The Play

...I am quite certain that he would have liked Fuzzy...

...William Hurlbut demolishes some shams, but points to nothing true or authentic whose place they have usurped...

...With his hand upon a very big theme indeed, he seems either to have tired or grown fearful of its implications, and to have steadied his vertigo by the use of the symbols familiarized by Brothers Freud, Jung, and Moll...

...The jungle throbs with tom-toms...

...The theme of Bride of the Lamb is as old at least as the circuit rider...

...Albaugh is a salvation-merchant, strong, handsome, and forceful, who has graduated into the soul-saving business from the vaudeville stage, without any formality of "laying on of hands...

...The new play at Greenwich Village Theatre is not all that, though it comes in the middle of a rumbling and inconsequent season like a sharp crack of thunder overhead...

...His senses once aroused, and his perfunctory resistance overcome by the crude passion of his hostess, he, too, paws and purrs...

...If any vice is forgotten in the group of white men whom Kilbourn Gordon and Chester de Verde have collected for our edification, I would like to be told of it...

...So long as human nature remains human nature, and so long as original sin—or the subconscious, if you prefer it—dogs inflamed emotions, so long will spiritual peril remain the condition of being alive at all...

...the "white girl" a prostitute...

...A sort of cozy-corner canticle pours from his lips...

...Those who follow the estimates of some of the powerful and confident fellows who make good and bad weather for the box offices, might well believe that the incredible had eventuated and that the "great American play" which is to interpret the spirit of our country in drama for the world at large, had arrived...

...His muscles bulge under sacerdotal broadcloth, his voice is the rich baritone that plays on feminine nerves as the wind plays with the trees...

...Later, one feels the reins are let lie too loosely on the neck of passion for art not to suffer...

...Huston has no use for his except to wheel his chair or wield his horsewhip with them...

...A whim of the drunken husband makes him a lodger in the Bowman home, and from the moment the round-eyed wife clasps his travel-soiled boots to her bosom, the issue is not in doubt...

...This is all behind us, and Kongo will do as well as anything else to register the distance we have come from Grant and Speke, Bruce and Livingston...

...She has provided a host of cautions and defenses which have earned for her prudence the name of prurience—"monkish prurience...

...phosphorescent mumbo-jumbos stalk the stage, impressing whites no less than blacks...

...Once again, as in Bernstein's Thief, we are forced to note, in one of our best American actresses, a lack of the sane measure that intelligence imposes and which the "grandes amoureuses" of the European stage never, in their most abandoned moments, forget...

...Speaking generally, few better casts have been assembled than the actors and actresses who interpret Mr...

...The dozing obstacle to heavenly marriage passes from the stupor of drunkenness into death...

...April 14, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 637 THE PLAY By HENRY LONGAN STUART Bride of the Lamb AS the theatrical season wanes and nothing of first value has appeared, New York critics have a way all their own of saluting something of second or third order with a volley of hoarded adjectives which they had hoped to put to better use...

...The overwhelming chorus of praise which saluted Bride of the Lamb last week is a case in point...

...There are moments in Bride of the Lamb when one feels that the long rope which our playwrights who make sex their unvarying theme have been given is pretty nearly reeled in...

...Anyone who has lived in America twenty years has heard, from older inhabitants, of incidents at revivals and camp-meetings beside which it is a mere airy trifle, and which are calculated to erect the hair upon the scalp under the very thickest coat of stacomb...

...As the hapless bride, Miss Alice Brady both rises and sinks to the levels of her unusual opportunity...

...A certain constraint which seems to rest, almost like awkwardness, over her acting in the first scene, the perfunctory and mechanical fashion in which her pursed lips utter the domestic bromides, falls into its proper place as the result of careful and intelligent study after the orgiastic exercises in the gospel tent have done their work, and when the furnace of hate that has smouldered in her heart for years bursts into flame...

...When the Reverend Albaugh, in the penultimate act, suggests a brief walk to cool his fevered wits, reality quivered like a landscape on an old-fashioned back set...

...The father is a steady and persistent drinker whose nerves and stomach are giving way under his vice (a "soft-bellied sot" he will be called when religious enthusiasm has cleared the last cobweb of wifely illusion from his partner^ eyes...

...Instead, the man is sincere...

...One rather wonders what degree of mental age the major critics are registering who beslaver the Greenwich Village Theatre production with such phrases as "devastating," "startling," and "disquieting...

