The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
566 THE COMMONWEAL October 14, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Bridge of Distances ANEW producer has entered the lists of those who would joust for the international mind in the...
...In spite of all this, which I readily admit, it is a neat play with many delightful bits of characterization, and at least one spark of very fine acting...
...The Bridge of Distances is important only as an illustration of how completely beauty can be disfigured through dramatic mishandling, and through lack of understanding arising from an incomplete and loose-jointed philosophy...
...There has been too much attempt to westernize an eastern theme...
...You will remark that just as in the theme, itself, you are shifted back and forth from eastern mysticism to western physiology, so in the dramatic action the mood jumps from poetry to melodrama and back again with such rapidity as to destroy all illusion of reality...
...Allen Dinehart saves this character from falling into complete sentimentality by giving a straightforward and honest piece of interpretation...
...This was a false fear, obviously because the matter of thinking has to do with ideas and rich emotions rather than time or place...
...But the high honors of a pleasant evening fall to Jessie Crommette in the part of an harassed and ineffectual mother whose wings beat against the winds of daily existence with pathetic futility...
...What there is of beauty and partial truth in the great philosophical systems of the Orient springs from intuition rather than logical tabulation and arrangement...
...To attempt to rationalize it, like a theorem in geometry, is to miss the spiritual core of it...
...China, old and new, is the setting for The Bridge of Distances...
...Applesauce LET us write largely on the record of the early season that this play by Barry Conners, in a homely and unpretentious way, manages to furnish a clean, amusing and at times highly entertaining evening...
...Or perhaps if it were a Chinese print of old China...
...You are likely to remember the pale and nervous figure of Ma Robinson long after the play is forgotten...
...The mystical beliefs of the Orient exert a strange fascination over a certain type of western mind without apparently awakening that mind to the real inwardness of these beliefs...
...Even when the authors pick up the thread of the original Chinese romance, which is supposed to explain the affinity between an English girl and a Chinese diplomat in the prologue, we do not find a drama of sustained interest or of anything like equal value...
...When the oriental breathes vaguely of reincarnation, he is reaching essentially toward the idea of purgation...
...This is just what John and Ella Scrymsour, the authors of the present play, have done...
...The cause can be murdered by too facile an enthusiasm...
...They should either be left alone entirely because of the danger inherent in what are at best partial truths, or else interpreted with a fidelity to the oriental mood which makes it possible to see in partial truth the groping toward the completion and fulfilment so magnificently portrayed in Dante, or the writings of the great Christian mystics...
...Anyone looking for sophisticated entertainment would probably turn up a superior nose at most of its situations and most of its comedy...
...The hero spends far too much time impersonating a male Polyanna...
...We lay passively in the doldrums for a great many years, content to see on every program, "Time: the present—Place: New York (or Ashtabula or Keokuk...
...The chief male character is the "show-off" viewed from another angle...
...Brigg's famous cartoons of "Mr...
...Even the idea of the play is western— orientalism as conceived and accepted by the over-enthusiastic western mind, stripped of its finer delicacy, mechanized by minds that seek demonstrable cause and effect, and laborious explanations for that which is inexplicable...
...By way of preface to some rather discouraging remarks about its first venture, we should wish it luck, wisdom and a rare degree of cold-bloodedness...
...The subtle artist has given way to the photographer...
...In many ways it is a good cause...
...In fact we pretty much demanded this localized interest, moved perhaps by the fear that if we let our imaginations and our interests soar too far aloft and abroad, we should be compelled to do some arduous thinking...
...The general theme is that a certain amount of "applesauce," or "soft soap," or whatever you might want to call it, aids mightily in smoothing the daily path of existence...
...It is not a great play, nor is it high comedy...
...But we yielded to it...
...It might even be made to appear ridiculous—which, when presented so as to be properly understood, it is not...
...There are certain isolated scenes of considerable beauty and poetic feeling, interspersed with moments of heavy-footed melodrama...
...The ink is heavy...
...But the trouble does not end here...
...In brief, it must be set down in the records of the International Playhouse, that in its first venture it has fallen a victim to precisely that facile enthusiasm which I mentioned as being its greatest enemy...
...This creates a curious lack of unity and so completely destroys the dramatic sequence that you receive a false impression of interminable length...
...The initial weakness then of this play, lies in not clinging tightly enough to the origins of its own material...
...The International Playhouse will even specialize in such mental food...
...It took a war to make us see that men think and feel more or less in the same fashion the world over...
...Why, in order to make this dramatically credible to the western mind, should one superimpose on a mystery of natural religion an almost Ibsenesque physiological explanation...
...The sub-title of the play is "A Print of Old China" —and if it really were that, with what delight we could welcome it...
...October 14, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL...
...Miss Crommette puts into her delineation of this character all the skill and the delicacy of a Ruth Gordon...
...Even the dramatic construction of the play is weak and in one point, at least, so crude as to bring a laugh from the audience...
...The horses of rationalism—their bits between their teeth—have run wild with the chariot of oriental faith...
...Much of it rolls along about on the level of Mr...
...566 THE COMMONWEAL October 14, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Bridge of Distances ANEW producer has entered the lists of those who would joust for the international mind in the theatre...
...They have created a fantastic story to explain the affinity in 1925 of two beings whose marriage in a previous incarnation took place centuries earlier...
...Unfortunately, most of its scenes are very occidental prints indeed...
...He has caught the vision of inevitable atonement...
...and Mrs...
...And now we have producers scanning every foreign horizon to find material worthy to lay before the very new and most painfully erudite intelligentsia of New York...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 23
