The Play
W., M.
December 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 189 THE PLAY The Fountain UGENE O'NEIL has at last presented his long-heralded romance, The Fountain, on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theatre,...
...Arms and the Man—Splendidly acted revival of Shaw's pleasantest comedy...
...Before the eyes of the dying searcher there pass, held equal and as if of the same significance, the symbols of pagan myths, of man-made religions, and the Cross...
...In a Garden—Laurette Taylor struggles with a farrago of artificiality...
...The fountain of his imagination is still luring his quest onward into a Cathay farther off and more difficult to reach even than the legendary region sought after by Ponce de Leon...
...Perhaps unusual difficulties were also encountered, a thought that the actual stage version of the play itself suggests...
...The Enemy—Mr...
...With all the time and care and thought that obviously have been given to the production, and despite the occasional beauty and effectiveness of a few of its scenes, the real theatre in which the real play of O'Neil's vision is enacted is still the playwright's soul...
...Young Woodley—A lyric and courageous play for a limited and mature audience only...
...These Charming People-—Cyril Maude and Edna Best tiptoeing on Aden debris...
...The dramatist himself supplies the following note— "The idea of writing a Fountain came originally from my interest in the recurrence in folk-lore of the beautiful legend of a healing spring of eternal youth...
...The mimes that pass before the eyes of the spectator are but halting and stammering shadows of the figures of his dream...
...Such moments come in the vision of Columbus and his voyagers at dawn as they sight the land, or the first glimpse of the mist-enshrouded clearing in the forest where Ponce de Leon lies wounded at the side of what he thought to be the fountain of youth, just before his visions appear—hallucinations and symbols by means of which, apparently, the playwright seeks to express the inner meanings of his conception, but which have little more than the arbitrary significance of a conventional, pantheistic pageant...
...For several years past there have been rumors concerning this new play, indicating that unusual care—even in the case of Mr...
...That the quest of beauty and of truth set forth in The Fountain may yet be at least partially achieved by Eugene O'Neil is not only a hope but also a reasonable assumption...
...Craig's Wife—Excellent portraiture and acting in a play of awkward construction and muddled thinking...
...O'Neil very truly says, will be granted by even the most captious of the playwright's critics...
...Easy Come, Easy Go—A mildly amusing Owen Davis farce...
...In the long list of plays which is printed in the program there are the names of many failures, but the names also of many great successes...
...It has sought merely to express the urging spirit of that period without pretending to any too-educational accuracy in the matter of dates and facts in general...
...Nevertheless, the turning of the thoughts of such a powerful and authentic dramatist as Eugene O'Neil to the quest of the high romance of the human soul is decidedly a welcome portent...
...O'Neil and his associates, who give such sedulous thought to their productions— was being devoted to its presentation...
...That The Fountain is not morbid realism, as Mr...
...Juan Ponce de Leon, in so far as Fve been able to make him a human being, is wholly imaginary...
...Until or unless the thought of today, whether expressed in art, in philosophy, or in the principles of social reforms, admits once and for all that Christianity is not merely one among many religions, but is unique, sharply distinct from all others, and only touching those others as something superior that yet draws to itself anything that is good and true in those inferior elements, the modern mind will remain vague with the vagueness brooding over The Fountain like the mist that broods over the man who failed to reach the fountain...
...The New Chariot Review—You can save money by not going...
...December 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 189 THE PLAY The Fountain UGENE O'NEIL has at last presented his long-heralded romance, The Fountain, on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theatre, with elaborate settings and costumes by Robert Edmund Jones...
...Otherwise, the story of the quest of Ponce de Leon proceeds slowly, and it must be confessed, dully...
...Dearest Enemy—A musical comedy of Revolutionary New York...
...Robert Edmund Jones perhaps even more than to the author...
...The Green Hat—Mr...
...The Vortex—Starts anywhere and ends nowhere, but has good theatrical quality in two scenes...
...Princess Flavia--The Prisoner of Zenda, delightfully adapted as a musical play...
...It remains true, after all, that it is easier to deal with the stark realities of seafaring life, or life on New England farms, or in water-side haunts, than to shape forth in tangible drama such high and difficult stories of the spirit as the quest of the fountain of youth...
...The characters, with the exception of Columbus, are fictitious...
...Andracles and the Lion—Shaw at his best—rand worst...
...yet whatever the reasons may have been, the long delay between composition and production, combined with the various rumors that have reached the interested public, drew unusual attention to The Fountain...
...The play is only incidentally concerned with the era of discovery in America...
...The School for Scandal—A rather dreary and monotonous revival of Sheridan's classic...
...Especially is this true when the playwright himself is as much baffled in his quest for the meaning of life as was Ponce de Leon in his quest for the fountain of youth...
...Aden's weak-willed heroine obscured by the glamor of Katherine Cornell's all-too-good acting...
...Here is a man to whom the playhouse is not a mere place of pandering to the desire for entertainment...
...Young Blood—Helen Hayes battles with a bewildered author's flounder ings...
...The Butter and Egg Man—Mostly good comedy spoiled by occasional offensively bad taste...
...Is Zat So?—The best character comedy of the year, hung on a poor plot...
...I have simply filled in the bare outline of his career, as briefly reported in the Who's Who of the histories, with a conception of what could have been the truth behind his 'life-sketch' if he had been the man it was romantically—and religiously—moving to me to believe he might have been...
...Therefore, I wish to take solemn oath right here and now, that The Fountain is not morbid realism...
...But even the most kindly and considerate and sympathetic of his critics could hardly say that O'Neil has succeeded in embodying his romance, in terms of the theatre, nearly so successfully as he has done in the case of several at least of his plays to which the terms "morbid realism" have often been applied...
...Stolen Fruit—In which Ann Harding achieves greatness and lifts a good play to distinction...
...Pollock falls down on a good theme...
...The Poor Nut—One good hippodrome scene and little else...
...There are few moments really poignant with drama, or with poetry, and those that are may trace their effectiveness to Mr...
...The gap between his ideal and the reality of its presentation is but imperfectly bridged...
...M. W. In Selecting Your Plays A Man's Man—A sincere and poignant play, marred by the current blasphemy fad...
...it is to him a temple of the human spirit...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 7
