The Play

...However, there they are...

...Certain scenes, thanks to Mr...

...Cradle Song HERE is a social as well as a theatrical significance to T the astounding success achieved overnight by Eva Le Gal- lienne's production of this fragile Spanish play by Gregorio and Maria Sierra...

...But in a play of deception, seduction, infidelity, and murder among supremely infantile persons, with only a faint last-minute rumor of finer possibilities, all that one can honestly praise are these masterful stage mechanics...

...And it may be another generation before you see such an assemblage again...

...6.00 Foreign Please enter my subscription to The Commonweal for one year beginning with the next issue...

...Even if Mr...

...The whole movement and flow of the piece is faultless, replete with humor and tenderness, and emanating that sense of exquisite and kindly quiet which only those who know convents will fully appreciate...

...a certain quaint charm, but only faint glimmerings of real- ity...

...But they do not materialize...

...Naturally, there are not enough good parts to go round...

...And if you are planning to watch the steady progress of a play, you might as well resign yourself at once to long and frequent interruptions of applause as each favorite appears and is discovered beneath his or her disguise...

...In the second, and last act, this girl, now eighteen, is about to leave to be married to a young architect who is taking her to far-off America...

...The Commonweal requests its subscribers to communicate any changes o[ address two weeks in advance, to ensure the receipt o/all issues...

...7] Enclosed fin,:l remittance...

...Of course, the apparent simplicity of Cradle Song is decep- tive...

...Some of them, of course, like John Drew and Mrs...

...412 THE COMMONWEAL February I6, 1927 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Trelawny of the Wells I T IS a rather curious comment on the vagaries of this theatrical season that, at its height, a manager should be able to gather some twenty or more leading actors for an all-star revival of Pinero's sentimental classic of stage life...

...The rest is an art theatre's unconscious excuse fo~" going most broadly Broadway, i. e., to Broadway's gutters...

...It is a human, cheerful, strong story, shot through with pathos that never becomes sentimentality and with a love that knows how to say farewell bravely...

...There is a fine sweep and authority to the few minutes allotted to Effie Shannon and Henrietta Crosman, and a gracious charm in Frieda Inescort...

...Here was a chance for her to throw color into her voice and personality, to break away utterly from the type-casting with which managers have afl~licted her...

...It is, if you will, the great social law of contrastm the thing that brings forth saints in o,cles of degeneracy, or that demands exaltation in order to save life itself from degra- dation...

...For example, the story is this: a baby girl is left at the door of a convent of Dominican nuns, and, on the advice of the convent doctor, is adopted...

...and Beatrice Terry as the wise prioress, and Leona Roberts as the slightly puritanical vicaress, are beyond reproach...

...It might so easily be priggish, or, what is worse, soft...

...And thus, as it were, endeth the parade...

...And in the few moments when Rose breaks into song, we discover a rich and delightful singing voice...

...And in the strained moments of that last scene, with the nuns trying to be cheerful in spite of their heartaches, a life story is revealed in the faces and in the least actions of each of them...

...February 16, i927 THE COMMONWEAL 413 Miss Le Gallienne, as Sister Joanna, finds one of her hap- piest parts...

...the girl makes her farewell and leaves...

...splendid poetry...

...Whiffen, at seventy-nine or some such age, trips about the stage with great ease, and even dances---a fragile, wise, and vastly competent old lady, whose age is a challenge to youth...

...Thomas Whiffen, emerge from semi-retlrement for sentiment's sake...

...but surely it is no tribute to the type of play filling some sixty New York thea- tres, nor to the astuteness of managers in general, that a revival could obtain easily the services of so amazing an array of talent...

...Pinwheel T HE Neighborhood Playhouse has gone modern with a shout of vengeance...

...It must fall startlingly upon the minds of those to whom convents have always loomed as gloomy prisons for the frustrated...

...Dorothy Sands gives an excellent external performance of the girl, but without internal depth ; and Marc Loebell is some- what more staunch as the boy...

...They are typical, perhaps, but only of the city's morons, and from that fact we have, instead of throbbing tragedy, merely the uninspiring battle of the ant against the steam-roller...

...The groupings of the crowds are excellent...

...You must accept it for just what it is, and, within its obvious limitations, enjoy it to the hilt...

...reviews of the cur- rent plays and outstanding books--all this for five dollars instead o~ the former price of ten dollars a year...

...Only the story itself is simple...

...Pauline Lord, as Imogen Parrott, is a disappointment...

...the theme is as richly complex and stirring as any a dramatist could choose...

...Egon Brecher loses none of the dry humor of the doctor, and Hardie Albright makes of the brief appearance of the young architect, beyond the convent grille, a moment of rare youthful manliness...

...For Five Dollars a Year-Where can you find greater value for five dollars than in a year's subscription to The Commonweal...

...It is the first of Miss Le Gallienne's productions I have seen in which she has entirely surmounted the difficulty of directing the play herself...

...The result is often cloudy when it is not simply crass...

...Beatrice de Neergaard as Sister Marcella--who always has at least a fingertip in hot water--is quite delightful...

...In the sixteen episodes, there are quite a number which, if they were not committed in the name of the new stage-craft, would rival the crudest sex-thrillers of Broadway...

