The Play

...Fate, and Henderson's charming daughter, bring to his office one Charles Parkman, son of a former President of the United States...

...Then the fireworks start...

...Keep your costumes...

...I am inclined to the latter view, largely because of the amazing sincerity and fine balance of that second act at the Mexican mine...

...He is shaken with disgust at himself and at Henderson...

...Anderson and Stallings...

...Here the authors forsake all satire for the pure drama of Parkman's murder and the shooting of the one woman— the consumptive wife of a previously murdered bookkeeper— who still remains...

...Those who acquired legitimate interests in Mexico, and who have seen those interests menaced, threatened, or rendered futile, and who have never done more than ask from our government the protection usually accorded by one civilized nation to the nationals of another—to such people, the play will seem unfair, unjust and malicious, a piece of sheer propaganda to put them in a false and suspicious light...

...Thus in the opening tone pictures, to music by Charles T. Griffes, the dance of The Night Winds is orderly but a trifle dull, and the dance of The White Peacock, immediately following, is tainted with exactly the spirit which makes the peacock less sympathetic than the swan...

...Aline MacMahon as the consumptive girl at the Mexican mines gives a performance as poignant and bracing as it is brief...

...this one is only clever concocting...

...To the blazing of patriotic airs, we see an animated cartoon of the nation responding to the call, we see the fleet in action, the first outposts of the expeditionary force sniping, and then, climax of climaxes, Martin Henderson enrolling, at a dollar a year, as Chairman of the National Defense Council...

...Obviously, this last bit is either thrown out insincerely as a sop to traditional sentiment, or is a genuine postscript to the effect that the authors are not pacifists at heart—merely crusading against the deliberate manufacture of wars for private ends...

...There is a vast difference between trying to make the eternal present live in antique form and making antiquity live in present time...

...By this time he has learned why he was sent to Mexico...

...Are they trying, in Spread Eagle, to show that all wars are conceived, planned and executed to serve special interests, or merely to forewarn the American public of the kind of black man to look for in the specific Mexican woodpile ? The story goes somewhat as follows: Martin Henderson controls large mining interests in Mexico...

...But there is such a thing as living up to one's own standards, such a thing, too, as a constant replenishment of one's exuberance, originality and power to select not only the unusual, but the authentic...

...keep your famous types...

...Their play was at least gorgeous reporting...

...That is the danger in all satire—that sweeping overstatement shoots beyond its mark and in wounding the criminal, hits the innocent as well...

...Cobb makes his last compromise with himself, and shuts Parkman's mouth by threatening to give out a fake story of his cowardice in coming away alive when a woman was killed...

...Its wit has a poisoned arrow...

...The closet satirist has been the precursor of more than one engulfing revolution...

...Of course, any reasonable person can point out the dynamite in this kind of satire—the deliberate assumption that a man of the Henderson status would plot a murder to further his own interests, or that a man with special interests in Mexico would be chosen as National Defense chairman...

...As in the case of What Price Glory, the question looms large: Are the authors pleading for pacifism or merely for a more enlightened and constructive patriotism...

...He threatens to expose Henderson...

...Cobb is no longer the cynical figure of the first act...

...The music is taken from Bela Bartok's Dance Suite, and the story is by Irene Lewisohn and Francis Edwards Faragoh...

...At least, one gathers very strongly from this—at times—most searing satire, that the authors did not have quite the courage or conviction to carry through their original theme, and so left the eagle very nearly as outspread as they found him...

...The thought germinates in Cobb's mind and rapidly spreads to Henderson's that if Parkman is given a job at one of Henderson's Mexican mines, revolutionary bullets might cross his path, and that a President's murdered son would be more than enough to unleash the dogs of intervention...

...It is not...

...Merely because we are growing accustomed to their efforts, it is obviously unfair to forget what an enormous and unstinting contribution they have made to the vitality of the ageless theatre in New York...

...With the assistance of his cynical and disillusioned private secretary, Joe Cobb, a veteran of the great war, he contrives the financing of a counter-revolution in Mexico, in the hope either of establishing a government more considerate of American interests or of provoking prompt intervention as the result of probable outrages...

...A motion-picture screen drops into place, and we see a news reel entitled Six Weeks of War...

...In the last picture of the reel, he and Joe Cobb are seen leaving in their special train for the front...

...The resurrection of the Commedia dell'Arte, from episodes last performed—we are told—before Louis XIV, has this much in its favor: If, as we may suppose, it is a careful reproduction of the old method of the stage, when drama sprang up by improvisation, it has a definite historical interest...

