The Play

...It does not quite ring true...

...We can impatiently await a Princeton creation next year...

...It is an astute and coherent portrait, played with exact restraint...

...I report these opinions for whatever interest they have...

...The Neighborhood is the one theatre of its kind where good intentions combine with practical and persistent executive ability to such a happy point that real artistry emerges and triumphs in the case of nearly every production attempted...

...Whether he has also the inner urge to become one is another matter...

...Those who want to do more than earn a living on the stage generally find a way, even if it costs them several hundred dollars a week...

...February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 441 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Great Gatsby ' I * HOSE who have read Scott Fitzgerald's novel with this A same name seem to be in cordial agreement that Owen Davis has performed a rare feat of dramatization—that most of the quality of the original story has been compacted into the prologue and three acts, and that the characters realized in the flesh are uncannily close to the prose portraits of the book...

...But the author steps in at frequent intervals to make comments, using the mouth of one of his characters...

...He admits at last who and what he is—but not until the evidence against him is overwhelming...

...The singing is very mediocre, the acting often too heavily underscored, and the tendency toward posed scenes is so great as to impede the flow of dramatic action...

...Much depends on your personal reaction to the character of Gatsby...

...Just What the Russians Have Done * I A HERE is no good object in making the Russians a fetich A of things theatrical...

...He has in him the material of the artist...

...Let's thank them—and set to work while the idea is hot...

...There are such cases in New York—of real heroism...

...In the second place, the production represents the highest development yet attained in New York of the group theatre idea...

...It is several miles from the theatrical district...

...She has been less cursed recently with type parts...

...If that is true, and if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, then Mr...

...They, too, have their smug ideal of indolence, and their lives are carefully planned to that end...

...They, too, are essentially egoists...

...Gatsby at least knows what it means to suffer—to climb, to reach out and fail to attain...

...He is shot and killed—but not in defense of someone else nor even of an ideal...

...Florence Eldridge plays the object of Gatsby's incurable idealism...

...When you realize that the average Broadway play is extremely fortunate to have four weeks' rehearsal, you will understand that in this case success has not been bought cheaply...

...By the pragmatic test alone, if Gatsby were of the stuff of heroes, his life and death would bring some good, some slight sense of awakening to at least one of those about him...

...Those who believe that sincere artistic efforts are doomed to failure and that only the cheap spectacles, or more sensational plays with strong sex motivation, can hope for success, ought to derive deep and fine encouragement from this...

...But he leaves their lives untouched, except for the author's own tribute...

...And the training of the other actors has been in the same spirit and direction...

...If the play—and presumably the book—were to be taken solely as a portrait, it might pass muster...

...Now your true hero of drama or romance is usually a man seeking something beyond himself—something which involves not only a struggle against those around him but against the surgings of his own nature, against his own pride, his own lust, or his own greed...

...The atmosphere of sincerity is so intense that it literally creeps over the footlights and pervades the house...

...The best piece of work by far, however, is that of Elliot Cabot as Tom Buchanan...

...E." as—"a reincarnated druidess...

...Gatsby never hears the call of sacrifice...

...More About The Dybbuk THIS production of the Neighborhood Playhouse was ably and fully reviewed during my absence, but there are certain aspects of its astonishing success which ought to have a special interest for those engaged in dramatic activities and Little Theatre work, and these I shall touch on briefly...

...Most of the actors have year-round contracts with the Playhouse...

...The Russian director, engaged for this production, knew that the feeling atmosphere of the piece was quite as important as the outward gestures or the spoken words, and he knew that this feeling could not be created spontaneously...

...He is predestined, under the present system of type casting, to play rough diamonds (or alleged diamonds...

...The music of this production is Bizet's familiar Carmen music, but its order has been entirely changed to meet a new story of Carmen...

...Miss Young's subject will be Ancient Ireland and Its Myths...

...It is this running comment which gives the false note—a comment dictated by sentimentality rather than insight...

...He could do much better work...

...James Rennie, of course, plays Gatsby...

...It indicates that the author sees heroism where there is none, something ennobling where, unfortunately, there is only something destructive...

...He is a man with moral blind spots—a bond forger, a master bootlegger, with a strain of romantic chivalry and an incurable habit of idealizing...

