The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
i6o THE COMMONWEAL December 16, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Enemy AFTER seeing this vastly press-agented play, to which its author, Channing Pollock, has apparently persuaded...
...If, by any unhappy chance, Mr...
...Every great dramatist has made his plays convey an eternal idea...
...and so heavily larded played by Laurette Taylor, ^nerself, she is an excellent type ibod * i<l commanding considerable sym. act, when the plot jumps in and robs her ch as Ger ^e Kelly robbed his Mr...
...But they cannot do the impossible and raise it to the power of drama, because the author has made them merely rhetorical puppets who must say certain things at certain times because Mr...
...Fay Bainter and the rest of the cast do as well as they can with this emotional stuff, and lend it for the moment a certain theatrical reality...
...I have no quarrel with Mr...
...We are experiencing a veritable surfeit of symptom reformers...
...Remembering, perhaps, the war-propaganda cartoons of a German family indulging in its morning hate, they would create an equally preposterous picture of American households indulging in morning love before breakfast...
...Pollock would have done a far more constructive job if he had railed less at the fever and delirium of hate and had showered his eloquence on the need of international drainage tubes for the pus and poison of pride...
...But sincerely florid platitudes do not of themselves advance the cause of peace...
...Barry is satirizing some particular writer of today's theatre, that victim can respond— "Praise be, thou too hast written a play...
...She blurs the few sharp outlines Mr...
...No one deserves a poetic, tender and forthright play of youth more than Helen Hayes...
...Does anyone really suppose it is merely because they are afraid of the law and its policemen •—which they themselves have created ? Is it not quite plainly because a court decision "saves the face" (i.e., the pride) of both parties...
...Craig of reality in Cr *g s Wife...
...When she is not being cast as Cleopatra five years ahead of time (I am sure she will do Shaw's heroine extremely well some day) she is forced into meaningless flapper roles, as far from her real quality as cocktails from old Chartreuse...
...Pollock's idea that the stage should be a sort of lay pulpit...
...In a Garden A GOOD title for this play—which might have served also for Mr...
...That is just what Mr...
...Pollock's—would be Caught in His Own Trap...
...If you want to see how true this is in a practical way, ask yourself why men settle their differences so readily in courts where once they used pistols...
...The Enemy depressed me so greatly through its lack of insight, through its trite superficiality, and through its purely artificial construction, that it would not merit serious discussion except for the light it throws on so many similar efforts in every field—economics as well as the theatre, for example...
...Pollock had had the illumination to call the enemy pride instead of hate—if for no other reason than that hate springs from pride and is a symptom rather than the disease itself...
...He would, if questioned closely, turn out to be one of those men who confuse suffering with evil, who weep copiously before the crosses of life and turn their heads before they have time to see its resurrection...
...The story is supposed to be of the struggle between father and son in a motherless household—a theme with possibilities for a serious author...
...Barry's effort does r*t mer t even serious discussion—so completely mechanically, pTQtivated...
...During the absence of Mr...
...His lack of understanding and intuitive sympathy lead him so far astray that his main theme becomes hopelessly lost...
...The same kind of disputes come up every day because the same kind of underlying pride is there—but the courts offer a safety valve for this pride which prevents its breaking out in gun play and physical slaughter, much as a drainage tube prevents death from an infected wound...
...Pollock is trying to preach...
...But almost never will they tell you that love flows forth like a great spontaneous stream, unconsciously and without effort, where pride has vanished, or that where there is no pride, you cannot discover hate...
...Forbes has evidently read a dictionary of flapper slang, and thinks that through its profusion he is painting a true portrait of the youthful mind...
...Pollock is a victim of his own creation...
...Philip Barry, softly transposing Ibsen's Doll's House to another key, has tried to tell the story of a sensitive and spontaneous wife who has lived under the dominion of a playwrighting husband who sees all life, including his own, in strict terms of the theatre...
...He would see his wife as a character in a play, and "stage" her life accordingly for the jovial purpose of discovering her "reactions" and proving how perfect was his own knowledge of human emotions...
...Her rare combination of intelligence and spontaneity merit the attention of the best of playwrights...
...They talk of brotherly love as if it could be generated by some patent form of auto-suggestion...
...But Miss Taylor plays her too heavily and with too much complexity...
...Pollock wants these things said...
...artificial is i with false s has possibili portrait, eas pathy up to of reality ve Young Blood IN A play that might have been quite stirring if its author, James Forbes, had decided whether he was writing farce or serious drama, Helen Hayes battles heroically against torrents of obtrusive slang and emerges with a few fine moments to her credit...
...But the playwright breaks in so often on the actors' most promising scenes, that the evening is depressing beyond compare...
...R. Dana Skinner in Europe for several weeks, the reviews of this department will be written by the members of the editorial staff of The Commonweal...
...Pollock forgot to tell...
...His is not the solvent type of mind whose broad charity and understanding seek the good and the constructive in everything, select the helpful from the dangerous elements, and build from the material at hand a noble edifice...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...Unquestionably it is a sincere play, written under strong emotions of protest against the useless slaughter of war and against the enemy of blind hate which lies dormant in nearly everyone and becomes active under the least stimulus of mob or national spirit...
...Pollock, for example, has his favorite mouthpiece in the play draw an indictment against all the organizations which he holds responsible for fostering the enemy of hate, including even organized religious bodies—one of those destructive gen- . eralities which only demonstrate clearly that Mr...
...Barry has drawn...
...But Mr...
...But being concerned only with symptoms, he has utterly failed to see the disease...
...The trouble is with the idea Mr...
...This play would, I am sure, have been vastly different and more compelling if Mr...
...He knows everyone "like a book"—meaning that he knows no one as a human being...
...But where Ibsen at least wrote a strong play, with whose moral index one might take issue seriously, Mr...
...He would analyze his own romance at the very moment it was taking place...
...It is like a dull man telling you dully how dull he finds his next door neighbor...
...Norman Trevor is his pleasant self and Florence Eldridge achieves a more than fair success in the character of a blackmailer who poses as a family maid...
...Barry tells you artificially how artificial he finds the minds of some dramatists...
...It is hard to shed tears over the misery of men and nations unless you catch a glimpse of why they are miserable...
...Barry's own play indicates that he is precisely that same type of dramatist...
...And they do still less good when accompanied by muddled thinking...
...It has precisely the bookish quality he derides—shows the same undue fascination with a theme or thesis—and consequently carries no illusion whatever of reality...
...i6o THE COMMONWEAL December 16, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Enemy AFTER seeing this vastly press-agented play, to which its author, Channing Pollock, has apparently persuaded countless friends to come and be praiseful, I can only say—deliver the real workers for peace from some of the friends of peace...
...He has achieved a hatred of hate, to which you can trace most all of the well-meant fallacies in which the theme of his play abounds...
...In the end, the wife in this play, failing to bring her husband to terms with reality, trots out the back door like Ibsen's Nora, and the dismayed playwright vents his amazement in pulling down the flowers of a garden "set" which he had constructed in his own living room to further one of his domestic experiments...
...We might call the play and performance as a whole, elephantine—were it wholly fair to* elephants, who are not limp, but alive and spontaneous...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 6
