The Play

...In the whole course of the play—and it seems like an interminably long course—there is never a moment when two characters talk to each other with the sincerity of real human beings...

...Of course the danger that has always lurked in such reactions is that man, led by his own pride, is more anxious to discover a new faith than to rediscover an old one...

...In the first place, it is a comedy of the Byronesque attitude toward life, minus the deeper springs of ecstasy which every now and then raised Byron's thought above the level of his emotional frailties...

...If they fail to increase the pace at a moment of emotional tension, the play seems to us to drag...

...Shaw is a leading instance of the successful propagandist, in this sense of the word...

...Even the meritorious features of the play, the many amusing bits of dialogue, and several really dramatic situations, are spoiled, or injured at least, by the poor stage management...

...The interesting point is not whether Mr...

...The director is slowly whipping up the action...

...It is entirely unlikely that Mr...

...We need more producers who will be to the plays they present what good orchestra directors are to orchestral music: real interpreters, capable of communicating their interpretations...

...The great hope to be gathered from the confusion in which so many of these writers seem to be laboring, is the aspiration which nearly all of them show toward a faith of some kind which will lead them out of the chaos threatened by the terrific pace of modern life...

...But that is so slight a compliment as to be hardly worth making...

...Lawson himself has discovered this faith, but the fact that he does not class himself among the pessimists and that as a representative poet of the younger school, he, like Eugene O'Neill, has begun to feel that without a faith, man and modern civilization are doomed...

...From their work you can gather the sense that people are beginning to be afraid that the machine will conquer the man, that the triumphs of our material progress will crush out our spiritual hope...

...It is only a few years since the then younger generation of writers was laboring to knock down the straw man which to them represented the ancient faith...

...To many a casual and pessimistic observer, the sum total of this complicated equation is zero and despair...

...often again they are ideas connected with various types of social reform...

...I think we often fail to realize the enormous importance of the director's hand in the sense of aliveness which a play conveys to us...

...Nirvana ONE of the most important plays of last season was Processional, by John Howard Lawson...

...Kenneth Mackenna, who may some day be a good actor, is also in the play and does rather better than usual...

...Perkins's portrait of a literary divine might linger in the memory as a compact and consistent piece of work...

...The production is attributed to the author himself, though it is difficult to understand how such a tried veteran of the playhouse as Augustus Thomas could have handled his own play so ineptly...

...In the second place, the dialogue of the play is as cumbersome and false as its theme...

...Channing Pollock's The Enemy, perhaps, is an instance of a play that succeeds, not because of its inherent drama, but because of the whole-hearted support given to it by those whose chief concern is the promotion of pacifism...

...But perhaps no author should be trusted with the actual staging of his work...

...Galsworthy, Ibsen, Brieux, and others, might be mentioned among those who have, in the vernacular, "gotten away with" propaganda in more or less dramatic form...

...it is simply because, despite the limitations and the handicaps imposed by propaganda, the playwright has written a good play—something that entertains, that moves and holds an audience because of intrinsic dramatic interest...

...Still-born Propaganda EVEN the most convinced opponents of the Volstead Act are likely to come away from Still Waters, in which the veteran playwright, Augustus Thomas, presents his propaganda against Volsteadism, with a regretful feeling that the Volstead Act must have something good in it after all, since the attack upon it is so weak and dreary...

...It had certain objectionable features, a lack of artistic restraint and a persistent crudity of expression...

...Its brief run of one week compared to the unexpectedly long run of Processional last year, only indicates again how soundly and how quickly public taste registers its impression...

...A poet like Lawson is impelled by the very newness of present-day conditions to feel that only a new faith can meet them...

...But suppose that even now a faith were stirring in the depths of the crowd-subconscious...

...Nearly every character talks in those rounded, balanced periods which the heavyweight afterdinner speaker always mistakes for sly humor...

...The tail end of rationalism was wagging violently...

...The variety, the surging force which he can put into a play, corresponds to the range of emotional excitement which we ourselves feel in the course of our own daily experiences...

...Sometimes these ideas are religious or philosophical...

