The Play
W., H. L. S., H.
January 20, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 301 THE PLAY Stronger Than Love /CONSIDERED as a theatrical offering to an American V> audience, Stronger Than Love, the adaptation of Dario Niccodemi's La...
...is delightful...
...And we are all equal before this death of pity...
...Neither are questions of disputed paternity a favored theme, even among those later writers who are busy exploring sexual motives for their plots...
...He succeeds only too well...
...Filial love, there is no reason to doubt, is strong among the Anglo-Saxon race...
...But the habit or fashion of representing it as a positive passion seldom has found a place within our literature, fictional or dramatic...
...Access to her father's papers has put her into possession of a terrible family secret, and in an excess of rage she tells the young man, that he is a bastard...
...Its theme is trite, not to say groveling, never rising above the pay-roll level, and its denouements set probability at defiance...
...It is the worst, the most unbridled of all sins...
...Anne, his wife, then returns from Paris with dramatic suddenness...
...We are in the early summer of 1914, so somewhat prepared for the terrible solution that destiny will have in store...
...Diminutive Queenie Smith more than makes up for what she lacks in stature in a personality and freshness quite individual...
...Miss O'Neil plays the leading role with a complete realization of its spirit, and with the ease and poise that is the outward sign of inward understanding...
...even pride of civilization...
...But aside from the banality of the Florida landscape, already too familiar to that dwindling minority of our population that has never even been to Florida, and also aside from the too prolonged sustaining of humorous situations which are not especially humorous to start with, Tip-Toes is agreeable...
...Perhaps it is one of the ills that the "Florida boom" carries in its train, that the public, surfeited with colorful advertisements of that land of eternal youth, should be compelled to watch the curtains of current musical comedies roll up, disclosing tropical trees and expensive southern-resort hotels...
...And if a new Noah were to construct an Ark there would be, perhaps, a last torpedo left to sink it, because ingenuity has reached its apex...
...Among the trivial and pernicious stuff of so much contemporary drama, its restatement of the eternal verities, its insistence upon the challenge of duty, no matter how hard, and the consolation that waits upon those who submit, strike a very genuine note, inculcate a very much needed lesson...
...Stronger than Love, it will be seen, is a play almost desperately sober in its theme and treatment...
...Salvation reaches young Beckwith with a tough "buddie" and a share in a garbage contract...
...Ernest Lawford for two contrasting studies in old age of merit and power...
...Thrust into the bread-winning breach when her husband's job goes glimmering, Anne rapidly acquires frocks, a Ritz accent, and an executive position in the Paris branch of the Mason store...
...Anne is his hard-scrubbing, dutiful, and unawakened wife...
...Ralph Forbes' support is at all times worthy...
...The gradual breaking down of her stubborn silence and resolution before the insistence of the man who believes himself her son, founded though this authority is upon a primal error, is a tour de force of complex psychology...
...H. L. S. Tip-Toes TIP-TOES trips its way with considerable charm, excellent music, and adequate dancing through Florida scenery...
...In a very touching and powerful scene, beautifully acted by both Miss Nance O'Neil and Mr...
...The impression, natural under the circumstances, that his mother has been an unfaithful wife, takes possession of the duke...
...Marius de Bernois, titular Due de Nievres, is an adolescent of handsome exterior and sympathetic manners, the sort of youngster who wins love, either from man or woman, by the sheer force of a pleasant personality...
...His chagrin when this love, once apparently returned to him, turns to a sort of sullen distaste that finds a vent in constant faultfinding, is all the harder to bear, and the young duke racks his brain to no purpose to find some explanation...
...The birth of a second son, all her own, the gradual exasperation at seeing him superseded and robbed of his birthright, has changed her love for the intruder little by little to hatred, and with this terrible word she drives him from her knees...
...Among the familiars of the ducal chateau is Laura Regnault, daughter of the family attorney...
...Andrew Tombes and Harry Watson, Junior, as her partners in the vaudeville trio which has all sorts of amusing adventures, provoke sufficient spontaneous laughter to send away, at the final curtain, a pleasantly cheered audience...
