The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
September 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 483 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Outside Looking In THIS play by Maxwell Anderson, one of the authors of What Price Glory?, is easily the most...
...And the theme, as I take it, is the impossibility of escaping public opinion...
...It is essentially mixed fare, running the whole gamut of fine characterization, penetrating insight, weak dramatic structure, moments of splendid power and stretches of excessively poor taste and misplaced values...
...I do not say that this is the point Mr...
...If you choose flight, it can only be back to the organized society you thought you had abandoned forever...
...Suddenly you find that you are not alone, that kindred shadowy spirits are moving about and with you...
...Anderson's work lies in his choice of material in the hitherto unexplored fields of the vagrant's mind...
...If you are to justify blasphemy on the grounds that it is "real life," then why hesitate to use other phrases and expressions equally true to life and character...
...Anderson has a...
...Anderson proclaims the maternal descent of one of his characters from a "bug...
...Little Red's announced intention of marrying Edna and settling down to work, runs counter to the established public opinion of hobodom and "queers" him with the gang...
...She is either the victim of inadequate direction or very poor casting...
...A young hobo, Little Red, tries to help in the escape of a girl, Edna, who has killed her stepfather because of a sordid crime he had committed against her...
...And if you don't think the question is important, you have only to watch the flood of imitation which has been pouring after What Price Glory...
...And now we come to the flagrant defect of an otherwise notable stage portraiture...
...Imagine yourself an outcast, presumably a rebel against all the codes and the prejudices of society, searching for the phantom of happiness in the irresponsibility which lies without the law and defies it...
...Anderson is obviously a dramatic realist—by which I mean that he is photographically minute in depicting his characters and scenes...
...James Cagney as Little Red, and Charles Bickford as Oklahoma Red, stand forth, as they should—but in completeness rather than in quality of characterization...
...In its effects as well as in its defects it gives one a great deal to think about...
...Anderson intended to bring out...
...The play frequently lags and loses its hold because of her...
...Can it be that the demands of artistic realism are imperative only when the majority will accept and tolerate them...
...She is a little of each —which destroys the illusion of her being anything at all but a speaker of lines...
...Mr Anderson, working with Jim Tully's material, has defined these characters with a deft and illuminating touch...
...prejudices...
...They form an empire, and you are now one of its citizens...
...The actors in the present production are more than alive to their opportunity and present a composite portrait of rare excellence and vividness...
...The novelty of Mr...
...and They Knew What They Wanted...
...On this slender framework, Mr...
...In the end, however, after many stormy scenes, Oklahoma Red helps them to get across the border...
...If you conform, all is well with you...
...She is neither the girl of innate refinement lost in a strange world, nor the amiable hoyden projected from a dissolute home...
...They, too, have a code...
...if not, well then you face the alternative of fight or flight...
...There is no excuse for the offense offered...
...He does not deal in the art of illusion...
...Does good taste begin to restrain "art" only when the box office standard is applied...
...Anderson is guilty of besmirching an otherwise excellent piece of work by the cheapest and most degrading of all devices...
...If you fight, you are the leader of a revolution, playing with grim chances...
...His play is based on Jim Tully's autobiography, Beggars of Life, and his interest may have been primarily to show to ninety-five hundredths of the world what the other five-hundredth part thinks...
...The story itself is quite simple...
...Mr...
...not the hoboes of vaudeville, you understand, but real men, sharing only their citizenship in the outlaw empire, and separated from each other as individuals by every barrier which race, home origins, degree of intellect, education, energy, initiative, daring or cunning can erect...
...They fall in with a gang of hoboes dominated by one Oklahoma Red...
...September 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 483 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Outside Looking In THIS play by Maxwell Anderson, one of the authors of What Price Glory?, is easily the most interesting production of the early season...
...There is something twisted here—something which seems to say— "Blasphemy will offend only a small minority, but plain English vulgarity may offend even the many...
...Here is a case where the theme is obviously more important than the plot or story of the play...
...But I think I can point out where his case falls down, even on his own chosen ground of literal exactness...
...With great fastidiousness, Mr...
...Why cling tenaciously to blasphemy when one blushes modestly at vulgarity and eschews it...
...unwritten, but strict laws...
...You think they, too, are enamored of freedom...
...Anderson has not established his case even as a rampant realist...
...And on the higher grounds that all true art gains in strength as it gains restraint and careful selection, Mr...
...Of course a play of this sort is solid meat to character actors...
...But no matter what you do, you are contending with public opinion...
...He would probably justify the excessive blasphemy which courses throughout the play, by saying that this is precisely what his characters would say in real life...
...He would resent any suggestion that he could obtain the illusion of reality with even greater force by the omission of this offensive language—just as a skilful writer avoids the necessity for italicizing words even in dialogue, by omission and rearrangement of phrases so that they simulate the spoken emphasis without being literally faithful to speech...
...You have here eleven hoboes, each as distinct and individual as if picked from eleven different nationalities...
...That is the immutable law of life...
...Anderson has woven an amazing pattern of human nature as it runs outside the limits of organized society—ourselves mirrored back by the outlaw mind, pitilessly, with caustic humor and a certain savage delight...
...Its value lies in the evident sincerity of his attempt to make one type of human nature understandable to another type, a small minority set forth in terms which the lethargic majority can grasp...
...But the net result of his picturesque and exceedingly frank statement of the case is what I have described—to establish with impressive force the perpetual struggle of the individual with public opinion, whether you measure that opinion in terms of nations and official governments, or in terms of outlaw empire...
...Blyth Daly, alone, as Edna, fails to sustain the mood or the quality of the piece...
...But you are mistaken...
...Here is the point I want to make...
...In the next breath, the name of Christ is ripped out with cheerful unconcern...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 20
