The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
496 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Granite HERE is one of the clearest examples of an unsatisfactory play so handled and modulated by an expert director as to become an exceedingly interesting...
...The Stranger returns to the cabin...
...He wanted a farm and a woman...
...We had nothing but the Stranger's own word that he was the stronger...
...But we seldom have the advantage of a published play to show us the difference that so often exists beween the author's original intention and the completed work...
...Prosper is thrown from the cliff against Judith's anguished protest...
...Judith accuses him of being the devil...
...And, lest anyone should miss the moral, the fall is made literal in the last act, when Halvard Solness falls from the tower on which he has just placed a wreath...
...Judith accuses him, standing far off...
...A year of happiness follows with Prosper—then a moment of jealousy on Judith's part, because of Prosper's attentions to little Penny Holt, a bond-servant in the house...
...If Solness himself makes her a symbol, that is quite enough, and merely another demonstration of the way we exercise self-love by seeing ourselves in others...
...She plays Judith throughout with stentorian hardness—vocally and emotionally...
...But now you believe it...
...The play seemed to require a last act in order to complete the dramatic cycle...
...If any man lays hands on her, he will avenge her...
...Devil a bit...
...It merely lends glamour to underlying grossness...
...On the whole, this is a notable addition to the more serious plays that are being offered this season...
...No amount of drenching in Ibsen can convince me that he was a truly great playwright, no matter how forceful his crafts497 manship...
...That is by all means more honest than letting it drip through dainty mouths...
...To say that the utterly and always delightful Peggy Wood has lent her services to this strange concoction is only to emphasize the fact that clear varnish does not cover up stains...
...H. V. Gellendre is a downright Jordan, and George Macready an engaging Prosper, honest and quite innocent of any suspicion of Judith's evil bargain...
...He is simply asserting an obvious fact...
...His range of interest was too confined to problems of pride in one form or another...
...Note that not a word of the spoken text is changed...
...You have seen the evidence of his strength before your eyes...
...You know that Judith has sold her soul and must pay the price...
...The Master-Builder A COMPLETE picture of Miss Le Gallienne's achievement on Fourteenth Street demands a review of Ibsen's Master-Builder—one of the better established pieces of her current repertory...
...Instead of becoming the protagonist of the granite, she becomes one with it, so that the play loses much of its potential contrast and drama...
...We are always conscious of the labor of intention and are never carried away by the surge of inspiration...
...If forced to make a choice between two evils, let us have coarseness speak for itself...
...It is also a play illustrating what the modern psychologists would call the power of the idea to realize itself, for good or evil...
...The marked success of the play is only another example of the fallacy of assuming that the public likes only happy endings...
...She takes him in, offering him a home and food in exchange for work...
...Can we imagine Ibsen creating a Romeo, a Falstaff, and a Malvolio...
...Frances Wilson, whose comedy was the outstanding feature of The Straw Hat, plays little Penny Holt with a fresh innocence utterly disarming...
...Prosper lays hands on his wife...
...The story is typical of the new forces that are at work in the theatre today...
...Now what has Boleslavsky done to alter the play's significance...
...It is, rather, an attempt to give Hilda a much needed reality, to make her a being apart from Solness, capable of influencing him through the ordinary channels of human contact...
...This is the most clear-cut example of creative direction I have seen...
...It was also given in England a short time back...
...They are doing it constantly...
...Judith's temper drives Jordan Morris to violence...
...Robert H. Gordon makes the Stranger a rare combination of the human and the sinister...
...It was an unfinished play...
...Then, instead of placing a hand on her shoulder, he beckons to her...
...But to the audience, Hilda should be simply herself...
...Under these circumstances, no little credit is due Miss Le Gallienne for doing her utmost to humanize Hilda Wangel...
...A Lady in Love DORRANCE DAVIS, who committed The Shelf earlier in the season, has now given us a pseudo-Restoration comedy on the persistent theme of infidelity...
...His wife, Judith, hates him, and, as the play opens, is listening enraptured to the sea tales of Jordan's brother, Prosper Morris, who has returned from service under Nelson...
...The Laboratory Theatre deliberately handicaps itself at the outset by trying to develop talent along diversified lines instead of casting strictly by "type...
...He has surrounded his story with all the familiar trappings of a Congreve play, but has given it little of the alleged sparkle of that master of double meaning...
...Shakespeare could write of three such totally different personalities as Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, all within the bounds of tragedy, not to mention his flights into pure romance or slapstick comedy...
...Boleslavsky has been unfair to his public...
...says the Stranger...
