The Play
Skinner, R. Dana & W., T.
THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Road to Rome ROBERT EMMET SHERWOOD has entered the lists of those who joust for an idea under the armor of antiquity. The Road to Rome, which is supposed to be...
...As Rome went, so America is going...
...The sophisticates love to call themselves "adult," but more often they stand for the awakening curiosity of a precocious child...
...But she has not learned to sustain the effect of inner tension...
...But it is that kind of cleverness which begins to pall after the first act, simply because it follows an obvious formula...
...And the artist has them at his mercy because they are or have become inarticulate whereas his own agile mind can spin sophistries as well as truth...
...Hence its codes no longer represent intelligent conviction, but simply sheepish acceptance...
...That is his none too original thesis...
...Indeed, there is too much conscious moralizing at times for the good of the play...
...Thus you will find both wisdom and folly in the words of Amytis, a passionate revolt against organized stupidity and all the confusion which revolt brings in its early stages...
...However, we do see in Mr...
...It is the artist and philosopher who can sit back and give to the actions of the other two a careful and astute analysis...
...The 439 440 real trouble with the play lies in the fact that Mr...
...Or you could express it in individual terms by the business man, the soldier, and the artist...
...Too often, she lets a torrent of words and gestures take the place of smouldering intensity or the sense of deep hurt...
...As a play, it concerns itself chiefly with infidelity and such modern drama food...
...Amytis is no goddess of Athenian wisdom...
...Sherwood has a doctrine to preach and so disguises it flimsily in the trappings of a period which every stump orator has likened to our own for the last twenty years...
...That she has that power in a large degree, certain moments in the present play confirm...
...That she gets away with it, up to the last curtain, simply indicates the generally childish mentality to which the play keys itself in its many weaker moments...
...Dinehart's ability seems limited to putting across rather obvious comedy...
...To this extent, the play has a pleasingly universal flavor, pointed by its use of modern colloquial dialogue...
...As for the method of telling, he has taken some pages from John Erskine and a few from Shaw and a few more from What Price Glory, so that, like the milk in the overcrowded ice-chest, the play has many reminiscent odors as well as its own proper scent...
...Thus the second part of the play, its bedroom comedy story, is merely another tale of the bored wife seeking excitement in a neighboring house...
...Miss Ann Andrews gives a very finished performance of a fashionable woman misled by her complacency and the flatteries of life...
...It is about as true to life as the child's fantasy that once he has run away from home, all will be freedom and joy...
...That does not mean that the codes are wrong, but merely that men have forgotten why they are right —a stupid faith without the support of reason or the excitement of rediscovery...
...You know exactly what to expect as each new situation arises, and hence have ample time to appraise what is really being done and said...
...Beyond that he lacks sensitiveness...
...Lee Simonson's settings and costumes are gems of semi-realism...
...Cynthia Pemberton discovers that it is not easy to straighten out a life begun on the wrong basis...
...This is decidedly not a play for those who prefer reticence, or who wish to forget the ideas in young people's heads today...
...The Dark IT IS a mistake to classify Martin Brown's drama, The Dark, as morbid, for all the impression it leaves of social gloom and disorder...
...Part of the story is legitimate satire, in which Rome, Carthage and Athens, speaking through Fabius, Hannibal and Amytis, express the eternal conflict between inflated civilization, heroic barbarism, and aesthetic mentality...
...Dinehart himself plays the part of Cynthia's husband, and, in that not very exacting role, does well...
...Unfortunately, the audiences of today are not far wiser than the playwright, so that The Road to Rome, in its total impression, becomes little more than a vicarious means of jumping the traces...
...Barbarism also has its instinctive codes, but blind ones as yet, codes never yet thought out and adopted through the expediency of active life and stern necessity...
...Sherwood has made Amytis his spokeswoman, and that he, as the editor of Life, hardly represents the Athenian spirit at its most mature point...
...I venture the guess that three weeks under the guidance of Guthrie Mc-Clintic would change all this amazingly...
...Sinner ' I A HE rocky road to Dublin is a modern state highway com-A pared to the path of Cynthia Pemberton in her education as sketched by Thompson Buchanan in Sinner...
...She learns a few wholesome truths as the play progresses, and so does her husband...
...More restraint in both directions would have made it a far better and more acceptable play...
...What it attempts to do, however, is to show the utter uselessness of defying codes which rest on laws of nature and human behavior, and not, as the cackling moderns would have it, on sheer custom...
...He never so much as hints that a woman may be "boss" in some matters, and her husband in others—and that each may have a profound and lasting respect for the domain of the other, thus supplying the only basis for free affection, love and understanding...
