The Play

...To others, it might be either dangerously morbid or cynically grotesque...

...Aside from one absurdly unnecessary bit of blasphemy in the first act, the play is written and acted with a deep and abiding reverence for the more mysterious truths of the human pilgrimage...

...November 18, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Young Woodley JOHN VAN DRUTEN, the author of this play, is a young English schoolmaster, who writes with a great deal of tender understanding of the eager and heartrending emotional gropings of a sensitive boy on the borderland of manhood...

...And Others EASY COME, Easy Go is another Owen Davis farce with Otto Kruger in the lead and some capable support...

...Simmons sends Woodley into the world of men because she knows that any other course would mean his destruction and in spite of all the clamor of her own soul for the things her husband can never give her...

...It tells of a young man named John Stafford, who, though upright enough in his living, throws back onto an external fate the various misfortunes that beset him...

...It is the story of a modern Job, to which is added, through the mouth of a priest, the lesson and the symbolism of Calvary—a story told in the expressionistic manner, but simply, forthrightly and with great beauty and insight...

...Yet one false note in Miss Gahagan's work would have utterly marred this portrait...

...In The Carolinian, a story of the Revolution based on Sabbatinfs novel, romanticism and realism get hopelessly mixed up, although several scenes are quite stirring and Sidney Blackmer and little Martha-Bryan Allen act as well as Charles Warburton overacts atrociously...

...In Dearest Enemy, aside from a tritely vulgar first act, there is much fine comedy, much excellent music and some good acting woven about the Murray mansion on Murray Hill during the revolutionary days...

...Perhaps the prevalence of this view, so utterly at variance not alone with historic Christianity but also with the findings of many modern psychologists, accounts for the bewilderment of the critics...

...And it has the added distinction of being presented with bold originality in stage setting and dramatic method...

...Briefly, it tells the story of a boy approaching eighteen who, rebelling against the coarser instincts of his companions, falls in love with the young wife of his schoolmaster...

...So in spite of all erotic material in which the play deals, and at times to excess, it manages to come to grips with the finer realities and the beauty that life holds for those prepared to build on its hardships...

...She weaves no sophistries about "conventions...

...Perhaps the highest tribute paid to her ever-increasing art as an actress is the fact that the attention of all critics has been focused on Mr...

...The end of the play shows us the gradual maturing of both, and the turning to good account of a situation that might have led to tragedy— the boy setting his teeth into the realities of life and its responsibilities, the wife after one mistake from which Woodley has a most unhappy—and I think unnecessary—reaction, too wise to break his ideal by insisting that her love was not real, but summoning him to the renunciation and the strength upon which can be built the tower of freedom and of manhood...

...His death at the end is no more than a re-affirmation of the truth that a man must die to himself if he is to be re-born to a more perfect love...

...It is a very frank play—laying completely bare the mind of the adolescent schoolboy as it is, and not at all as many writers have idealized it...

...To detail the story as unfolded in fifteen scenes would be quite useless in this limited space...

...Simmons, is the more difficult, because the more complex, and the more acutely restrained...

...He will not accept the truth of Calvary, that life is a state of suffering, and that suffering is the path to humility and spiritual rebirth...

...Because of the emphasis on this material, it is essentially a play for more mature audiences, for those who earnestly wish to recapture their understanding of troubled youth, rather than for those who, regardless of age, are still entangled in the confusion of youth's problem...

...To Stanley Howlett for his direction, and to Miss Clifford Sellers, Miss Ernita Lascelles, Miss Alice Chapin and Mr...

...Or, to put it another way, he discovers that it is not an external objective fate, but an inner condition of his own soul that has brought about his downfall...

...It is not a play for any and every audience...

...Princess Flavia BACK in Ruritania again...

...His is the subtle sin of pride and selfsatisfaction...

...Walter Kumme for beautifully graded contributory acting, one owes a real debt...

...This theme has received an extraordinarily sensitive and understanding treatment at the hands of Glenn Hunter and Helen Gahagan...

...Noel Coward's play, The Vortex, intimately reflected this current view...

...Unfortunately it drags heavily toward the end...

...These boys are asking the eternal questions of youth, some in cleanliness of spirit, some with coarseness and cynicism...

...Of the two parts, Miss Gahagan's, as Mrs...

...The stage settings by Cleon Throckmorton are amazingly in the mood and rhythm of the piece> and the acting of Robert Lynn as Stafford shows a rare understanding, restraint and tense power...

...The lift and beauty of the last act might be entirely missed by those already too preoccupied with the childish view of sex—and without the implications of that last act, the play is one that would simply drive in the nail of morbidity more deeply...

...Unfortunately for him, she reciprocates his love—a rebellion on her part, too, against the cold, prosaic mentality of the man she has married...

...This should be stated in all fairness to the censor who barred it from the English stage...

...Where Candida sends Marchbanks away simply because she is still in love with her husband, Mrs...

...Instead, she conquers herself and in doing so gives Woodley his chance to build fine things through suffering...

...To my mind, it is by far the finest thing produced by the Provincetown Playhouse...

...Adam Solitaire O OMETHING approaching a roar of bewilderment has ^ arisen from the critics of our daily papers over this deeply spiritual and moving allegory by Mr...

...Shy, awkward, sensitive, gifted with the soul of a poet, Young Woodley falls into the trap of his own idealizations, and turns the fullness of his growing emotions toward the one person who seems to understand him...

...Basshe...

...This is Helen Ford's best musical comedy part to date, by all odds...

...The more Stafford rebels and the more he reviles fate, the more crushing becomes the burden of his disaster, until at length he discovers the secret of submission to a Will higher than his own, and through this submission regains that which he had lost...

...For romance, illusion and an evening of sheer delight, by all means see Princess Flavia...

...The play runs counter to the popular currents of thought...

...Welchman is a real actor as well as a graceful singer, and Evelyn Herbert as Princess Flavia does almost as well...

...To a limited and understanding audience, this play, as now acted, will be for the most part lyric and courageous...

...back, too, with that splendid line, "if love were all" which has given to this old story something of the romantic sublimity of Cyrano...

...Hunter's amazingly poignant portrait of Woodley...

...A slightly greater restraint might have made it acceptable to many more...

...Of course this theme strikes at the very root of the greatest single destructive force in modern civilization—the overweening pride of man in mankind, in man's power to create his own destiny without supernatural aid, and the projection of all our failures and disasters onto an objective fate, which, for the sake of scientific glamor, we call economic or hereditary determinism...

...Its acceptance is widespread among those who seek release from the responsibilities imposed by freedom of the will or by immutable moral laws...

...Yes, back under the spell of that magnificent love story, The Prisoner of Zenda, with the zest of delightful music by Sigmund Romberg, gorgeously romantic stage settings by Watson Barratt, with our old friends Rudolph Rassendyl, Rupert of Hentzau, Black Michael of Streslau, and the lovely Princess Flavia...

...There is a firmness and a right mindedness behind this play so conspicuously lacking in Shaw's Candida...

...The Shuberts have taken another great step forward in their restoration of light opera in this splendid production— and not least in entrusting to Harry Welchman the difficult double role of Rassendyl and Prince Rudolph...