The Play

...Among last week's audience withers were unwrung, and ducts did not function...

...Once again, native good-humor, native dislike for intimate tragedy, native preference for solutions that leave belief in the essential rightness of human nature unshaken, native love for the situation and mistrust of the sermon, cheat us as they have cheated us a score of times before...

...His Larry Gilbert is a man who, through a long life of illsuccess, has achieved a stoical philosophy all his own, and who covers a tender and wounded spirit with a grim acceptance of things as they are that is in strong contrast with the rant and bounce, the tawdry pretense of his fellow Thespians...

...Even the terrible deacon stands revealed as a furtive and clandestine crap-shooter...

...Strange figures, indelibly associated in the public mind with secular hair revivers, antediluvian cough elixirs, prehistoric balsams, and perennial pills descend from dusty shelves in archaic drug-stores and strut their little hour upon the stage...

...With the irruption of a group of Thespians from the great city, the ominous miseen-scene of the first act takes its consecrated place in the familiar sphere of the dryly humorous...

...The play moves to its predestined end, through what is, it must be admitted, a great deal of enjoyable and uproarious incident...

...Or, as in the case of Frank Bacon, the creator of Lightnin', come their way so late...

...It reaches us from a day when pathos was primitive (as humor has remained...

...Over and over again the playgoer finds himself faced with one or another of these characterizations—compact, flawless, studied to the least gesture and intonation...

...Why does headline success come their way so seldom...

...East Lynne AN aphorism by William Winter on the front page of the East Lynne playbill, informs us that the venerable melodrama has induced "more tears than the Civil War...

...The extravaganza is acted by a very clever cast, indeed, whose relish of their own clowning never fails to communicate itself...

...But even the high-spirited kick against the obvioiis, upon which the last curtain falls, does not save us from disappointment that a play which promised distinction ended in commonplace...

...There is a nice clean-cut boy for the nice sunny girl, a situation behind the scenes at the "Opery House" of that thrilling order where the under-dog gets definitely and decisively on top and the nice girl saves the show apparently through sheer force of inherited talent...

...The sealed parlor with its shabby furniture, enlarged photographs, ostentatious Bible, and view upon the one stupid village street—the lantern-jawed deacon with his acrid, ubiquitous wife, the dreamy romantic child (her drawer full of post-cards sent her from the capitals of the great world by an outlawed father whose name must never be mentioned...

...But to the thoughtful mind it is, even today, no funnier than a bad sermon or a "good" advertisement, or any of the hundred odd reactions contingent upon1 a sharp difference in mental age...

...What becomes of these splendid utility men of the American stage, whose equal, it seems at least to one critic, any other would be hard put to show...

...It would be an interesting experiment to revive the hoary drama au serieux, with straight acting and respectful mise-en-scene, and to watch the result...

...Or did they spend the dark night of the 'seventies and 'eighties watching for the dawn of an age when, from corsets and courtesy alike, their children should be free...

...It is at least an interesting surmise...

...In his settings, Cleon Throckmorton has raised ugliness to a kind of essential sublimity...

...what elements of authentic drama lurked here...

...The Trouper * I * HERE were a few minutes, all too brief, last week at the A Fifty-Second Street Theatre when one loved to think, with a sensible thrill and a forgetfulness of past disappointments, that the big, hundred-percent American drama was in course of incubation before one's eyes, and that the skill and honesty which had assembled the materials of native drama would not be content to employ them to the purposes of mere entertainment...

...The fact is that East Lynne, for all the pains lavished by the Provincetown Players on scenery, dresses, and direction to lift it into the sphere of extravaganza, keeps too near sentiments not altogether outgrown to be a successful vehicle for ridicule...

...What spectral hollowness in those flyblown courtesies...

...Archibald Fleming's rendering of the virtuous and uxorious solicitor is desperate in its ligneous quality, and reprobation is broadly featured by Stanley Howlett, whom it was the pleasing custom of the archaeologically-minded among the audience to hiss at fitting levels of villainy...

...Its humors are documentary ones, like Godey fashion plates or Peele's Popular Educator...

...What rich pasturage for moths in these lank cerements...

...Ruth Nugent has little to do save register the breathless sweetness of unspoiled youth, but a word must surely be said for the vivid interpretation of Deacon Millett by Carleton Macy...

...J. C. Nugent, as Larry Gilbert, carries most of the burden on his shoulders...

...Is their very versatility and accessibility helping to depress the native stage, by keeping it within the margins of the constructed plot and regional characterization which they can be so depended on to fill...

...What an ankylosis in those wooden gestures...

...It presented its symbols with a happy confidence that they would find general acceptance and awaken emotions which can now be aroused only by a cautious approach and by obliterating every trace of the obvious...

...Even last week, a suspicion was in the air that, undirected by the fuglemen of laughter, some at least of the audience might have taken East Lynne as seriously as their grandparents...

...Like the rustic who, gazing upon the giraffe, refused to credit the existence of any such "animile," we ask ourselves whether it be possible that in such disguise the fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers who begot us, lived and loved...

...Practically all the parts in The Trouper are cast in character, and when an American company of professional actors and actresses play character together, it is an ungrateful task to pick out the best—all are so good...

...In spite of the overlay of burlesque, Mary Blair's Lady Isabel insists on retaining a quaint vestige of pathos, like a pretty face in a cracked mirror...

...But neither did the laughter approach even remotely the volume that greeted that incredible monument of imbecility, Fashion, revived two seasons ago...

...The entr'acte songs of the period, sung with convulsive sincerity by Louise Bradley, were a feature...