The Play
W., H. & Skinner, R. Dana
January x2, x927 THE COMMONWEAL 971 THE By R. DANA The Guitrys in Mozart T HE name of Guitry is one with which to conjure in Paris. There was a time when Sacha Guitry was known only as the...
...not as customs and manners ideally Catholic, but as a consequence of aberration from ideal Catholic life under the influence of persecution, of deprivation of all those rights which early Americans have claimed to be inherent in man and unalienable...
...H.W...
...One doubts whether the comedy will be as well understood here...
...January x2, x927 THE COMMONWEAL 971 THE By R. DANA The Guitrys in Mozart T HE name of Guitry is one with which to conjure in Paris...
...At other times, the comedy runs rather raw...
...Now the reason for comparing the French and American productions is precisely that matter of audiences which plays so important a part in the theatre and is frequently forgotten...
...On the whole, The Padre in English and before a New York audience is an ill-advised adventure...
...But to Guitry the theme is replete with comedy, and he makes the most of it in the approved mood of the Paris boulevards...
...The cardinal is a man of much human and spiritual wisdom...
...One has the assurance in advance of distinction, smoothness, perfection of detail and lightness of handling...
...He sees far beneath the surface roughness of the good cur6, and restores him to his parish...
...Amusing situations follow--mother, sons, danghter-in-law, grandchildren, proceed to Rome in a body, to investigate...
...No one, I imagine, would accuse Sacha Guitry of being a profound writer...
...Guitry carries this combination of qualifies even into a musical review, such as the one he staged in Paris shortly after the Armistice...
...There was a time when Sacha Guitry was known only as the son of his famous father, Lucien, but even before the latter's death, the Parisian public began to understand that his talent had passed on in direct line, altered and modified, but still living in its own right...
...In fact, it is almost bound to give sharp offense to many, and to be mistaken by others for an indiscriminate attack on the higher clergy...
...But to compensate for this, there are few writers for the French stage today with an equal gift for swift delicacy--a delicacy so disarming that one often forgets its extreme sophistication and cynicism...
...To the fine sincerity and simplicity of Father Pellegrin, no one can be blind...
...The settings by Joseph Wickes are delightful, and in the Roman scenes, full of enchantment...
...Sothern is this---in fact, he looks and seems younger by many years than in former New York performances...
...We scent hostility where it does not exist and misinterpret its causes where it does exist...
...If ever a play rang with true Christian spirit and the homely virtues, this one does in many poignant and sincere scenes...
...we have built great numbers of churches, therefore we have built the Church...
...Rightly, E. H. Sothern, always the figure of romance, has been cast to prove this, and to show that a certain sort of grandfather can make a more charming lover and husband than many an average youth...
...In our attitude to all around us the ancient flavor of oppression dings to us in the midst of perfect liberty...
...It is not a very charming story, in spite of the verbal charm with which it is told...
...There is, about the play itself, so much of the farce-comedy, that one should not quarrel too much with certain bits of scarcely convincing psychology--for instance, the young wife remaining fervent and devoted in the face of the disclosure that her husband has concealed their marriage from his family through a sense of shame, and has lied to her about the ages of his sons...
...What Never Dies I the new year should sponsor an unprecedented rush toF the marriage-license bureau, of elderly gentlemen holding willing, and even anxious young maidens, by the wrist, the over-worked clerk might be justified in presuming that the 27~ THE COMMONWEAL January 12, 1927 Belasco production of What Never Dies was exerting its in- fluence...
...the Catholic Church in America did not exist before we came...
...Father Pellegrin refuses, but happens to discover that the profiteer's wife is about to run away to Paris with a young parishioner...
...Boyd has adequately extracted all the humor from the really extremely clever lines of the original...
...But what of an American audience...
...Moreover, Guitry carries these qualities into his acting and directing...
...Large expenditures and extravagances are reported, and a family council is called to bring Grandpapa back to the straight and narrow...
...Mr...