...It is a museum piece of the theatre...

...But it is also the most dangerous, because it multiplies itself in the winds of suspicion and hate...

...Henderson himself begins to crack when he discovers that his daughter was really in love with young Parkman...

...There are signs in it of fatigue, of a slackening of inventiveness or of imagination in research, of art slipping almost imperceptibly into artifice...

...But as one of the eternal variations on the Columbine-Harlequine theme, with the usual infidelities, broad witticisms and coarser implications, it loses most of its vitality through the effort to recapture the letter of a lost age...

...The troops are suffering from dysentery...

...This might sound like a blow at costume drama in general...

...And authenticity is what half the present program lacks...

...A dapper general tells him how well everything is going, and that the holiday is proving almost as delightful as the postponed vacation he intended taking in Florida...

...This is a splendid and vibrant piece in four parts, replete with authentic drama, stirring and at times fairly irrupting with wild forces, an almost perfect example of living art...

...As a last touch, however, the disgusted Cobb enlists, returns to the car, and with the most contemptuous of all phrases, tells the shaking Henderson to stand up as the band in the distance is heard playing the Star Spangled Banner...

...Malcolm Duncan's portrait of Father Estrella is also an unforgettable bit...

...but have at the comedy of life with the full vigor of today instead of with the archaeological eye of the collector...

...The curtain rises on the broadcasting room of a radio station...

...Satire tries to penetrate to the motives of men...

...Spread Eagle has been called a prologue to What Price Glory—but that, I think, is unfair to the memorable work of Messrs...

...Once more, how vastly more interesting it would have been to give a modern Commedia dell'Arte, springing out of contemporary life, to have caught somehow the spirit rather than the letter of the past, and have made it live again through showing how eternally the idea may be applied to each new generation of mankind...

...It is a vast and spontaneously accorded credit to the Neighborhood group that they can vault the hurdles of time, space and form in drama, of type in acting, of style in presentation, and of swiftly changing mood...

...664 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Spread Eagle YOU might say that George S. Brooks and Walter B. Lister, the authors of Spread Eagle, had tried, judiciously, to clip the outer feathers of the symbolic American bird, only to discover that the eagle is not so ugly a bird after all...

...Satire is always unqualified...

...Parkman turns up alive...

...It is one of the swiftest weapons of the human mind...

...In exposing hypocrisy, it often ends by creating blind prejudice...

...From a sentry, Joe Cobb gets another story...

...The last scene of the play is in Henderson's car at Matamoras, Mexico...

...This Ritornell stands among the five or six finest achievements of the Neighborhood Playhouse in its long and brave efforts to give lyric drama its due place in the modern theatre...

...This hopelessly unconvincing argument somehow serves for stage purposes, and Henderson is left groaning at the unbearable future of seeing his daughter married to the man he tried to have killed...

...Then the great irony...

...Thus the Hungarian dance romance, billed as Ritornell, re-creates, in the here and now, the fast fading customs and characters of peasant Hungary...

...The reading of the rising stock-market quotations is interrupted for an excited announcer, reporting the unanimous vote of Congress for immediate intervention in Mexico...

...If you believe, as they seem to believe, that interests of every sort (including the Catholic Church) are trying to bring about intervention in Mexico, and you set out to write a play showing how easily the desired end may be accomplished through the manipulation of gullible public sentiment, then you owe it to yourself and to your invited public to show just where your satirical intention stops...

...But the chief honors certainly fall to Osgood Perkins as Joe Cobb, as complete and biting a characterization as this winter's stage has seen...

...Written, acted, and directed with admirable restraint and cleverly timed suspense, this scene is one of the best of its kind I have ever watched, engrossing, stern, and mordant...

...By no means as interesting as the two previous bills, it still reveals the delightful versatility which this group of permanent actors attains through accumulating years of hard work and persistent direction...

...He was only severely wounded...

...There follows a scene of excellent melodrama in the office shack of the Spread Eagle Mining Company at Mercedes, Mexico...

...Parkman is given the job...

...For the rest, Spread Eagle is well acted and expertly directed by George Abbott...

...Lyric Drama at the Neighborhood THIS annual bill of lyric drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse is a curious example of preciosity mixed with sturdy talent...

...Before the curtain appears the manager of the theatre, to read a proclamation from the War Department, calling on all the reserve officers and enlisted men to report at once, offering them the service of the lobby telephones, and assuring them, with deep emotion, that "we are all behind you, boys...