the management in presenting it, have assumed a serious responsibility...
...It ends in a very human and unsarntirnentzi compromise between stern facts and vain intentions...
...The play is aptly named...
...However good and great that seat' of religious authority muybe~ it~ is~ nolyct the new Jerusalem, and it is not entitled to special' privileges...
...November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Fake HAVING tired (for the moment) of the bedroom as a box office stimulus, Mr...
...disgusted at the whole performance, persuades Pillick to accompany him on a two weeks jaunt to St...
...Nettie Minick— at least as the delightful Phyllis Povah plays her—is breaking into charming womanhood, impulsive, thoughtless and conscientious by turns, rather highly strung but sound to the core...
...Minick TT demands true qualities of artistry to take the over-worked theme of two conflicting generations and handle it so deftly and sympathetically as to turn it into a fresh and amusing play...
...For that is all The Fake amounts to...
...Miss Foster has made the utmost of rather poor material...
...Any other supposition would be energetically denied...
...on the other, the practical civic and sodal life of American Catholics as members of American society...
...Mecklin is undoubtedly right in holding that the great spread of the Klan is not due to the attractivencss of its original design, but to the success of its management in tapping deep streams of prejudice and calumny in the hearts of the people—the sad hcritagc of the wars of religion...
...There is no case on record in which missionaries have been willing to admit that thcir concern was the national advantage of the country from which they came...
...After six summer and fall months, the strain becomes acute...
...The longest chapter in the book is devoted to this subject, and in it we arc told that the Catholic Church has these peculiarities— It is an ecclesiastical super-mationalism directed from a centre outside the bounds of American society...
...This Filhick at last agrees to do, but Sands, apparently fearing subsequent treachery, decides to kiU him instead, and puts an overdose of drug into his whiskey...
...Nor is Father Minick any too happy...
...Any religious socicty in the United States sufficiently interested in the spread of its doctrines to send a missionary to a foreign field thereby enters upon a career of "ccclcsiastical super-nationalism...
...It would appear to the casual observer that there are quite enough murders nowadays, based an someone's private opinion that some one else ought to quit this earth, without having a Brcndway hero hint that more of them would be justified...
...He bears witness to "thc unimpeachable patriotism of American Catholics," and he declares that "there is no more preposterous assumption than that put forward by Klan leaders to the effect that the Catholic church is a menace to the sovcrcignty of the American nation...
...Six years later when things come to a difficult pass, Sands...
...Its "hero" deliberately murders an unfortunate victim of drink and drug...
...It is interesting to add that the audience roundly applauds the "hero" for his deed—a result achieved by about as clever a bit of jury pleading as I have ever seen cast into the outward farm of a play...
...Just before the last curtain, Father Minick quietly steals off to the Howe—happy in what he almost feels is a selfish decision...
...For although the Klan antagonizes Jcws and Negroes also, Dr...
...Margaret's Bay...
...It is undocrored and Unsugared life...
...And then he supplies evidence that kI~.hough he doesn't 'kno* it,>ont of those aterers types is pressing on his own mind...
...The penetrating character of anti-Catholic prejudice is unconsciously exemplified by Dr...
...Lonsdale has not yet to my knowledge had the courage of a Bernard Shaw to publish a preface and give us his own views forthright...
...D. New York: Harcour:, Brace and Company...
...almost — much, in fact, as you like Father Minick...
Vol. 1 • November 1924 • No. 3