...One feels that Mr...
...The Catholic Church is universal, and its very universality permits the growth and existence of a multitude of local cus- toms, local manners, local group and racial manifestations and individual practices in religious expression...
...The picture of inno- cence determined on destroying itself is never a delectable picture except to the cynic...
...our intercourse with our neighbors in matters of religion is polemic, often harsh, and insomuch, not Catholic...
...Recently, I saw the same play, adapted by Stanley Logan, in New York...
...This good priest, Father Pellegrin, was a stretcherbearer during the war, and from the camaraderie of the trenches, he has picked up a vigor of speech which gives a rough coating to the heart of a saint...
...It is possible to daim for America that never before has there been offered anywhere such perfect opportunity for the free development of religion...
...The political activities and the spiritual blindness of the bishop will not ring true or pleasingly or be understood in their relation to complicated French politics...
...But a play is not all one character, and I am inclined to feel that the taking of this play out of its French setting was a mistake...
...He has to---if only because of his stage-mother...
...Even Leo Carillo as Father Pellegrin does not play with the integrity of the man who took the part in Paris, and the bishop, in particular, suffers at the hands of John M. Kline, who plays him almost in a low comedy key...
...BOOKS ,4d~entures in Catholicism, by Richard EHison...
...Here you have the artifice of the theatre raised to the nth degree...
...They be- come truly objectionable, however, when they repel those not of our faith, or when they are forced by some zealous group as an essential part of universal religion upon others of the same faith to whom they are inapplicable and who do not like them...
...they are a proper part of the means by which religion works upon human nature...
...Some of the customs, manners, nationalisms to which ref-erence is made are alien to the spirit of America and are objec- tionable wherein they continue misunderstanding or engender repulsion among people not of our faith who are in-terested in it...
...We do not realize this as we should, for we are not interested in what others think about religion...
...Alexander Engel is the author of What Never Dies, and Ernest Boyd its translator into English...
...With these remarks as prelude, we come to the present New York appearance of the Guitrys in Mozart...
...If the authors are rather severe and exaggerated with the worldly bishop, they are correspondingly sympathetic with the priest and the saintly cardinal...
...No amount of spun sugar coating can conceal this essentially perverse theme...
...The Padre A BOUT a year ago, in Paris, I saw a play known as Mon Cur~ Chez les Riches, by Andre de Lorde and Pierre Chaine...
...America did not exist before we came...
...The material is all familiar, the allusions understood, the apparent irreverences taken with a healthy grain of salt...
...They are American only by imposition...
...Briefly, it tells of Mozart's second visit to Paris as a young man, eager to conquer the city by his music, and equally eager to become initiated into the mysteries of illicit love...
...Miss Rosalinde Fuller, as the young and vivacious Italian noblewoman who is head-over-heels in love with her elderly husband, convinces with her appearance and charm, where she faa% to do so at all times with her acting--and the curtain goes down, after minor complications, on a festively happy pair...
...One might compare the standing of a Guitry pro- duction in Paris with, say, a Winthrop Ames revival of Gil- bert and Sullivan in New York...
...Historians will probably admit that never before has the Catholic Church functioned in sur-roundings so nearly perfect...
...As it is a play that will undoubtedly arouse much controversy, a comparison may prove interesting...
...We Catholic Americans today are somewhat under the sway of customs and manners which pass in the rest of the world for our own, but which are not so in fact...
...Of the quality of the sugar coating, there can be no doubt...
...It applies essentially to a very real phenomenon which may be described as an acute self-consciousness among racial groups manifesting itself in a great variety of ways...
...For according to its theme, the spirit of romance is a thing unfettered by encroaching years and grey hair--in fact, the author would have us believe that it not only never dies, but grows ever more youthful and spontaneous with the filter- ing of sand through the hour-glass...
...It has every attribute associated with the Guitrys---the external daintiness of a miniature, the wealth of glamour and illusion which only a most capable cynic can throw around a sordid subject...
