The Play
W., M.
THE PLAY The Dream Play /XAHE Dream Play, by August Strindberg, translated by -i. Edwin Bjorkman, and directed by James Light, is the latest production at the Provincetown Playhouse. In...
...Strindberg still remains among the most modern of moderns," wrote Mr...
...They talked of cycles of plays, a repertory...
...The waits between the scenes were far too long and tedious...
...There are three acts, with a prologue and epilogue, and some fourteen or fifteen separate scenes, some of them elaborate ones...
...At that time Eugene O'Neill declared that Strindberg was the precursor of all modernity in our present theatre...
...O'Neill, "the greatest interpreter in the theatre of the spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama, the blood, of our lives today...
...Dana Skinner, dramatic critic for The Commonweal, who has been in Europe for several weeks, will resume his reviews of current drama in the next issue.—The Editors...
...I use the word "victims" advisedly, for these conflicts as viewed by the modernists with whom Strindberg is still a great leader, rarely, if ever, show us a human hero...
...They desired a permanent company...
...In one sense, however, it is a return, a repetition—it might, indeed, be called a re-striking of the original note of the Provincetown Playhouse, because two years ago the reopening of the Provincetown, after a period of inaction, was made with Strindberg's The Spook Sonata as the vehicle...
...I suspect that many years hence the new moderns will be harking back to Strindberg...
...Bjorkman, its translator, explains: "The author has tried to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream...
...Yet their very merit, perhaps, was a handicap to the achievement of a greater success for the play as a whole...
...As Mr...
...They struggle, but it is without the direction of will...
...Their work is a splendid tribute to the devotion to high ideals which distinguishes the best of the experimental groups of today, and which redeems some of their most pessimistic and disagreeable productions...
...Not only has he the root of the matter in him, not only does he express the quintessence of modernistic philosophy, but technically, as a dramatist, nothing that has come upon the stage since his day has bettered his forcefulness and his dramatic magic...
...A thousand circumstances pull them hither and thither, direct or deflect their destinies, lead to flitting moments of pleasure or gleams of elusive happiness, or (and usually) entice or thrust them into an endless series of misadventures, misfortunes, and disasters...
...Even the very capable acting which distinguishes the production cannot wholly make up for this disconnectedness, which is not integral to the play itself, but a mechanical error...
...Not one of them has pierced deeper into the darkness which surrounds a life without faith than did August Strindberg...
...The Dream Play has never before been produced on the American stage, though since 1916 it has been one of the potent influences in Europe...
...Under all circumstances of tragedy, comedy, or farce, those playrights who reflect the modern mood have in themselves no firm faith, no reasonable philosophy of life, and they depict all spiritual conflicts in a bewildering fashion coming from their own spiritual bewilderment...
...Few of them achieve anything like his stark, absolute sincerity and honesty...
...They deal with the hard and gloomy facts of life—in the hope of finding a way for others safely to tread the maze...
...These scenes should flash before the eyes, should bring their apparently disconnected yet in reality consistent messages to the ears, without such jolts and jars to the attention and the memory which the long waits between the scenes produce...
...Two years have not changed the situation...
...Anything may happen...
...All the same, the work done by the players in The Dream Play is remarkably good...
...O'Neill calls "the characteristic spiritual conflicts . . . of our lives today...
...XXT M. W. (R...
...The modernist drama might be bound up in one huge volume under the general title of, Man Without a Will...
...These hopes have not been realized...
...That very considerable number of the dramatists of today who are not content with catering to the demand for mere entertainment in the playhouse (worthy and commendable as that enterprise, within its proper limits, undoubtedly is) are concerned, above all things, with what Mr...
...I suppose that mostly they are men and women who really share the intentions, and who have taken part in many of the actual productions of the dramatists associated with the experimental theatre...
...The producer of the play laments the fact that since the production of the first Strindberg play none of the hopes and dreams indulged in at that time by the Provincetown enthusiasts has come to pass...
...Yet, without a permanent company, working together in a common tradition, or, rather, creating their tradition as they go along, it is quite apparent that the experimental dramatist will always be at a great disadvantage...
...wonderfully so, considering the space limitations of the stage...
...everything is possible and probable...
...Fewer still have the power of setting upon the stage characters and situations which firmly and vitally symbolize or portray these spiritual conflicts and the men and women who are their victims...
...And in any such collection of the plays of modernity, those of Strindberg would deservedly take a high, if not the leading place...
...In this sense they are like Strindberg himself...
...These scenes are well rendered...
...It is a form that Strindberg used several times...
...There are nearly fifty characters to be manipulated on the tiny stage of the Provincetown Theatre...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 13
