The Play
Skinner, Dana
THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Hedda Gabler IT'S quite all right to stick to your muttons if you happen to know just what your muttons are. Several of our group theatres (rather more...
...It rings false in every key...
...From several sources I have heard it said that—for a French play—it has various winds of cleanliness blowing about it...
...But this is just what I do not feel...
...Coincidence of event is strained to the last limit, and if there is any message which one feels drifting from the author it is in the nature of how idyllic an extra-martial love affair can be...
...In spite of Jones's superb settings, which are again used, this is not a play in which one can find an ounce of true spirituality...
...Here Hedda (or Ibsen) comes to an impasse...
...In The Doll's House!—a false attitude toward marriage, answered only by Nora's convenient exit...
...He (as represented, of course, in his manifold characters) never discovers the meaning and the value of suffering—its creative possibilities, its power of purification, the resurrection it forecasts...
...Digges's Tessman, the real high lights of the performance come from Patricia Collinge in a delightfully understanding portrait of Mrs...
...Moreover, the acting of the present revival is without serious worth—in fact it is distinctly bad—except for one brief appearance of Mme...
...The latter show clearly the motives leading to wrong relationships in the world, but they do not show the relationships themselves as leading to anything but suffering, degradation, and the need of purging through deep inner flames...
...The next year or two will give us the answer to the Actors' Theatre innovation...
...He shows neither the ability nor the desire to forge his way out of the intolerable situations he creates...
...Her suffering does not begin until she finds that Judge Brack has her in his power—that she must henceforth do not what she wants but as he wills...
...Dudley Digges's own acting as Tessman, and his direction of the play throughout, are masterly and full of fine feeling for the value of repose...
...Several of our group theatres (rather more appropriately "grope theatres") have, so far, failed to discover this simple commodity, with occasional distressing results—stage settings that outpace acting, direction that lags behind advancing dramatic ideas, and the like...
...There is one danger in this policy which might be mentioned now, for the sake of going on record...
...To this defect she adds a rapid and at times almost inaudible diction...
...This is her moral weakness...
...Charitable and Christian, yes—if one felt that the play were sincere and that its solution worked out from the inner necessity of the various characters themselves...
...His do not inspire the sad exaltation of lyric tragedy, but only the bitterness of inglorious defeat...
...It may involve greater production risk and more courage to probe among the archives for the single masterpiece of an otherwise dimly known author —-but in doing just this, what a service the Actors' Theatre would render to real drama stripped of glamorous names...
...A life of tragic suffering carries the promise of ultimate redemption—as that of the blind Oedipus wandering outcast over the earth...
...In a highly sentimental and slow moving play in which an unfaithful wife reaps the reward of having her husband take a highly rose-colored and pollyanna mistress, such an ending has a smell of insincerity and purely theatrical purpose...
...For Kelly is essentially an observer of outward facts and foibles, willing, one suspects, to bend his outcomes toward popular taste, whereas Ibsen's characters spring right from his own inner nature and share both his strength and his great weaknesses...
...In Rosmersholm—suicide...
...Examine the run of Ibsen's work...
...Ibsen's dramatic power is so great that we often forget his intellectual and moral weaknesses...
...This is the end—a blank wall ahead...
...This is her intellectual bankruptcy...
...Heroic death carries with it the symbol of vast things beyond— such deaths as Hamlet's, or Cyrano's...
...She has come as far as she can go...
...Don't waste your time on The Jest...
...In the meantime, they have again had recourse to Ibsen...
...For Hedda Gabler is not an isolated play...
...But in the last act the passion for a happy ending has led either the playwright or the adapter to ring down a smiling and contented curtain...
...But these are not the deaths nor the evasions of Ibsen...
...Ouspenskaya, whose every movement reveals tragedy in the proportions of a Duse...
...She does not search her soul to find the cause for her suffering...
...Put down Embers on your list as an immoral play—and if you find friends championing it, remember that soft sentimentalists have done more harm in the world than whole armies of forthright realists...
...The Jest SEM BENELLFS play has been revived without the Barrymore brothers...
...There is a false atmosphere to the symbolism of this erotic melodrama which leaves one with the conviction that its author, when he wrote it, was in a most unhappy and confused state of mind...
...She has no desire to plunge further into the mysteries of suffering...
...The plot is intensely artificial and mechanical...
...Miss Emily Stevens plays Hedda with an obviously clear understanding of the broader outlines of her character and conflicting emotions...
...It is full of soul struggle, but not in the right direction, and it smacks constantly of insincerity...
...The selfloving lady whose name it bears has not a little in common with that latest creation of feminine selfishness, Craig's Wife...
...In a strictly technical sense, it is quite true that sins and mistakes take a mild toll of suffering...
...So it happens that when Hedda's plans crash about her, and life seems intolerable, she shoots herself, whereas Mrs...
...It is rather a relief, therefore, to find the Actors' Theatre settling down to an interesting, if not stirring, policy of reviving "standard" plays...
...It requires only a certain mental inertia, coupled with a too facile acceptance of popular judgment, to consider as "standard" only such plays as those of Ibsen and Shaw, about which controversy has raged, and in which the acting roles offer a chance to compete with past luminaries...
...In The Wild Duck—suicide...
...But one hardly thinks of Hedda as ranting about the stage, and Miss Stevens does rant...
...Embers REGRETFULLY, I cannot see any value in this new play which Henry Miller has brought over from France and in which he is now starring...
...The one intolerable idea, for Hedda, is that anyone should have the power to limit or constrain this self-love...
...For such plays there is always a ready-made audience-—drawn by the legendary glow of the author's name quite as much as by any intelligent conviction that the plays are worth seeing again...
...It does mean plays that have attained to a certain standard of public recognition as works of enduring value...
...She has no intellectual rumor, even, that a mystery exists into which she might plunge...
...Her suicide is only the outward—the objective—expression of her soul...
...Next to Mr...
...Put in the same position, they might conceivably react in very similar fashion—up to the point where Ibsen and Kelly follow separate roads...
...Hedda Gabler is a good actors' play—well constructed and with many declamatory moments...
...But his actor material in this instance is not quite up to the usual standard of the Actors' Theatre...
...Then the production is further weighted by the conventional grimaces of Frank Conroy as Judge Brack...
...Take Hedda: Her jealousy, her selfishness, her boredom, her love of power over others are all aspects of a supreme love of self...
...The last act brings a reconciliation and the assembling of both children under one roof...
...The wife has a child which is not her husband's and the husband has a child by his mistress—the latter dying at childbirth...
...Happily this does not mean standardized plays—far from it...
...Either the characters themselves commit suicide when suffering hovers near, or Ibsen, through his plot, ducks the issue: In Ghosts—an expression of heredity, unanswered...
...In both aspects, the weaknesses are Ibsen's own...
...In The Master Builder—a problem of pride left unsolved by death...
...Craig scatters rose petals over the floor of her empty house while searching for truths that Have never yet touched her...
...Ordinarily, I would not give so much detail of the plot of an uninteresting and tiresome play, but by stating it frankly, I can illustrate concretely just what I have referred to so often in this column—the effort of soft-minded dramatists to idealize the mistakes of life and to condone them, and in this sense doing far more harm than some of our realists who deal quite brutally with vice but have too great a sincerity to clothe it with attraction or glamor...
...Is it an exaggeration to call Ibsen—in spite of his technical skill in presenting a problem—the grand master of the defeatists...
...The quality of the present revival is good without having the touch of fire which made The Wild Duck of last season memorable...
...Elvsted...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 15
