The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
134 THE COMMONWEAL December 8, 1926 THE
By R. DANA Up the Line p RIZE plays suffer the initial handicap of increasing the critical mood of an audience. When associated with the drama...
...The play lacks a point of view...
...She cannot kill in him the instinct she is trying to keep alive in herself...
...But there is an essential crudity and cheapness in the handling of the plot and action which deprive the story of its value...
...Each poet is introduced by a short prefatory essay...
...In fact, the speetade of any kind of religious faith as a dramatic motive is rare enough to deserve a welcome...
...There is no artistic restraint in the handling of her scenes with father or son...
...He does, in fact, come back, but not for eight years...
...But Nubi, who is quite without moral sense, proceeds to exert her charms on father, son, and hired man...
...Only the acting of Lydia Willmore as the paralyzed mother of the first act tends to throw the play off key...
...But Mr...
...The thought of staying forever on the ranch has become in- tolerable...
...There are plenty of good scenes in the play...
...The Play's the Thing I N WHICH Holbrook Blinn and Reginald Owen have a lot of fun with a racy and indelicate story of Molnar's about a playwright who saves the feelings and illusions of a young man by cleverly extracting his fiane& from a compro-mising situation...
...Both Mr...
...And unfortunately, what is not stated on the stage generally escapes notice...
...Effie tries to tell him that she is going to have a baby, but her courage fails her when she sees what it means to him to be off again...
...Owen waste a deal of good acting on the most artificial and unimportant play with the poorest third act Mr...
...She lets him go to Fargo...
...The sincere and poignant acting of Blanche Yurka as Dolores does all that is possible to redeem the play...
...And you are left to guess at Effie's real motive...
...She is not, as several critics indicated, merely afraid to tell him...
...In the end, the Mendez household awakes, and the healing of the sears begins...
...What might have implied tragedy becomes merely sentimental pathos...
...One looks for academic niceties and tries to detect the odors of the labora- tory...
...By contrary instinct, Slug gets from her his first desire to settle down...
...Against her better instincts, Dolores offers the girl shelter and a home in exchange for work...
...In that time, no word has come of him...
...But it is not a parr that brings out her best possibilities...
...He has somehow brought his rangy proportions into a compact and forceful being, with no little glamour, in the first two acts, contrasting with the broken-down prodigal of the last act...
...Louis Calhem as the wandering Slug does by far his best work o~ several seasons...
...Henry Fisk Carlton is the author of this North Dakota study, and if I am not misinformed, he has worked in those regions, has gone "up the line" from job to job with harvesting crews, and thus completely earned the right to tell us what that kind of life does to character, male and female...
...Then, beaten by himself in his one chance for happiness, he goes off again, once more on his endless march "up the line...
...Effie hears him talk of Alaska, the northern lumber camps, great titles...
...as well as many lesser known poets...
...The acting of the play is, for the most part, of high order, allowing for distinctly mediocre direction...
...Their sensual side is played beyond all good taste on the standard box-office prindple...
...But he has found in his wife, Dolores, a human sympathy and understanding which have largdy made up for his loss...
...He becomes the incarnation of her own longings...
...Into this situation comes a group of I. W. W. harvester hands, headed by Slug, a tall and handsome animal, to whom more than four days in one place is an absurdity...
...Her hysterical invectives against everyone and everything are vastly overdone...
...The mounting of the play is excellent...
...The last act becomes meaningless...
...This is all grossly unfair to the playwright and to the producer...
...Mary Fowler in a small part is singularly effective...
...According to tradition, Effie should marry Nels, the Scandinavian hired man...
...It is neither Effie's play nor Slug's...
...It is not stated...
...He promises to return in a week...
...The authors include such poets as Alice Meynell, Francis ~=~ Thompson, Louise Imogen Guiney, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Joel Chandler Harris, ~:~ Katherine Tyrian...
...The real cause for Effie's allowing him to go to Fargo without PLAY SKINNER telling him about their baby is barely hinted at...
...Its author, one guesses, was torn between writing a serious play of what faith and prayer can accomplish in straightening out a domestic mess and a play that would follow the box-office formulae of Alom'a, White Cargo, and similar pictures of civilized man encountering primitive females...
...But there is nothing to hold it all together or to give it emotional stir...
...Carlton passes over this struggle with a light and colorless touch...
...Jose Mendez, in giving up his art to marry a woman of peasant origin and to work on a farm, has had to suppress a powerDecember 8, x926 TH E C OM MONWEAL I35 ful creative instinct in his life...
...They marry...
...Nubi is one of those characters who speaks broken English and always talks of herself in the third person...
...There is plenty of natural and effective dialogue, and plenty of amusing characterization...
...The result, when it is not ludicrous or cheaply melodramatic, is drab, in spite of Lionel Atwill's direction, and the heroic efforts made by such actors as Blanche Yurka, Mary Fowler, and Lee Baker...
...It comes at the most crucial moment in the form of the gypsy chief, who has heard from Nubi's discarded lover, the hired man, where she is...
...The father begins to paint again, using Nubi as his model...