...As one friend pointed out to me, music is generally a generation ahead of play-writing...

...As a result, the beggars now constitute not only a mob but a group of highly distinct individuals...

...That is the kind of interest attaching to Gatsby...

...In the meantime, Gatsby will probably please the sentimentalists, and retard by that much the progress of important drama...

...No theatre in New York is harder to reach than the Neighborhood...

...Cabot has achieved something quite phenomenal...

...In such a setting Gatsby can hardly fail to emerge as a character of interest and vitality...

...The acting of the play is excellent...

...The stage settings are designed and built in the theatre itself...

...Carmencita and the Soldier, already reviewed here, is by no means a wholly successful effort, in, spite of its important innovations in stage setting and its dramatic return to the convention of the Greek chorus...

...Nowhere was the sense of unity and cooperative effort lost...

...And the way you feel toward Gatsby will be influenced in turn by the framework in which you see him— surrounded by a brood of bored and futile suburbanities, skating on the thin surface of life, and because they know nothing of the depths or the heights, exasperated by the monotony of moving forever on one level...

...Even his chivalry springs from the desire to realize his ideal intact...

...That is why his heroism does not ring true...

...Miss Young's Recital MISS ELLA YOUNG, the distinguished Irish story-teller and poet, will give a recital on the evening of Monday, February 22, at Bryant Hall, Sixth Avenue and 41 Street, New York...

...Yet, The Dybbuk has been selling out regularly to standing room...

...He is not, then, so very far different from those around him...

...But one thing these Russians have taught us with a vengeance, and that is to cease regarding operatic librettos as sacrosanct...

...In the first place, this play was rehearsed steadily for three months...

...I strongly advise Little Theatre directors from any part of the country to study the methods of this group where art and business lead such a contented life together...

...The difference between them and Gatsby is not so much in the degree of self-seeking as in the kind of things sought...

...All of this has counted tremendously in the finished production...

...Someone has even accused this complete Bostonian of forging a Yale accent to complete the Buchanan picture...

...The Russians have proved that one can enhance the dramatic value of operatic music by combining it with a play that is a play and not merely a series of lyrics strung together in plot form...

...They almost enjoy their boredom...

...He never lays the axe to the root of his own desires...

...By the time new music gets popular acceptance, the libretto of an opera is two generations behind current standards...

...Her work is steadily improving...

...Assisting the Russian director was another director of the regular Playhouse productions...

...He has some of the glamor of the romantic fool...

...To cite but a single instance of thoroughness, the crowd of beggars in the second act was compelled to lie around the stage, to beg from the other actors and from anyone coming into the theatre for a whole week before learning a single line of text...

...At some crucial moment, he is summoned to a great sacrifice, perhaps of life itself...

...Think what good libretto surgery could do to certain desolate wastes of Meistersinger, and you begin to see the possibilities the Russians have opened up...

...One might grow lyric about a dandelion in an ash dump...

...Its moral is politely but unquestionably wrong...

...Probably his social crimes are not much worse than the daily soul murders committed by the slothful parasites surrounding him...

...A resident of Connemara for many years, she made it her constant occupation to collect the ancient legends that were dying out upon the lips of the older peasants, and by rescuing them from oblivion and incorporating them in her stories and poems, has been a distinguished contributor to the re-birth of ancient Irish culture...

...But when all this is granted, he is still a man who chooses dishonorable means to what he holds as an honorable end— and, more important, a man in whom no inner conflict is created by this dishonesty At no stage of the drama is he struggling against his own weaknesses...

...Miss Young, who is best known as the author of Celtic Wonder Tales, is one of the most remarkable figures in the Gaelic renaissance, and has been well described by "A...

...But plays, to be worth while, must have a life of their own, quite apart from the source of their material and plot—and in this respect, Gatsby is not very stimulating...

...From certain scenes in Bewitched, through a blackmailing maid in Young Blood, to Daisy Buchanan is a fair range of characterization...

...He is, after all, a supreme egoist, to whom everything seems right that leads to his self-created goal...

...He seeks himself in all things, even in the woman he loves, who, as the audience knows, falls so far below the picture Gatsby has made of her...

...But then, a single strong milkweed would look hopeful on a barren sand dune...