...to another, a soul to be nourished before God...

...Fifty-two issues of lively comment on world events...

...And that is the entire story...

...But beneath this lles the full and ageless power of maternal love, its dignity, its self-sacrifice, its poignancy--the everlasting trag- edy and triumph of renunciation...

...Lawrance D'Orsay takes full advantage of a small chance, and we are grateful for brief glimpses of J. M. Kerri-gan and Otto Kruger...

...John Drew--bless him l--as the choleric vice-chancellor, gives a performance as youthful and telling as if he planned, to keep on acting for another twenty years and had no such responsibility as being uncle to the Barrymore family...

...To one she is a bright song trilling in the convent garden...

...Admitting at the outset that Donald Oenslager's scenic craftsmansldp in visualizing the spirit of New York is incomparably fine, one cannot restrain astonish- ment that this mountain of fine labor should have been piled upon the mouse of Francis Edwards Faragoh's play...

...Oenslager, have all the magic topsy-turveydom of New York...

...interesting correspondence...

...For the play itself no longer rings with the illusior~ of great sincerity nor gathers the momentum for emotional force...

...For each of these intensely individual nuns becomes in the finest sense a mother to the abandoned child...

...If the Misses Lewisohn, who directed the play, have attempted deliberately to mix the real and the unreal, they have either tried to mix elements that will never mix, or have mixed them in artistically wrong proportions...

...Amazing, diverting--but hardly a sight nor an atmosphere, nor, for that matter, a play, to sway your inner emotions...

...special articles on a variety of sub- jects...

...It is an extremely difficult scene because of its stark simplicity...

...Wilton Lackaye throws his abundant humor into James Telfer, but slows up the action somewhat by his infinite leisure...

...It is no mere accident of faultless production that makes people swarm to Cradle Song at the same time that theatrical filth is reaching its lowest point in other parts of the city...

...It has moments of pathos, but rather more of frank sentimental- ity...

...Aside from those already mentioned, you will find, in small parts and large, Wilton Lackaye, Henrietta Crosman, Otto Kruger, Pauline Lord, Estelle Winwood, Eflle Shannon, Frieda Inescort, O. P. Heggie, Eric Dressier, Lawrance D'Orsay, John E. Kellard, J. M. Kerrigan, and a few more...

...The young man talks to the nuns through the grille...

...But the present per- formance is in different temper...

...others, like Rollo Peters and Helen Gahagan, are under contract or ar-rangment with the manager, George Tyler...

...Street...

...For the past two weeks every mail has brought many more letters of praise and commendation for The Commonweal...

...The boy and girl whose misdoings supply the thread of the story, are as inconsequential as the infantile emotions which the city arouses in them...

...Possibly with a workaday cast, and the forceful hand of a Guthrle McCllntie, unhampered by the glow of constellations, it might reveal itself in stronger terms...

...Send bill...

...But anticipation should be shorn to a gentle breeze...

...To Josephine Hutchinson falls the part of the waif, Teresa, and I doubt if anything more restrainedly lovely than her last parting scene is to be found in the theatre today...

...Faragoh's intention was, as rumored, to have New York City the chief character in his play, a sense of proportion would demand adequate protagonists somewhere...

...It is well worth seeing...

...But we still see Amy, of They Knew What They Wanted--the nervous hands, always pulling at some-thing, the hesitant speech, the rather drab voice...

...It has used the vehicle of a rather trite play about distinctly uninteresting people to give an expressionistic view of New York in all the glory and din of modern stage-craft...

...It is really a very profound study of the strongest human emotions, wrought with all the skill and tempered suspense of the most stirring drama...

...The Avonia Bunn of Estelle Win- wood is another markedly good characterization--pathetic, dis- tinct, and carried through with clear understanding...

...Among the things that have been said are: "the whole tone and contents are, in my opinion, exactly what they ought to be" "the usual bitterness of theological controversy is missing" "The Commonweal grows better every week" "The Commonweal is already a power in the United States" "The Commonweal is really much the best weekly review that exists" ENTER YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW SUBSCRIPTION BLANK Tim COMMONWEAL) $5.00 a year Grand Central Terminal, $5.50 in Canada New York City...

...Eric Dressier, as Arthur Gower, hardly reconciles us to the fate of Rose Trelawny, particularly when Rollo Peters is so completely sympathetic as the frustrated and forlorn Tom Wrench...

...Name...

...and to Sister Joanna of the Cross, who is still a novice the day the child is found, she becomes a child to be cherished, warmed, guarded, scolded, loved, even as this same Sister Joanna had had to care for her small brothers and sisters in the days before she entered the convent door...

...2-I6...

...Rose Trelawny falls to Helen Gahaganmand if her speaking voice still has distressing registers, it has for the most part improved and soft- ened, along with her touch for light comedy...

...All in all, Miss Le Gallienne and her cast are admirable in a richly under~ standing production of a very rare play...

...Albright makes it straightforward and brave...

...City...

...The pervading unreality of the production robs them slightly of their most obvious significance, but, at that, no real- ism has been spared in these very scenes where a true sense of artistic proportion would have demanded complete stylization...

...They a_mount, in essence, to the brashiest form of emotional exhibition- ism...