The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
22 THE COMMONWEAL November n, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Lucky Sam McCarver SIDNEY HOWARD, the author of They Knew What They Wanted, is undoubtedly one of our most important and...
...At times it is like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta...
...It is at this moment that Carlotta pours out the whole bitterness of her soul in the ironic protest—"Do talk grammar...
...Placing the scene in Venice is in itself a wild excursion which breaks all sense of unity...
...the latter violates what is a deep inner reality to thousands of persons...
...I have never seen facial expression convey more astoundingly subtleties of mood and purpose...
...And I find neither in Sam McCarver...
...Nor do I agree with several critics that an actress of more sensual type would have suited the part better...
...While he is talking, she quietly dies, hidden from his sight in the depths of a big wing-backed chair...
...So much for the acting...
...And the Sam McCarver of John Cromwell is more than a match for Miss Eames's creation...
...But above and beyond this, there is a supreme distinction between mere coarse, strong language, between a biblical downrightness in calling things by their own names and the misuse of the name of God for theatrical effect...
...Within the narrow limits of the play itself, Miss Clare Eames has given us a remarkable exhibition of cerebral acting as Carlotta...
...But the episodes all have their faces turned one way, whereas life as one experiences it has a face toward the sun as well as the dark face of night...
...and again a blatant and inexcusable sensuality as in scene three of the first part...
...If so, he simply has not succeeded, because this inner hunger and this secret death, to achieve dramatic meaning, must be in some measure conveyed either by outward action or by powerful inference...
...You catch the restlessness which urges him still higher—the calculating passion which makes him want to marry Carlotta Ashe because she has been born in a world above him but has compromised enough with his own world to bring her within his ambitions...
...Sam comes to offer her a more honorable support, which she refuses...
...At times it has a fragrant beauty of the desert...
...Howard knows as well as anyone, and better than his cheap imitators, that the blasphemous use of the name of God or Christ by characters on the stage is totally unnecessary in a really strong play...
...You see the rigid common sense that has already brought him up the material ladder...
...Howard and his fellow realists might remember this in estimating their offense against those who differ with them on the reverence due to the name of God...
...Carlotta is distinctly a mental type whose very remoteness from the simpler emotions alone explains her resort to the degenerate forms of excitement displayed in the third episode...
...You will notice that there was a time when Sam and Carlotta might have redeemed each other...
...Geddes's great Dante project...
...The former can only offend squeamish taste, can only touch surface conventions...
...Howard honestly meant to convey rather more than the play states...
...For this reason it is not real drama at all...
...The second and most important part has not even been indicated...
...The first episode shows Sam McCarver as the proprietor of a Broadway night club on New Year's eve...
...You see here some of the effects, in miniature rumor, contemplated in Mr...
...It is just what its author calls it in a sub-title—four episodes...
...Only half the story has been told...
...The instinct of drama demands a revealing somewhere of what the inner death in Sam's own soul was to mean to him—if not in present action at least in the rumor of future agony...
...A real tribute is also due Olive West as the Arab mother in the one character that maintains unity and strength throughout...
...In fact, I hold quite the opposite theory that light treatment provokes light thinking, and that light thinking politely opens the door to light acting...
...at times, an exotic if none too pleasing truth...
...For a moment he is stunned when he discovers what has happened...
...But the settings are a work of supreme art combined with extraordinary ingenuity...
...You learn of his early life as mug-washer in a Hoboken saloon...
...He then begins to boast of his success, to berate Carlotta, and to tell her how little she has meant to him in his climb...
...Death only scratches the surface of tragedy...
...It is a sign of weakness to have to resort to it—just as italicizing words is a sign of weakness in good prose...
...There are moments of swift power in this play, of bitter truth and scathing laughter...
...The rather obvious defense that it is true to life seems to fall to pieces before the most obvious fact that it is only true to half of life...
...He attains vistas and a magic of light and movement and mystery that I have never seen approached on any stage, and far transcending the comparatively obvious results he achieved for The Miracle...
...Howard's sense of irony and a good curtain has buried his sense of universal drama...
...Arabesque THE only importance I can find in this curious hash of poetry, satire, burlesque, delicacy and gross sensuality is the superb and exciting stage-setting of Norman Bel Geddes...
...He takes up his hat and coat and leaves...
...But of yearning, of aspiration, of the rumor of creative currents—of that faint though thrilling promise which Lawson wove into his Processional—there is not a trace...
...Only the McCarvers violate the realities of the lives of others because it furthers an immediate alluring purpose...
...I think Mr...
...A facile enthusiasm for brutal portraiture might impel you to like his new play...
...The total effect is simply a sad and tiresome blur...
...Polly THIS sequel to the Beggar's Opera by John Gay, written about 1729 and first produced in 1777, is quite typical of that class of satire which, under the cloak of disclosing the immoral foibles of the day, never hesitates to make full use of them for popular amusement...
...There is still the possibility of creative love between them, which Sam promptly kills by selling out his respect for Carlotta to entrench his own career...
...Howard should have turned this into a story of redemption...
...You see him take the risk of a shooting affray on his own shoulders because this act will put Carlotta in his debt...
...I should say exactly the same thing if I were an atheist—only that I would then add this polite comparison: a man might show disrespect for his own parents, but he would knock down anyone else who insulted them...
...The final episode is in a cheap New York apartment where Carlotta has become the mistress of an oily stock broker...
...Now, I don't want to insist for an instant that Mr...
...One is meant to give realism to characters, the other to give the reality of spoken emphasis to the written word...
...The second point relates to the tiresome theme of blasphemy in the theatre...
...but having once chosen to head for deep tragedy, he ought to have carried his theme through...
...Then he remembers an important business engagement...
...22 THE COMMONWEAL November n, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Lucky Sam McCarver SIDNEY HOWARD, the author of They Knew What They Wanted, is undoubtedly one of our most important and promising dramatists...
...I think he meant it to be a drama of isolation and loneliness— of the death of the soul in the pursuit of the phantoms of pride...
...It would have been more difficult, perhaps, but far more compact and effective to have placed it in New York...
...The third episode is in the American colony in Venice...
...The play itself never becomes any one recognizable entity...
...I happen to be one ol those incorrigibles who can not accept the "unreality thesis"—namely, that if you make loose morals unreal enough on the stage, through exaggeration and sparkling wit, they at once become excellent material for light comedy...
...It is the least skilful part of the whole play, reeking with the atmosphere of perversion and degeneracy...
...In the second episode, he has married Carlotta and begun a successful Wall Street career...
...It moves on a straight descending line, and not in a swinging cycle...
...Or if you are sufficiently conscious of the wall of destruction erecting itself between thousands of individuals today, of the terrific sweep of selfish purpose in the world, of the way pride can throttle the least impulses of creative purpose, then you might feel that Sam McCarver and the woman he marries stand as a sardonic comment on the great human impasse...
...With supreme common sense he treated lightly only light things...
...Two more things remain to be said...
...His transition from naive human downrightness to the hollow resonant shell of the last act is one of the most finely graded performances I have ever seen...
...Throughout its course there is a freezing of the soul...
...There is lots of good tomfoolery in Polly and lots of bad tomfoolery-—enough to remind one that in the whole satire of "gallantry," there has been nothing to equal Gilbert's wit...
...Neither is necessary to the expert...
...There is a moment of struggle —and business wins...
...One feels that Mr...
...The scene is intended to motivate the disgust which finally makes Sam throw over Carlotta...
...It ends in polar night...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 1
