The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
50 THE COMMONWEAL November 17, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Daisy Mayme ANEW George Kelly play has become one of the season's standard events—surely not because of Craig's Wife alone,...
...The one at the close of the thirteenth century has inherent color and force, but is the least well acted...
...The Straw Hat THE little American Laboratory Theatre has won considerable attention in the last two years by the exuberance and originality of its work under the direction of Richard Boleslavsky, formerly of the Moscow Art Theatre This year it has started its season with an adaptation of Labiche's Straw Hat, with special music by Randall Thompson...
...One must accept his plays within their own obvious intention and not try to compare him, let us say, to O'Neill...
...The adaptation is amateurish, the lines largely filled with slang of three years ago, and the action so broken as to leave chiefly a feeling of confusion...
...The genius of the Kelly note-book lies in its economy of observation...
...It picks the phrases and characteristics universal to all men and women and ignores those minutiae which we fondly believe make us better than, or at the very least different from, others...
...The prologue and epilogue are both in modern times, and being intended to point a moral, fail rather heavily...
...Kelly's fault...
...Sure Fire THIS play has, at least, a daring title, in as much as the author, Rolph Murphy, has expressly indicated that it contains all the elements of the formula generally destined for box-office success...
...In Craig's Wife, life became more confined...
...This play is good, within its own intentions, which are hmted and mildly satirical...
...But there is considerably more to the play...
...A real-estate man with a keen sense of family responsibility and a tribe of watchful and jealous female relatives, encounters, through his daughter, a breezy and not too young lady from the Middle-West, and, almost without knowing how it has happened, finds himself prosaically engaged to her as the last curtain falls...
...The husband who left his intolerable home was much more a fugitive than an adventurer...
...This applies most pointedly to Daisy Mayme, Mr...
...The fascination of life comes from finding the similarities beneath surface differences...
...Thompson's music, which suffers from receiving only a thin piano accompaniment, has moments of exceptional lyric beauty...
...And here is where the note-book comes in...
...In Daisy Mayme, the spirit is still more confined...
...Without the niceties of the note-book, Daisy Mayme would be nothing more than a drab and totally uninteresting episode...
...Of course, the spirit of the play is that of spoofing—akin to Seven Keys to Baldpate, and it comes off with moderate success, even if without the glamour of the happenings on Baldpate mountain...
...The Ladder THE possibilities of reincarnation seem to hold no end of fascination for certain playwrights...
...Here was the start of an amusing idea—a family whose males had been "white wings" for many generations and who took to themselves as much pnde in this tradition as do the descendants of a line of Presidents Unfortunately, the first act gave away the complete secret of all the others—a sort of milestone treatment which carried one through the generations from the first horseless carriage to the modern automotive city, with the white wings forever against the advance of the new idea...
...We may all be alike, and yet show an extraordinary variety in the degree of our many instincts...
...There is not much sparkle to Daisy Mayme, little adventure, and what humor there is becomes in time monotonously ironic...
...Quite the opposite is true of Miss Irene Purcell This young actress has grasped the secret that gait, manner, voice, and gesture all change with costume, and she is remarkably successful in transforming herself from period to period, including the bouncing and flapperish present...
...The present part is less in his vein, perhaps, than the well-known prize-fighter, but he still handles his comedy well...
...And one Frances Wilson, as a country cousin who never utters a syllable, is destined some day to rival Harpo Marks for sheer perfection of dumb play...
...Two or three of the numbers, however, deserve a prompt hearing on Broadway...
...Boleslavsky an opportunity such as he had in Twelfth Night for sheer boisterous good humor...
...It is just the pathetic defense we all try to set up against being honest with ourselves—a defense that insists on our being different from all other humans instead of excruciatingly like them...
...It is not a production which gives Mr...
...But if accepted as a series of one-act plays, two or three of them furnish considerable interest...
...The heroine of all the episodes, who is also the dreamer is played by Antoinette Perry with varying success She does not, unfortunately, have the knack of wearing costumes convincingly...
...The part of the playwright is taken by the same Robert Armstrong who debghted so many audiences in Is Zat So...
...50 THE COMMONWEAL November 17, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Daisy Mayme ANEW George Kelly play has become one of the season's standard events—surely not because of Craig's Wife alone, but rather because that and The Show-Off came from the same pen within two seasons, marking their author as something of a genius among the reporting type of playwrights To say that George Kelly carries a mental note-book with him everywhere and that his plays are built upon gleanings from that book rather than from adventures of imagination, is merely to take him at his word...
...He betakes himself to Clayville and there finds that all the rural characters he has long made fun of in "clean" plays really exist and do pretty much as tradition says...
...The English play of 1670 is simply a drab copy of that license which the sophisticates like to extol because of its supposed supreme wit...
...There is no more to the plot than that...
...The last three acts held no surprise and much clumsy repetition...
...Carlton Bnckert as Mettinger is as colorless as his part intends him to be...
...By pushing generalizations too far we can arrive at a fatal drabness...
...It is also the best acted...
...Then, too, the treatment did not permit of genuine feeling...
...In making his characters such patently universal types, Mr...
...What happens is that an unsuccessful playwright is spurred on by his friends to draw his next play from real life in a small village rather than from his imagination...
...It is least successful in its approaches to modern jazz...
...The chief character might easily have been a member of the Pickwick Club...
...Kelly's latest photograph of humdrum America...
...The most notable contribution of the play is a young lady named Nancy Sheridan who, as the beautiful country lass of time-honored fable, manages to inject an amazing sincerity and simplicity of feeling into dangerously trite lines and situations...
...The elderly sisters talk—and even if you weie never blessed with sisters of any kind, you know that sisters have talked like that since the world first recovered from the flood The real-estate man blunders from one banality to another, and at once you know that way down deep you do and thmk exactly the same things, no matter how much frosting you try to lay over them...
...The play is almost too faithfully acted, with the best characterization falling to Josephine Hull as the least acid of the sisters...
...Yet even so perfect a note-book has its limitations...
...not from ignoring the differences entirely...
...But from the note-book springs the life of the characters...
...He makes few pretensions and is quite able to live up to those he does make, which is a sturdy lesson in fine sincerity...
...Brock Pemberton has selected a play on this theme, by J. Frank Davis, as a vehicle for exquisite costuming and some fine stage settings, ranging through six centuries...
...White Wings THE brief career of this play prevents more than the courtesy epitaph demanded by a Winthrop Ames production and the authorship of Philip Barry—a combination that should have brought forth something notable...
...The most interesting of all the episodes is certainly that laid in the New York of 1844...
...There were plenty of women who saw their neighbors and never themselves in Craig's Wife, and there will be plenty of men who will see everyone but themselves in Cliff Mettinger, but that is not Mr...
...A veil of artificiality hung over the entire performance and is what probably became, in brief course, its winding sheet...
...In The Show-Off, one felt glittering beneath all the absurdities and trivialities of the characters the amazing sprite of adventure...
...Nevertheless, it does give a few of the young actors an opportunity at luxurious farce Anne Schmidt, formerly of the Neighborhood Playhouse company, does a country bride with exquisite and naive awkwardness—the awkwardness which only a person of natural grace can achieve...
...There is a sop for those who resent the reincarnation idea in the fact that the successive happenings, in which all the same characters appear, turn out to be only a dream with a "lesson " November 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 51 Strictly as a play, the idea is too far-fetched, without a compensating sparkle of sheer fancy, to carry conviction or sustained emotional interest...
...Kelly, at least in Daisy Mayme, has gone too far...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 2