...Driven to bay, the duchess lets him know that he is not her son at all, but an illegitimate child born to his father before their marriage, whom she has promised as a sacred and death-bed vow, to rear as her own, without ever letting him suspect the deception...
...Its theme, as old at least as the story of Esau and Jacob, is the disruptive force of love in a single family when it is unevenly bestowed...
...And we are all punished equally by the scourges—all...
...Laura has conceived a violent passion for the young noble, and, finding it unreturned, looks around, after the proverbial fashion of "the woman scorned" for some means of revenge...
...When all these reservations have been made, Stronger Than Love remains a very powerful and poignant drama...
...The statement is meant as no reflection whatever upon the moral of the Latin peoples...
...Misunderstanding is of the essence of comedy, but it is, of all things, perhaps, the hardest to deal with in drama, and when we have said that Mr...
...Pride of power, pride of riches, pride of strength, pride of domination, pride of glory, pride of race—even pride of faith...
...Among minor characters, a word should go to Miss Katherine Grey and Mr...
...Birth control, the invasion of industry by woman, the right of the home-keeping wife to wages, relations between capital and labor, the claims of shareholders, and sex allure in salesmanship —or saleswomanship—were all frisking and leaping about the stage, till one yearned for a single piece of homely and conclusive philosophy to clap a container on one or two at least...
...January 20, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 301 THE PLAY Stronger Than Love /CONSIDERED as a theatrical offering to an American V> audience, Stronger Than Love, the adaptation of Dario Niccodemi's La Nemica (The Enemy) labors under two initial disadvantages...
...But whether it be regarded as sombre depends a great deal upon the spirit in which it is witnessed...
...His love for his mother, Anna de Bernois, is so intense that even the victim suspects in it something that is a little outside the order of nature...
...Frank Beckwith is a "one-job" filing clerk with no ambition and with a cheery acceptance of penury quite out of place in New York...
...To the little family chapel, where the wretched mother is waiting for news from the front, knitting and sewing for the field hospitals among her women, the young duke returns, sorely wounded, to tell her that her own child has fallen, and that his last word has been the word forbidden his own lips...
...A cardinal-cousin played with great conviction by Frederick Perry, who has hurried to her side, speaks the word that bids her bow her head and take her part in the national desolation, and send Marius back to convalescence and duty, reconciled with the being he loves best on earth...
...It is simply a restatement of a fact abundantly noticed by many critics—namely, that the sense of the family as an entity being weaker among the northern peoples, the appeal of a disaster which strikes at its root is felt as being less inherently dramatic...
...Forbes keeps his bewilderment invariably dignified we have paid him a pretty high tribute...
...Head First lacks any single element of distinction...
...So it is with Tip-Toes, and so it was with The Florida Girl...
...It is pride that has*ruined the world...
...It is a new deluge—more terrible than the other because it is a deluge of tears and blood...
...H. W. Head First QELDOM have so many hares, with no apparent burrow ^3 in view, been released at one and the same time as in Head First, the comedy-drama by Willis Maxwell Goodhue, offered at the Greenwich Village Theatre last week...
...A general housecleaning leaves the lady in her exclusive apartment at the "Ambassadoor" and the gentleman the prospect of another hard-working mate...
...In this great catastrophe, to believe that one is chosen to feel a greater sorrow than others —is a sin of pride—Do not commit it...
...Ralph Forbes, the son seeks, by every appeal that his affection can suggest, to wrest the truth from his mother's conscience, with forgiveness and continued affection assured her in advance...
...The financial improvement has no apparent effect on Frank's clothes, which grow shabbier and shabbier, nor on his temper, which frazzles until he has become that most obnoxious creature, the male shrew...
...George Gershwin's music in Looking for a Boy, Sweet and Low Down, That Certain Feeling, and These Charming People (who can resist the satire or the plausibility of "if these people can be charming, we can be charming too...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 11