...We can read signs on every hand that man has discovered the limitations of logic and physics, that he is yearning with a new vitality to reach beyond the merely physical, beyond those things which can be explained in neat syllogisms to that realm of thought and feeling which only recently was so much despised under the name of metaphysics...

...Several good actors have somehow been induced to devote their energies to this piece, including Oswald Perkins, Antoinette Perry, and the star of the evening, Arnold Daly...

...If the actors rattle off their lines too rapidly during a moment of emotional calm, the play strikes us as artificial...

...The production of plays is so vital a point that it seems strange that the present season should have witnessed so many occasions when inadequate or fumbling stage management was so obviously responsible for so many failures of plays which might have had a fair chance to succeed...

...The direction alone of the Masque of Venice would be enough to ensure its rapid decay...

...Even if the theme were sound and the dialogue witty, the slow mechanical movement of the characters through the play would give something of the effect of a minuet played in funeral march tempo...

...During rehearsal, the director has much the same job to perform as the leader of an orchestra...

...They are acting to each other as well as to the audience, and the result is highly distressing...

...In a play that is well directed you could, if so minded, keep time with your foot almost as accurately as when you hear music being played in the distance...

...I think you can set it down as an axiom of dramatic success that a play with a false theme, untrue to our instinctive knowledge of the ways of life, never achieves a general response from the audience...

...But to balance this, it had a great and splendid vitality, a vigorous and constructive protest, and certainly carried a forceful hint of much finer work, to come from this author...

...Thomas's play will attract only convinced enemies of Volstead...

...The third cause for gloom is the direction...

...This so-called comedy indeed is so far from being successful as a play, still less as propaganda, that it inspires the hope that its failure will do damage to the whole business of using the stage as a propagandist agency...

...Lawson says in a program note, "the American people express themselves in jazz and machinery, great buildings, tabloids, and radio...

...There are plenty of other faults which might be pointed out, but these I have mentioned are enough to suggest the title of a book—Why Plays Leave Broadway...

...In the first flush of eager search, he does not see the identity of the things he wants with those things which have always been ready to his hand...

...Whatever else we may think of the strivings of these younger poets, we must not lose the significance of their desertion from the ranks of pessimism and their entry—even unconscious— into the army of those who search for truth through faith...

...Whenever a propagandist play succeeds, it is not because of the propaganda it contains, or rarely so...

...In Nirvana, for example, he does not see that the simple prayer uttered in the last act is nothing else 4 4 4 * than the prayer of all the Christian mystics of every century...

...Perhaps too much attention has been paid to the mere scenic aspect of the production problem, and too little to the subtle yet more vital factor of intelligent and creative direction...

...He can make or ruin a theatrical production by methods almost exactly analogous to the conductor's...

...His present play, Nirvana, is a great disappointment, failing as it does to fulfill the promises of Processional...

...But in all these instances, the ideas dealt with by the writers are concerned with less disputatious and immediate problems than prohibition...

...526 THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Masque of Venice PLAYS that fail can be quite as interesting as plays that succeed, if you want to take the trouble to find out why they lack the magic of popular appeal...

...When a climax is approaching, you will find your foot beating faster instinctively...

...But even wets, provided they have not left their sense of drama outside the theatre, will scarcely find this creaking, heavy-footed attempt at comedy more enlivening than a dry dinner followed by anti-prohibition speeches...

...In an absolute sense, it is true that most really worthwhile writers, whether for the stage or the press, are propagandists in the sense that they use their medium of expression in the service of their ideas...

...As Mr...

...The Masque of Venice, by George Dunning Gribble, is a good laboratory piece for this purpose, because it combines nearly all those faults, any one of which would be enough to send it back to the storehouse...

...There are certain points of Nirvana which are well worth discussing for the light they throw on the work of the distinctly modern playwrights...

...Now the reaction has set in...

...An audience where drys are represented as well as wets will certainly not be pleased with his thesis...

...His work always has a superficial cleverness but lacks strength and inner sincerity...

...If intended as satire, which it probably was, it fails to probe deeply enough or sharply enough to reach the real trouble and so loses itself in a mist of sentimentalities about irregular love and becomes in effect a plea for free sentimental attachments without the reality of life's responsibilities...