...When youag Hilda Wangel comes into the home and life of Solness and his embittered wife, one almost expects to see a printed label on her back, with the words: "This is my old pride of youth come back to me...
...But the theme and its illustration are so painfully obvious throughout that we hear the machinery of plot squeaking...
...I am stronger than you are...
...Because you are perfectly aware that the distinguished actress stands for something better than the part she plays does not make the intention of the play any better...
...And the dramatic cycle is complete...
...She starts to go toward him, drawn involuntarily by his eyes, like a Trilby under Svengali's spell...
...The scene of the play is in a cabin on the granite island of Lundy, off the coast of England, a century or more ago...
...Now he has both...
...In giving Miss Tancock the opportunity that this role affords, Mr...
...Jordan Morris, having taken him a wife from London, has settled down to building a fortune by setting false lights and reaping the benefit from resultant shipwrecks...
...It has its moments of dangerous symbolism, but one hardly sees how the lines of the play would permit anything else...
...Her mind has become warped through her lonely struggle...
...As if in answer to her prayer, a shipwrecked convict is cast at her door...
...Devil a bit...
...The Stranger is not making a challenge...
...He was, essentially, a man imprisoned within the walls of his own personal obsessions, unable to reach out and understand problems differing from his own...
...Her interpretation of this part has stirred up considerable comment and criticism...
...The Master-Builder is, of course, a story of fear-stricken pride before a fall...
...Then the Stranger says his last line—"I am stronger than you are...
...Whether you accepted the play as an allegory, along the familiar lines of Faust, or realistically, the question still remained whether Judith would yield, or struggle and be defeated, or, perhaps, triumph...
...To her despair, the Stranger again fulfills his pact...
...And this was the play as Clemence Dane left it—the Stranger placing his hand on Judith's shoulder...
...In the present case, the play itself as directed triumphs over faulty casting as well...
...He has tried in many instances to sharpen the taste of his lines by modern colloquialisms mixed with antiquated figures of speech, and has injected for good measure many foul lines that are but thinly disguised as doublemeaning wit...
...Thus Clemence Dane, the authoress of A Bill of Divorcement, eventually lands at her goal, having entered by one of the many artistic little back-doors now in evidence...
...He laughs...
...She defies God, Who has failed to grant all her desires, and calls on the devil...
...It should be played with a combination of smouldering fire, pent-up passion, and, in the scenes with little Penny Holt, with an outpouring of maternal instinct...
...Numerous managers have had the chance to appraise it...
...The author and the public both owe him a debt of thanks for what he has done...
...Judith Prosper is a rare part for a fine emotional actress...
...The rest of the cast, however, makes up in large degree for Miss Tancock's deficiency...
...This is an interesting production of a not very interesting, because too obvious, play...
...Not that other directors fail to do the same sort of thing...
...Simply this: After the Stranger has killed Prosper, he returns to the cabin and sits nonchalantly at the head of the table...
...Starting as a repertory piece of the American Laboratory Theatre, under the direction of Richard Boleslavsky, Granite will now move to a Broadway theatre...
...Even her facial expression is as fixed as the granite rock of Lundy...
...He lacked the quality which sets genius on the works of Shakespeare—that is, a universal sensitiveness to all forms of human emotion...
...As in the case of John Gabriel Borkman, Miss Le Gallienne has shown a tendency to select Ibsen's less frequently acted plays, and in this way to give her public a glance at other sides of the Ibsen character than those typified by Hedda Gabler, The Doll's House, Ghosts, and The Wild Duck...
...He will be her servant and protector...
...He laughs...
...It is quite on a par with seeing Ethel Barrymore in The Constant Wife...
...There is no variety...
...496 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Granite HERE is one of the clearest examples of an unsatisfactory play so handled and modulated by an expert director as to become an exceedingly interesting and, according to box-office rumor, successful production...
...Miss Blanch Tancock fills none of these requirements...
...And that is what Miss Le Gallienne makes her—sturdy, humorous at times, impulsive, mistaken, by turns pitying, contemptuous, and proud...
...He makes a pact with her...
...The Stranger shoots him on the edge of the cliff—leaving Judith free to marry Prosper and to salve her own conscience with the thought that she did not actually commit the murder...
...But it demanded the constructive imagination of Boleslavsky to see how the alteration of one bit of stage "business" a minute before the last curtain could bring the story to proper dramatic proportions...
...But the whole meaning is changed through pantomime...
...Real drama, well directed, holds as well today as ever...
...Granite has been available for some time in book form...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 18