...Walter Huston is impressive as Flint, the paralyzed trader who sits at the centre of his web waiting until the instruments and victims of his revenge are attracted to it by some centrifugal force of which the screen and near-screen dramatists keep the secret...

...A little daughter, wonderfully played by Arline Blackburn, whose rasping voice and infantile demands for attention have plucked at the nerves of the playgoer through two acts, becomes the immediate instrument of disaster...

...In the midst of these borrowed and trashy elements, Mr...

...the doctor a hashish addict, flying from a charge of abortion...

...Ina Bowman has never drawn her dividends at all...

...We must not forget Fuzzy, a herculean and heroic native guide who shines, through his exertions and by contrast, and who is fond of thumping his cavernous chest and saying: "Me good man...

...We liked to think of him gaunt and fever-stricken, in his hammock, or plodding resolutely on ague-shaken legs through swamp and forest, his black bearers and helpers stringing out behind him...

...with "a hundred lovers in the rubber belt" and smitten with a vile disease...

...Albaugh is an interesting study in psychology...

...The wise old Church has always recognized the danger...

...One of the French abolitionists just before the Revolution wrote a little book entitled Un Bon Noir Comme II y'en a Peu Blancs...

...As evening fell we imagined him asprawl in a folding chair beneath the flap of his tent, while a squatting semi-circle of rolling eyes, ebon torsos, slit ears, and spiky heads, stared wonderingly upon the steel barrels that could hurl the white man's thunder, the brass-bound medicine chest which contained the white man's magic, even the little black book, unbelievable as it seems today, in which dwelt the fetish that kept the white man chaste, and patient, and helpful...

...He gets great help from a face that has all the appearance of being a Benda mask, built upon a careful study of the lineaments of D. H. Lawrence, and from an immobility which is within his role...

...Most actors find the control of their hands a problem...

...To be a mere host of jumbled impulses and associations, through which one mad passion is tearing like fire before wind, seeking, with disjointed phrases picked up during the crazy week of revival, to express a craving for which language has no real equivalent, is a test rather for physical endurance than for art...

...He passes at the same moment that a florid and overdressed beauty specialist from the Pacific Coast is claiming the Reverend Albaugh Herrick as her spouse according to the flesh and the registrar...

...Yet somehow, in the gingerly fashion of his introductions—in a certain aloofness while the Saving Name was being passed from mouth to mouth with the unctuous relish of "Oom-muni-padni-oom," I fancied I sensed a consciousness that he felt very much as the skipper of a tug-boat might feel when told off to tow a hulk loaded with T.N.T...

...About the Kongo TO the imagination of a world whose hair is silvering, the white man in darkest Africa was a familiar and revered figure...

...The coming of the Reverend Albaugh precipitates disaster...

...Hurlbut has resisted the facile temptation to make him a blackguard and sensualist that lay so near his hand...

...William Hurlbut 's merciless play...

...But it is one which, derived from emotion, is at the mercy of emotion to destroy...

...A brown charmer slithers across the boards ubiquitously mingling naive blasphemy with demands for a "kisskiss" which become the pretext for some edifying comment on morals generally...

...Love and happiness are the reward of beauty" the face-cream specialists tell us...

...through a narrows planted with submarine mines...

...The brief remainder is an aftermath of merciful madness, crowned like poor Ophelia's, with flowers and bridal veil...

...Tanqueray are used...

...From now on the love-crazed woman knows but one purpose, to remove the ailing and whining husband who lies like a log across the path of her escape...

...A bottle of white shoe-cleaning fluid for which she begs contains a deadly poison...

...The trader is a paralyzed tyrant who rules with the whip and the revolver...

...When the spiritual circus hits the Bowman family it is already a laid fire of repressions and discontents, that crackles for the torch...

...Construction is spotty, and devices as flagrant as those which cranked up the machinery in Mrs...

...The mother is a small-town belle, married early, prettier and dressier than her neighbors, who dreams of limousines, duvetyne dresses, and a grave and tender lover...

...The Reverend Johnson, accredited pastor of the luckless flock, played by Gerald Cornell, appeared once only on the stage by the side of his dynamic, irregular brother...

...The curtain falls upon a surrender whose nature the audience (artistically as it seems to me) is left to interpret according to its lights and inclinations...

...Lucky Mr...

...the "great White Father" a Sadist who tortures his peons...

...It is always a pleasure to identify intelligent direction in one of a play's minor moments...

...His conversion, sudden and scamped as the work has been, is a real one...

...Under the circumstances the comparison with Duse is overweening...

...Perhaps the task set Miss Brady was an impossible one...