The Play

...in Sheridan's The Critic...

...468 THE COMMONWEAL March 3, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Cyrano Again 1WISH every bill-board along Broadway could flame out the fact that Walter Hampden is again acting in Cyrano...

...But the quality is different...

...Hampden would become a vastly more potent force in our theatre if he set to work to produce modern as well as classic and costume plays...

...But unfortunately, plays of this type either are, or have become through tradition, vehicles for one or two star actors...

...But on account of Cyrano, and thanks to Cyrano, we know it is not incurable—that this brave actor who shrouds himself in fine thoughts and intellectualizes his emotions, can and does escape from his prison...

...Only instead of going round in a circle, he has at last emerged into a place where stars shine...

...If it were not for Cyrano, one might suspect it incurable...

...And possibly the hand of an outside director during the last days of rehearsal, to bring Mr...

...Eugene O'Neill has himself passed through a dense forest peopled with fears since the days he wrote of Brutus Jones, pullman porter, emperor and lost fugitive...

...The moral is poignant...

...In Cyrano one sees—or, more accurately, feels— both the weakness and the strength of Hampden the man...

...The obvious melodrama has been well softened to meet the comedy, and the character acting is so excellent as to lift the play well above the mechanics of its plot...

...Few actors know so accurately in advance just what they wish to portray...

...It is not an original play...

...Miss Methot shows considerable acting quality except in repose...

...What's to be done about it...

...There is something in that false and grotesque nose which releases the real Hampden...

...There you have a picture to whet the appetite of the real theatre lover—a sheer variety that would bring Hampden's naturally deep feeling to the surface and give him the glamor he needs...

...But— It is not as bad as it sounds...

...Well—for example—suppose we were to say that Hampden's apparent strength is, in reality, a weakness, and the very thing that hampers his art...

...The result is quite electric...

...Take first his intellectual strength...

...To me it is a distinct weakness in the current Hampden season that he has not attempted a play in the drab colors but more intense immediate feeling of the present day...

...In fact, it is not even a particularly good play according to the somewhat overstrained standards of the moment...

...He is a national figure, admired, respected, and yet—except in Cyrano—far from idolized...

...Hampden sent out scouts to discover such plays...

...Has Mr...

...It is something of a feat to be a one-man band—but what of the greater strength in being able to delegate authority and to select subordinates worthy of receiving that authority...

...a demand for ensemble that would stimulate the finest inner powers of his company...

...In fact, there are two girls—the imperiled young one, and the widow, not quite so young, but still capable of throwing the net of tenderness and reformation around the Deacon...

...Hampden probably calls this "keeping faith with the public"—a splendid ideal, worthy of a Cyrano...

...Hampden has over-developed the thoughtful side of his work...

...For certainly no one could complain of the theatrical emotional force he brings to Othello or Hamlet...

...This is much better than relying solely on intuition or the feeling of the moment...

...The trouble is evidently deep seated...

...The prologue, set in a box car, may lead you to expect another drama of the hobo empire such as Outside Looking In...

...Probably the time has come to speak very frankly about Hampden...

...By this I mean genuine personal feeling...

...His company would learn to play better with him...

...They are not starring vehicles—in the same sense, that is, as the traditional Hamlet...

...The true answer might go far to solve the Hampden puzzle...

...In view of the brilliant fact that Cyrano is again on the boards, these remarks would be ungracious and ill-timed if it were not for the genuine interest and enthusiasm which I share with many others for Mr...

...They would feel less crushed under the weight of a single great talent...

...At all events, he puts into Cyrano a volume of feeling and warmth which many find lacking in his portrayals of other noble parts...

...But, if this strong suppression of temperament, so excellent in a business man, carries over into his acting, the public might be glad to sacrifice ten minutes of punctuality for ten degrees more of warmth in the play itself...

...Perhaps he identifies his own idealistic nature more closely with this hero than with any other...

...We need every now and then to be brought back to the beauties of the historical theatre-—to realize the eternal truth and value of all great drama from Greece to modern New York...

...No one is more needed to leaven the conflicting ideals of the current theatre...

...Roberts as the prize-fighter, and Donald Foster as the upright and misunderstood young hero make a smoothworking trio, with Miss Frances Underwood and Miss Mayo Methot helping out admirably as the girls in the case...