...8.30 II [ 47th St., West of Broadway Matinees, Wed...
...There is nothing about Up the Line, the new Harvard prize play produced by Richard Herndon, which smacks either of laboratory or academic halls...
...When associated with the drama class of a college, matters become worse...
...They taunt him with yielding "to a skirt...
...Some of his old friends come up the line...
...The action of the present play all takes place in the mess shack of a ranch house where Eflie and her mother live and look after the appetities of the steady hands...
...And the occasional blasphemies are merely pale and mistaken attempts to shock an audience into interest which only real drama could command...
...There, I take it, is the central point of the play, the struggle between two overmastering human instincts--home and the road of adventure...
...It is simply not a good play...
...The Squall T HE first production of the season of Messrs...
...He has reason, like Job, to be pleased...
...Jones and Green is a modern drama of rural Spain by Jean Bart in which more time and talent have been wasted upon purely mediocre material than in most of the plays that reach Broadway...
...The play then becomes nothing but cheap sex melodrama, crowding out what beauty or sincerity there might have been...
...The theme itself might have brought forth a powerful play...
...She is afraid, on the contrary, to put in his way the same obstacle which has always tied her down to one spot...
...It becomes just another aspect of a long story, instead of the dramatic climax to a single great issue...
...But Effie is afflicted with the wander- lust, the desire to see trees and mountains and great cities...
...Carlton has not used his material well for dramatic purposes...
...Molnar has yet had ex-hibited in America...
...The Nubi of Miss Caubet is played as written, and without any redeeming primitiveness...
...In an agony, Dolores prays to the Mother of God for help...
...It is worth pointing out these defects to forestall the trite post mortem that "here is another good play which could not succeed with the modern public...
...and Sat...
...Nor does it center with enough dramatic intensity about the struggle between them...
...Then, during a storm, a gypsy girl, Nubi, takes refuge in his house from the cruelties of her master...
...All the subtlety and fineness which has gone into the writing of Dolores's part disappears when Nubi is on the stage...
...Florence Johns as Effie makes the most of her underwritten part...
...They need his leadership in an approaching battle with the Fargo police...
...134 THE COMMONWEAL December 8, 1926 THE By R. DANA Up the Line p RIZE plays suffer the initial handicap of increasing the critical mood of an audience...
...But either through an attempt to be oversubtle, or through failure to realize just what he is writing about, Mr...
...The themes ~=~ are secular as well as religious...
...Thus the weakness of the play is its lack of a well-developed central idea, to which all minor defects in treatment can be traced...
...A year later, once more at harvest time, Slug has become restless...
...M. Bois, a personal friend of the distinguished diplomat and poet, will tell Americans: Who Is Paul Claudel ? THE COMMONWEAL for December 15 Order your copy early Gompany /fnnounce tAe Publication of THE BOOK OF MODERN CATHOLIC VERSE Edited by THEODORE MAYNARD [~ An anthology of representative verse by Cath- olic authors from Coventry Patmore to the present day...
...Atwill's direction seems to lack vibrancy, although he too has done much with conflicting material...
...Blinn and Mr...
...He is legally dead, and Effie has married Nels...
...It is unfortunate that so much that might be good in theme, and so much that is good in acting, should find so second-rate an outlet in tawdry playwriting and the attempt to tickle a jaded popular taste...
...2.30 | I. chuk,~__, ~8~2 . .9 II I...
...His son is an excellent student, his farm has prospered...
...There is a moment when he is ready to fight for the chance to stay with his child...
...You have here one of those great wheat ranches where the "hired girl" must inevitably marry the "hired man," and where, thanks to a benevolent owner, they have a chance in time to buy a section of the ranch and thus tie themselves forever to the in- terminable and treeless soil...
...Maynard has confined him- self to the best writing in English during the last three-quarters of a century...
...Baker as the father is good only in his scenes with Dolores...
...There is undoubtedly material here for a stirring play...
...Wanderlust is one of the great universal themes of drama and literature...
...The son neglects his studies and his fiancte...
...I I I I I |1 Actors Theatre Production m ~ ii i i ii i iii FOR NEXT WE.EK ii m THE COMMONWEAL Announces An article by L. J. S. Wood, whose long years of residence in Rome as an English correspondent have quali- fied him to discuss authoritatively problems of Catholic policy, will answer the question: How Does the Catholic Church Interpret Marriage ? Another article by Jules Bois will define the personality and achievement of M. Paul Chudel, just nominated French Ambassador to the United States...
...3.00 at all Booksellers | | EUGENE O'NEILL'S ~:~ HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY ~=~ IIBEYOND THE HORIZON One Park Avenue New York ~:~ II [ Mansfield Th~tre---l]ve...
...Dolores discovers what is going on, but realizes that to drive Nubi out would merely make the glrl appear a victim of jealousy...
...It is a play obviously drawn from the soil and from first-hand observation, and if it lacks certain elements which go toward establishing true emotional power, the fault lies in the idea of the play itself and in a treatment quite as common this season among the experienced Broadway writers as among collegiate dramatists...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 5