...too often we would seem to have...
...But for the peace of mind of the marriage-license clerk, we hasten to add that it would have to be a very special grandfather--with all teeth and hair intact...
...We are absorbed, not in American ideals, but in the new freedom into which we have been inducted...
...but they are forced to accept the situation when they discover the charming lady is really a charming wife (a fact heretofore concealed by Grandpapa) and that there is, moreover, a baby in the picture...
...The story is European in its essence--a story of a family of two sons, a danghter-in-law, and some odd grandchildren, growing deeply concerned because "Grandpapa," who, since his widowerhood, has consistently refused to be dignified or to share family responsibilities, has escaped from the deadly at-mosphere of a perfectly ordered Viennese household (up-holstered in heavy foreboding velvet curtains) and flitted to Rome---whence rumor drifts that he has acquired a charming villa, and~what is worse to his family--an even more charm- ing lady...
...2.25...
...The cur~ is then haled before his bishop, a man somewhat afflicted with worldliness, and is about to be punished when the cardinal intervenes...
...There is little use dwelling on her marvelous artistry in the part of the spirited great-grandmother, dominant ruling force in the lives of grandchildren and great grand-children alike, for the critics have already burdened her with laurels---and the play-going public is likely to concede, en masse, that they are more than earned...
...As to story: it relates the experiences of a country parish priest of France in his first contacts with the after-the-war PLAY SKINNER profiteers...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...Many of these customs and manners, in- vigorated of late by this phenomenon of nationalism, have grown up under the exigencies of other times and other conditions, in other places...
...No American production has ever glistened with such perfec- tion of detail...
...Each enthusiast, per- haps, will find in her performance one thing more than another particularly fine---but the tones of her voice, charmingly blend- ing the silvery quavering quality of age with the firmness of an unquenchable character and will, are likely to form the most tangible memory of her impersonation...
...who even, as is happening all about us today, long to look upon the Catholic religion as dearly all that it claims to be, the one sure hope in a disintegrating spiritual world...
...In a country of practically only one religion, such as France, this play offers few chances for misunderstanding...
...A profiteer seeking election bids for the priest's support...
...Many of the critics have already questioned its good taste, directly or by implication, and the acting of the American company does little to improve the intention of the authors...
...Haidee Wright, who plays that r61e, puts so much fire into her lines that it would seem only plausible that such a mother should produce such a son...
...There is in his work the mark of the Boulevardier, cleverness largely taking the place of depth of feeling, sentimentality often supplanting firmer sentiment...
...He is the enemy of hypocrisy and sham, a human and humane character, lovable, abrupt, tender, or, when aroused, scathing...
...But unless one confuses ability to express with the truth or nobility of what is ex-pressed, there is an absence of enriching art...
...Most of the supposed or actual hostility against Cath- olics in America comes from misunderstanding or bitter dis-appointment--not in our religion or in what the Church claims, but in what it appears to be and appears to claim through our own actions...
...And his wife, Yvonne Printemps, is an able ally...
...But with a French audience, there can be little doubt of the constructive influence of the play as a whole...
...She is not a great actress, but she is undoubtedly a very fine one, with a sharp sense of high comedy and, when occasion demands, no little pathos...
...This play, or three-act episode, is from Guitry's own pen, with music by Reynaldo Hahn...
...To the extent that the word applies to international affairs and to domestic politics, the phenomenon it indicates is also observable in religion...
...N ATIONALISM is a current catchword among those who specialize in study of international relations...
...No amount of French sauce can restore the youth of an ancient filet...
...Father Pellegrln rushes after them hotfoot to try to save a scandal, is directed by a wag to the Abbaye restaurant, discovers his mistake too late and risks being disgraced himself in order to let the profiteer's wife escape unidentified...
...When such practices, provincialisms or nationalisms are a part of the being of those who exhibit them and are thereby useful for the purposes of religion in that particular group of people, they are not objectionable...
Vol. 5 • January 1927 • No. 10
