The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
24 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Money From Home EVERY so often, Frank Craven pops up on Broadway with one of those plays from spotless town. Plays of this kind, inless they are extremely good,...
...Lack of true emotional situation...
...Plays of this kind, inless they are extremely good, simply furnish a target for the ophisticates—not, if you please, because they are "clean," but because, being immaculate, they have forgotten the necessity of bing good plays as well...
...The old materials are stale...
...He has chosen an eerie setting—a dilapidated old schooner adrift in a fog...
...And hat fact alone gives weight and importance to the play...
...She is entirely unsuited to a part that should, in spite of awkward lines, convey something of helpless terror...
...He makes the most of it...
...An bvious line of action from start to finish...
...For when I say that everyone suspected surface satire, I mean from this group as a whole rather than from Lawson personally...
...And his present play, Money From Home, has fallen still farther down the scale...
...Money From Home will give you a fairly amusing evening...
...James Durham, the part played by Mr...
...Of amusing stunts in staging, quite a few, due presumably to the ingenuity of the scenic designer, Mordecai Gorelik...
...But these moments pass all too quickly and are submerged almost at once by the blare of the commonplace...
...At that, it is not half so bad as you would think from reading the newspaper eports...
...But Frank Craven las shown us only one side of her...
...The last act, however, does achieve something of real theatrical force...
...That would have been the unexpected—as if Flo Ziegfeld instead of the Theatre Guild had staged the Brothers Karamazov...
...But you will never mistake it for a fine play...
...A few puns of the brothel variety are hung onto the last act...
...Yet the dialogue is so false, the human, or feeling, emotions are so carelessly developed, and the action proceeds so unevenly, that you wonder at times how a modern audience can accept it at all and suffer any degree of illusion...
...From the first moment of he play, you are never in suspense as to what she will do...
...The noment you begin to feel something of the mystery of the implest mind, you have a sense of the reality of the character...
...Whereupon the derisive ones say: 'There you are—you can't make good drama out of simple hings...
...also John Dos Passos (The Moon Is a Gong...
...Curiously enough, this group does not seem possessed of one great element of showmanship—the ability to spring a surprise...
...Or pend it all in one glorious adventure...
...Loud Speaker, by Lawson, is just the kind of surface satire everybody feared—presented, as everybody suspected, in a "constructivist" setting, and amusing only by virtue of the new stunts thought up for the occasion...
...If all ends happily, you feel he is lucky...
...Possibly if the part of Harry U. Collins, candidate for governor, had been played by someone else than Seth Kendall, the play might have risen to some unity and force...
...It picks up the loose threads of narrative, the vague suggestions of human emotion, the possibilities of character development, and whips them together in a scene of wild but rhythmic disorder...
...Plot instead of drama...
...John Howard Lawson, author of Processional, is of the illustrious five...
...Of distinction, the play has none...
...Of course, Frank Craven did give us The First Year...
...she tells everybody, right and left, that she will go to New York and spend every cent she has...
...But the fortunate fact remains that when a really good dramatist takes up the lives of simple people in simple situations, he can give to them all the dramatic interest demanded by the most jaded of critics...
...Sur-ace comedy...
...It is unfair to Harry Wagstaff Gribble's direction to lay the blame for this handicap at his door...
...But Loud Speaker has none of this magic...
...I am sure that if Lawson would forget his obsession for novelty in dramatic form, and content himself with writing a play of character and emotional struggle, he would rapidly emerge as one of the finest playwrights we have...
...At least, there are moments when action and even mystery become suspended in something very like a fog and when the dialogue wanders hopelessly as if lost...
...And there you have, I believe, the secret of the prejudice against the professionally clean" play...
...But Mr...
...Of wit, only a pallid variety...
...Imagine, for example, a girl, brought up by old relatives, vho suddenly comes into possession of a few thousand dollars...
...Once nore, type instead of individual...
...The fault of the average "clean" play lies, not in its subject-matter, but in the fact that it requires more skill to write convincingly of simple subjects than of complex and sensational ones...
...Fog JOHN WILLARD, author of The Cat and the Canary, has written this mystery melodrama about a fog and—possibly —in one...
...If all "clean" plays were like this, the critics would be amply justified in yawning...
...No doubts or misgivings...
...The humor of the play ranges from the obvious to the coarse...
...New Brooms, as I recall t, was not quite so good...
