The Play

...It does not mince words, and makes full use of the freedom of speech so characteristic of the recent type of play...

...When she does find out, later, that the reason for his Rip Van Winkle strangeness is fifteen years' imprisonment for murder, she is afraid to face the social consequences...

...A murder, the death of the daughter and the renunciation of the sculptor who first started her toward fame, finally clear her path...

...He then learns that with all her faults, Brenda Fallon had loved him unselfishly and that her greatest desire was to see him restored to his wife...

...It is a plain and bold indictment of the habits of mind and the twisted views bred by our post-war civilization, distasteful at many times because the people it is describing are distasteful, but for the main part constructive because of the earnest fight 80 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 which one man carries through the play, and carries to success, against this very sordidness...

...She is puzzled by his strange aloofness from her own world and what she considers his nai've views, but does not suspect the cause...

...Violet Heming as Nina, the wife, does her best work in many years...

...He also learns that beneath her surface veneer, his wife has the stuff of true and fearless devotion...

...This part is acted with superb intuition by Molly Kerr...

...Her gestures have become dislocated and spasmodic Her facial mannerisms, particularly a certain twist of the mouth, have become annoying...

...The Ramblers IT HAS been said—and not always by the press agents— that Clark and McCollough in The Ramblers offered more compacted fun than any combination since the Marx Brothers...

...Well—perhaps...

...Titheradge himself, is also a finely moving characterization of a man tortured by the effort to adapt himself to new and false values in life, and eventually, through earnestness and courage, winning the honest forthright love he had sought...

...But it does so with a sincerity of feeling and honesty of purpose so patent—and often so poignant—as to relieve it of the charge of deliberate sensation-mongering...

...Briefly, an artist's model has risen through energy and will to a point where she controls the destinies of an empire...

...It is not until his wife is won over by the sheer strength of his love, and a realization that the murder was in an access of rage against a man who had ruined his sister, that hope begins to dawn...

...But this is not an uncommon endowment these days...

...For it is worth noting, in comparison, let us say, with Walter Hampden's efforts, that Miss Le Gallienne has followed his unfortunate example in trying to act and direct at the same time...

...The principle of this is fundamentally unsound...

...Loose Ends HERE is a play of distinct and distinguished quality, in which Dion Titherage, the author, takes the leading part and also, by happy choice, directs with considerable success...

...Perhaps it is not unfair to say that they, too, would do better with a firmer directing hand...

...So far as one can judge from her performance in Saturday Night, her work already shows signs of deterioration since her memorable performance in Liliom...

...This makes it doubly hard to appraise the work of the company and of Miss Le Gallienne herself in the principal role and as director...

...Two others, which will be reviewed later, were the Three Sisters, by Tchekhov, and Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman...

...In the meantime, her friend, Brenda Fallon, has fallen deeply in love with Forres, but is too loyal to admit it to him or anyone else...

...Miss Le Gallienne needs, then, and needs badly, the drawing out, the development and the discipline which come from expert and understanding direction...

...She, too, is a product of the times, curiously amoral, and offers to help him give his wife a divorce if the latter insists...

...In his distress he turns to her and then discovers her feeling...

...This Benavente has not done...

...much of it is uninspired slapstick, and only here and there does it sparkle...

...One of the first plays chosen for presentation under this new scheme was Saturday Night, the translation of a play by Jacinto Benavente...

...For the Wednesday matinees, this is reduced to $1.10, with gallery seats at thirty-five cents...

...The third act, in a tavern, which closes with the murder of a prince and the mad dancing of a tarantella during a police raid, stands out as the one moment of the play where Miss Le Gallienne has achieved true theatrical magic...

...Here is accomplishment and pioneering effort worthy of profound respect and honest tribute...

...Nina Grant, an actress, marries Malcolm Forres on short acquaintance...

...In spite of its frank speech and situations, this is a much sounder play than many of those whose speech is irreproachable, but whose implications are destructive...

...November 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 79 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Saturday Night HP HE courageous adventure of Miss Eva Le Gallienne in A establishing at the old Fourteenth Street Theatre a first-class repertory company at popular prices has probably attracted more attention in New York theatrical circles than any other event of this season—and rightfully so...

...The men, almost without exception, were incompetent and wooden...

...This scene is swift, violent, and comes with splendid impact...

...Everyone has lamented the high box-office prices in New York...

...It puts the actor-director in the false position of instructing others and being himself above instruction...

...Miss Le Gallienne has provided a program of first-class plays, opening her season by two different plays on successive nights, and immediately adding others...

...A good deal of the fun is vulgar fun...

...The most distinguished bit of secondary work was Leona Roberts's portrait of an ancient and broken courtesan whose last days are spent in the gloom of a disreputable tavern...

...The play as a whole is one of those Graustarkian stories of an imaginary empire which could only attain import?' 'e and interest through an amazingly skilful building up c ^ ter and human values...

...Of her work in directing the other members of the long cast, it is unfair to judge too severely so early in a season that must have involved many trials and distractions...

...The real value of the other members of the permanent company can only be judged from the vesatility shown in subsequent performances...

...At the Civic Repertory Theatre, the top price, tax included, is $1.65...

...Whatever the prevailing or one's own personal opinion of Miss Le Gallienne's ability as an actress, and whatever judgment may finally be passed upon her season, she has already accomplished something of which no one can deprive her...

...And her voice has lost that restrained intensity which helped to make her, in Liliom, a figure of high tragedy...

...It might be argued that too much sympathy is won for Brenda Fallon, but I am inclined to think that Mr...

...This breaks the last of his illusions...

...Beatrice Terry is fairly amusing but quite unconvincing as a fickle countess...

...And among actors, it is only the occasional genius of a century who has that acute quality of self-criticism which enables him without direction to avoid the faults, the mannerisms, and the exaggerations which are the actor's greatest menace...

...Then her past, in the form of a daughter, comes back to plague and torment her, giving her a choice between maternal instinct and the fulfilment of her ambitions...

...The music is fairly good without much originality...

...Ruth Wilton as the daughter was rather colorless, though showing a certain sensitive fluttering quality which might develop into something of real interest in a more authentic play...

...She is a hardworking, courageous and intelligent actress, with native talent, good physical and vocal equipment, and a real theatre sense...

...Where others have talked and hoped and complained, she has acted...

...The Benavente play is not, perhaps, the happiest of selections, in spite of one act, the third, which reaches a magnificent height of theatrical climax...

...Everyone has complained of hit or miss acting and the lack of acting opportunities for fine talent...

...The story is discursively told in five acts, with only small success in sustaining emotional interest and with a confusion of detail and a brevity of motivation which drape it with the pall of artificiality...

...Tither-adge has shown unusual artistic integrity in displaying her for just what she is, a girl whose mistaken views are born to the current loose thinking of the day, but whose finer sensibilities, whose loyalties and spirit of self-sacrifice and renunciation are of the fine women of all time...

...But the movement of the play and the grouping of several difficult scenes suggests a need for greater compactness and less scattering of attention...

...The unreality of the empire of Suavia and the failure to give to this woman's problems the searching human treatment which might have made them plausible, combine to give hollowness to the play, and to make one feel toward it the supreme indifference that is associated with the older opera librettos...

...Malcolm Forres, acted by Mr...

...Miss Le Gallienne is patently not a genius...

...It is best to say at the outset that the play is strong medicine...

...One could easily name five or six actresses of equal or greater natural ability, and certainly two or three with a markedly greater emotional gift...

...Her emotional moments are fragile and occasionally futile...

...and again, probably not...