The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
396 THE COMMONWEAL September 2, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Spring Fever THE comedy with this rather belated title has, in its first two acts, certain promising elements—an employer...
...This is the core of the whole question...
...Yet I feel quite certain that the whole effect of the play on the American stage will be to taint still further the public attitude toward marital relations...
...Structurally the plot is ingenious...
...If you will agree with me that constant association with people who easily condone moral irregularities tends to weaken one's own moral resistance—through the unfortunate fact that public opinion controls more people than the motive of self-respect—then you can hardly deny that plays which make light of the same situations have a similar destructive effect...
...This is true to a limited degree in France, for the reasons I have given above...
...Louis Verneuil's Palais Royal farce, now being staged under the name of Oh...
...It would be interesting to know what perverse spirit has decreed that every A. H. Woods production must have a bedroom scene...
...All real comedy ends with the rising curtain of this third act, and from then on everything is forced gloom...
...Distinctions of this sort promise to become even more important this season than last...
...The Frenchman finds it as innocuous as the domestic troubles of Punch and Judy...
...396 THE COMMONWEAL September 2, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Spring Fever THE comedy with this rather belated title has, in its first two acts, certain promising elements—an employer on the verge of nervous collapse because his golf game has deserted him, a shipping clerk who is also an amateur golf champion and the prospective rescuer of his employer's lost game, a girl equally in search of a coach, and sundry complications connected with introducing the shipping clerk as a guest at the fashionable country club...
...But you will also find an increasing number of plays into which the continental spirit will be injected for no other reason than the box-office—sprightly comedies in most cases, where the glamor of a few well known names, and the sparkle of foreign authorship will be used to throw a halo around plain filth...
...The real moral of Spring Fever is that someone should find a worth-while play for James Rennie...
...Their effect will be to create a moral anaesthesia...
...This means that whereas a Frenchman, seeing a certain play, would accept it with an amused shrug and promptly forget about it, your average American would gape at it in wide-eyed amazement as a new revelation of corrupt human nature, and continue to ponder over it unhealthily for some time to come...
...The rest of his equipment entitles him to a good part in a play destined to last much longer than the banalities of Spring Fever...
...There are going to be plays aplenty that will handle life with bare hands and outspoken words...
...Palais Royal Farce STARTING with the proposition that the Murders in the Rue Morgue is not exactly soothing reading for an impressionable child of ten, one is led to expand on the general idea of stories and plays written for one kind of an audience and served up to an entirely different group of people...
...Everything is very artificial, very far from any conceivable situation in real life, and there is certainly none of the direct play to sense impressions that made such a play as Fata Morgana repugnant...
...And you will find many prudes ready to condemn any play that uses a harsh phrase or deals outspokenly with vice...
...In the last twelve months, we have had a seemingly endless supply of continental farces for Broadway consumption—some with, and some without, generous modification...
...Broadly speaking, we do not appreciate the satirical touch...
...The suspense is not too trying because of the obvious and inevitable conclusion, but the mechanics of the plot are well established...
...There are certain situations which, through ancient conventions of the French theatre, are accepted as material for lively farce, but have not even so slender a sanction on the American stage...
...There is not even the excuse of cleverness...
...Then comes the dull thud of the third act...
...There are few men with a better developed art of appearing at ease on the stage...
...If there is anything more yawn-provoking than to see a dramatist with a perfectly good plot throw the whole thing into the discard for the sake of an unnecessary bed, I have yet to discover it...
...Behind all their laughter, Americans take everything seriously—with the ingenuousness of every young people...
...I strongly suspect that the playwright started a plot that was too good for him to finish, and so put the whole piece to bed with a sigh of boredom...
...Not so the American, who takes his theatre much more literally, and reads into it a contact with real life which it was never supposed to establish...
...As if there were anyone north of the equator who did not know what a bed looks like...
...Mama, is a good case in point...
...It is not sincere plays of this type that will call for censure...
...In our art and literature, and our theatre, we are still adolescent...
...What the French writer intends to be obvious ridicule, we are apt to swallow as merely blatant cynicism...
...We have not learned to shrug our shoulders and forget...
...Justified criticism of this type of play will probably be received with indignant howls by those managers who think they have discovered a bonanza...
...but it is far from true in America...
...The counter argument of the French dramatist is that no one takes these farces seriously...
...In this particular case, the bed has about as much to do with the preceding plot as canteloupe with butter...
...He is, if you will, immunized by a long tradition...
...His vocal quality is a bit monotonous, but I imagine that under proper direction he could brighten it up considerably...
...Yet many of these plays will be very fine ones, rising to a considerable height of tragedy or dramatic power, and offensive only to those who think that morality consists in blinking at truth...
...The signs point to a season of exceptional interest— certainly to all those who love the fine and the powerful things of the theatre and who are willing to spend a little time dissecting the glamorous trash into its true values...
...My contention is that aside from a few well traveled theatregoers, the average American audience is in no way capable of taking this European pepper without an offensive sneeze...
...With the capable James Rennie sustaining the dignities of the shipping clerk, this early part of the play joggles along with fair humor and adequate speed...
...It would be much better to end the play with the second act and offer cash prizes for the best suggestion for a glittering conclusion...
...They just do not mix...
...It is something of a pentagon instead of the usual triangle...
...And the bedroom dialogue drags on interminably...
...Why blink the fact that it is five times as hard to build up moral resistance as it is to break it down...
...The burden of ridicule falls upon the rouel husband...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 17