...Kendall's performance was dull, unimaginative, and monotonous— the polar opposite of a lively, humorous, and magnetic performance by Romney Brent as a tabloid reporter...
...So says the manifesto on the first program of this new group...
...You wonder—but you have to accept the fact, as demonstrated by the nervous laughs, the short screams, and the solemn between-the-acts discussions...
...Or as if the Guild itself has presented Abie's Irish Rose...
...In spite of this, Fog is very good theatre at times, and before the end of the last act the audience is screaming directions and cautions at the heroine in the true spirit which such thrillers should create...
...There are, perhaps, three spots in the play where something else emerges for an instant— an almost tragic questioning of life by the characters themselves...
...Lack of hon-st reaction to the feelings of the characters themselves...
...Robert Keith, after a long period at O'Neill—in the Great God Brown and Beyond the Horizon—plays the manly hero of this concoction without in any way adding to his growing reputation...
...Imagine the sensation along Broadway if such a group had selected as its first play a fine, stirring modern drama, presented with power and imagination, but without the fantastic tinsel of expressionism...
...There were truly tremendous moments in Processional—cosmic moments, as the new school would say—when the whole turmoil of American life, tragedy, and resurrection stood stark and revealed on the stage...
...Romance and adventure have never come her way...
...If the earlier parts of the play were anything like as good as this last scene, one could write an enthusiastic report...
...The work of George Kelly illustrates quite well the impor-ance which innocuous stories may attain when handled with true understanding of human feeling...
...It makes you wonder if, some day, we shall see the collaboration of the detective-story playwright with some such constant retoucher as George Abbott...
...Craven could learn many lessons even from Anne Nichols...
...You begin to share his or her emotions...
...The only real surprise is Mr...
...Your interest is height-ned, your curiosity piqued...
...But above all, it is lamentable that a group representing so much self-admitted talent, could find nothing more stimulating with which to start an experiment of so important a character...
...Lawson's failure to come through with anything approaching the power and virility of Processional...
...Give us salty, coarse speech...
...Suppose this girl is torn between a desire to expand her life and an inherited instinct of thrift and parsimony...
...Give us modern drama, nodern problems...
...In the present case, Mr...
...Drama has flown out the window...
...She has never known the power of money, only the crushing veight of poverty...
...As for Dr...
...Loud Speaker AT LAST the revolutionaries have a theatre of their own...
...It is simply a satire on the most commonplace of all subjects, political hypocrisy, coupled for good measure to the obvious pranks of the tabloid papers...
...What will she do...
...The "active management" of the New Playwrights Theatre, "is in the hands of five working playwrights...
...The only girl's part is played by Vivienne Osborne, who, if memory plays no tricks, was last year's Aloma of the too well-known South Seas...
...Agnes Lumbard as the Collins daughter was personable and entertaining, and Leonard Sillman was more than competent as the dancing butler...
...But they are not as good, and even the curtain of the second act, which offers large possibilities, is badly bungled by a combination of awkward writing and clumsy direction...
...But, no...
...And the play becomes nothing but plot...
...But it is not—if one may use a non-technical phrase— written from the heart...
...You do not hear the pithet of "clean play" slung at Kelly's writings, largely be-ause his characters have the capacity for suffering as well as aughter...
...Jennie Patrick, in Money From Home, is that kind of a girl...
...Smash the vails of Victorian reticence...
...If she gets into difficulties, you feel she is a fool...
...Craven limself, we have here simply the old reformed crook...
...Willard has evolved an ingenious plot...
...It is written in the comedy and not the arce key—but it lacks the serious moments of real feeling wehich alone make comedy effective...
...There vas a play with enough wit and humanity to make its mark and lraw persistently large audiences...
...Em Jo Basshe (Adam Solitaire) ; Francis Edwards Faragoh (Pin-wheel) ; and Michael Gold...
...Save her money and marry prosaically...
...Nothing to make her human and interesting...
...She becomes imply a type character and not an individual...
...The best part, theatrically, is assigned to Charles Dow Clark...
...Their problems may not seem gigantic to us, but hey are decidedly serious to the characters themselves...
...It is rather curious that so sharp a line should be drawn between mystery plays and all other forms of drama...
...But the production as a whole moved slowly and spasmodically, due largely to the physical difficulty of the miles of stairs over which characters rushed back and forth as they dodged about the mazes of the skyscraper setting...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 19