...Churchill as the card-sharping pseudodeacon, Mr...

...In the third place, there is Hampden's love for heroic plays, notably Shakespearean repertory...

...He is easily the greatest puzzle of our stage today —a man of deep intellectual understanding, an indefatigable worker, a profound student of the drama, manager, director and actor...

...But at times the structure itself is too apparent...

...But the play, to be a living thing in our lives, must quite as often spring from the environment of the times—must restate the eternal themes in terms of our own lives and feelings...

...Careful thought has chilled feeling—and what some people call glow and others magnetism in acting is little less than rich warm feeling conveyed to the audience through good technique...

...Then there is his power to occupy a triple role—actor, director and business manager...

...Or is his adherence to costume classics really a covered dread of letting us see Hampden in modern clothes...

...The Return of Emperor Jones BACK in the cramped quarters of the Provincetown Playhouse with Gilpin once more in the lead, we have had a chance to see Emperor Jones while the memories of Great God Brown are fresh...

...Three days less work with Mr...

...The reason it does not obstruct the emotional surge in Cyrano is undoubtedly because in this character Hampden has found so much of himself that natural feeling has triumphed, surging above the barriers of thought...

...But thereafter things run in more conventional lines...

...Hampden's own acting into closer harmony with his support, would lessen the public feeling that ensemble is sacrificed...

...If O'Neill continues to progress spiritually as much as Great God Brown indicates, his next few plays should be things of incomparably greater beauty than anything he has done...

...Then it becomes a weakness—a blinding thing...

...Alias the Deacon GOOD old-fashioned comedies of reformed crooks are so exceedingly rare that Alias the Deacon ought to be set for a considerable run in New York and elsewhere...

...From the family mortgage upward and onward, you will find all the comforting and familiar episodes of villainy, misguided lives, triumphant virtue and all-conquering love, drunken prizefighters, kind-hearted card sharpers, Italian desperadoes, selfconfident detectives—and the girl...

...As theatrical manager, Hampden announces that the curtain will rise at eight o'clock— and at eight it does rise with a rigidity of purpose that must cost a man of temperament no small effort...

...I venture that even those familiar with his earlier performances in the same role will find much that is new and strong and splendid in the part as he plays it today...

...Hampden and what he can still do in the future for the American stage...

...I know that he is absolutely sincere in believing this to be a fine theatrical ideal...

...It gives the effect of a permanent structure to his work...

...No one else is in a better position to make us a great gift—to establish for and with us a theatre that will give us the best in authentic drama while avoiding the too frequent morasses of the experimental and ultra-modernistic theatre...

...Hampden (and company) in a lyric tragedy by Dan Totheroh, perhaps Wild Birds—Hampden in Hamlet again, and then in Cyrano— Hampden in Rostand's Don Juan—Hampden in a serious and worthy French play such as Robert et Marianne—and Hampden (for the sheer good fun of it...

...Bragdon in perfecting the stage sets exchanged for three days more of stored-up vitality might be an equally pleasant greeting for the public...

...But it provides a solid evening of entertainment, much familiar though never tiresome comedy, and enough intervening pathos to keep the surface emotions pleasantly stirred...

...Somewhere, somehow, he seems to have shut out the breath of life which gives a man of far lesser proportions, such as John Barrymore, glow, glamor, and popularity...

...Hampden in character comedy—yes, even in The Show-Off...

...Many people have accused the Comedie Frangaise of rigidity, yet I saw recently at that famous theatre a modern play, Robert et Marianne, which would have taxed to the utmost the ability of Hampden and Miss Barrymore, and would have presented New York with something far above the level of all except one or two plays of this season...

...Not only is the play a great piece of romantic literature, but in it Hampden achieves a reality and sincerity far beyond the ken of most actors of our day...

...less of Hampden, perhaps, in acting roles, but more of the creative Hampden more of the artist of the theatre as a strong, virile guiding hand and source of inspiration...

...If she would remember that people are just as vividly alive when saying nothing as when talking in the center of the stage, she would become a much more than acceptable ingenue...

...And in our modern plays the interaction of character is of their essence...

...No one has finer and purer ideals of what the stage ought to be...

...In other words, tenacity is a splendid virtue when it does not become so pronounced as to defeat its own purpose...