...But the play, except for its clever satire, is utterly at odds with human experience and is a cheap bid for salacious success...
...Miss Foster can be as natural and spontaneous as any younger actress on our stage...
...It has ceased to think...
...But it does carry through a constructive intention...
...The same excuses are made for discarding worn-out and invalid wives and husbands, and the divorcing of the helplessly crippled or insane, and popular feeling still resents these abandonments...
...It is a very clever presentation of the profound error in the aesthetical outlook upon life and its duties of a woman who loves beauty, is devoted to her husband for his manly charms, and who is left uprooted and horrified when disfigurement comes upon him...
...Before 1914, it might have been expressed by England, Germany, and either Italy or Austria...
...Civilization has become smug...
...Until the dismal doldrums of the last half of the last act, he brings to the play its one note of sincerity—the romantic adventurer in the breast of a soldier...
...Miss Julia Hoyt plays convincingly a role that is highly amusing and thoroughly cynical...
...Although it is a play with many faults, it does offer Miss Foster a greater range than she has had before, particularly in the turbulent scenes of the second and third acts when Cynthia faces the consequences of her wrong start...
...The Road to Rome, which is supposed to be all about Hannibal and why he never entered Rome, after coming within three miles of its gates, has about as much to do with Hannibal as cigarettes have to do with the smoking habits of the old Egyptians...
...The only thoroughly interesting characterization is Philip Merivale's Hannibal...
...In spite of its rather gloomy story, The Dark makes a profitable evening entertainment...
...America, Russia and Spain, or perhaps France, might represent the same conflict today...
...She is neither the wife of farce comedy, nor the embodiment of an idea, though she tries to be each in turn...
...The story of the play has it that Amytis, the Athenian wife of Fabius Maximus, went forth from Rome, like a not very exalted Judith, to find out what manner of man was this invading Hannibal, and to convince him of the utter futility of life in general and of the capture of Rome in particular...
...The satire against militarism almost disappears in the artificial glamour thrown about infidelity triumphant...
...Thus Hannibal seeks further conquest for its own sake, without quite knowing why, whereas Rome, at the other extreme, seeks it through habit...
...With a little aerating in the middle of the second act, it could present a strong case in comparison with many plays now being offered on Broadway...
...That she succeeds may be attributed by some to the wisdom of her arguments over the breakfast table, but if the very frank situation in the play indicates anything in particular beyond the author's consciousness of "box-office," her success springs from a decidedly more primitive influence...
...The wig of cleverness which, when it conceals the baldness of misdoings, our critics call "sophistication," hangs over the play at times...
...Miss Vera Allen, having emerged from the Neighborhood Playhouse group, gives an interesting performance of the weakling sister-in-law, and Merle Maddern makes a young and understanding mother for whom any Cynthia might eventually be grateful...
...Buchanan valiantly propounds the notion that success comes only when one or the other becomes "boss...
...Sinner is the selection of Richard Herndon as the vehicle for Claiborne Foster's return to New York after a considerable road tour in The Patsy...
...Jane Cowl as Amytis is more than ever beautiful to look upon, and delightful to hear, but alarmingly inconsistent...
...T. W...
...That is the bald truth beneath the wig of sophistication...
...But perhaps he felt compelled to balance the extreme frankness of certain situations by a few weighty sermons...
...but she does many exceedingly infantile things...
...But she will need more stern direction than that of Allan Dinehart to develop her full power for emotional expression...
...You are meant to sympathize with Amytis, who is little better than a flapper wife in search of the cheap thrill of infidelity...
...The author would have done better to let it tell its own story, which is a self-evident and sound one...
...And while we are on the subject of these recent marriage plays, isn't it curious that so few writers of either plays or books seem to see the possibility of successful marriage based on mutual respect...
...Buchanan's theme the impending revolt against the extremes of feminism—and, if you have the leisure or take the time, you may find some interest in linking this up with the growth of dictatorships in governments, in industries and in sports...
...He has a pleasing and manly personality, gives the conviction of sincerity, and has a sure sense for the more downright dramatic situations...
...Louis Calhern is also excellently cast as her husband...
...In fact, it starts out with the case of a young girl who prefers unfettered love to marriage, and who accepts a ring only to get her sister-in-law out of a scrape...
...Chaos is slowly giving birth to its own counter-irritant...
...She says many uncannily wise things (what bright child does not...
...Martin Brown's picture of the wife pursued vainly by her own husband as well as by several lovers presents a side-view into domestic interiors, where aesthetics have taken the place of duties, and where the blooms of youth are the only flowers left to life and human endurance...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 16
