The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Ned McCobb's Daughter ANEW play by Sidney Howard has become one of those events for which confirmed theatre-goers offer thanks. Although he has not yet projected...
...He has no morals and no manners...
...It is a role that cannot achieve tragic importance with a mere literal following of the lines...
...One could even tell its story so as to make it seem ridiculously trite...
...Although he has not yet projected on his audiences the sense of poetry and tragic gloom pervading the works of O'Neill, Mr...
...Like so many other Howard characters, however, even Jenny has points...
...Carrie, facing facts squarely, finds that she must support the whole family and opens a moderately prosperous Spa at the terminus of the ferry...
...Yet one comes away with the conviction that the present cast and James Light, the present director, have failed to give to Beyond the Horizon the subtler shades of emotion and striving which would relieve its sense of hardness and gloom, and give it the spiritual lift which was undoubtedly latent in the intention of O'Neill...
...He can, when he wants to, write with the greatest poetic "beauty...
...She becomes simply an unimaginative woman afflicted with self-pity...
...The one thing which might endow it with beauty would be a sense of striving on the part of both Ruth and Robert to come closer to each other in spite of the great wall of contrast between them...
...His dialect— what else can you call the new language springing up from the water fronts?—wanders a little at times...
...It is the distinguished and quite amazing achievement of Clare Eames to whom the part was entrusted...
...She marries the brother whose inner longing is to get away from the soil and to travel upon the rainbow of day-dreams and poetry...
...To many people, I imagine the most interesting point in this revival will be the sharp parallel in the initial situation of this play and The Great God Brown...
...As her assistant, she has Jenny, a girl of rather lurid past...
...The shock tills her father and leaves Carrie herself faced with the problem of raising $2,000 in twenty-four hours...
...O'Neill's writing opens up...
...She has become utterly disgusted with George Callahan and asks nothing better of life than the chance to work and live on where she is, and learn to become something better...
...This by no means implies that Mr...
...One does not feel that he is ever meant to be a great poet, or even a good one...
...Babe is a bootlegger operating on rather a large scale...
...Nor in this connection must we forget that the Carrie, as seen on the stage of the John Golden Theatre, is far more than the work of Mr...
...His plays have one quality which even those of O'Neill lack...
...Robert Keith, remembered for his excellent performance of Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, takes the part of Robert and plays it uncompromisingly in the incompetent key...
...Miss Aline MacMahon plays Ruth with a similiar rigidity...
...What chokes and crushes her life after her marriage to Robert is less his failure as a farmer than his failure as a man...
...It does not always achieve the true tang of New York...
...O'Neill's lines, but one feels the need of it to lessen the rather garish black and white feeling of the play...
...O'Neill selects the abnormal for his material, and where Mr...
...Howard selects the •excitingly normal...
...To Earl Larimore has been assigned the thankless part of the no account brother, Carrie's husband...
...Lunt does no less by the part of Babe Callahan...
...It would be very easy to play this part in the hard, clipped fashion so easily associated with New England, and to ignore entirely the explosive emotional depths which the very restraint of New Englandism has imbedded in its people...
...The tragedy, as it is told, is the one that so often follows upon an initial mistake of this kind...
...But this is the only criticism which the most captious play-goer could bring against a fine and intensely colored impersonation...
...Somewhere one yearns for the shadowed middle ground between Ruth's hardness and Robert's dreaminess...
...In Carrie's understanding of Jenny, in her salty battle with Babe, and in her almost tragic appraisal of her husband, she reaches the highest points of New England character at its best...
...He is purely and simply a dreamer but never achieves the inner strength to realize either his dreams or the hard tasks of outer reality...
...people whose sense of adventure has not been killed and who still have the power to achieve some of their dreams...
...The production is good, the acting occasionally fine, and the play still retains a deep, emotional power...
...Sharp to the nth degree in business, trusting to absurd limits in the honesty of others because of the essential integrity of her own make-up, there have been few stage portraits of recent years comparable to Carrie Callahan...
...159 Beyond the Horizon AS THE second production of its season, the Actors' Theatre has revived, after a lapse of many years, this first full length play of Eugene O'Neill...
...Howard has shown other qualities, strength and virility and knowledge of good theatre, which place him in the upper rank of American playwrights...
...It is a beautiful piece of work within its limited intention, but it does not go far enough along those by-paths of emotion which all of Mr...
...It needs the shading of pantomime and of unspoken hope and fear to raise it to that pitch where it becomes of universal importance...
...He plays it with a keen understanding and no attempt to mitigate its general repulsiveness...
...O'Neill intended, one could use superlatives about Miss MacMahon's acting...
...Old Captain McCobb's daughter, Carrie, lias married the shiftless and good-for-nothing George Callahan with a brief prison record to his credit...
...Where Mr...
...Ned McCobb's Daughter, which has just been presented by the Theatre Guild Acting Company, probably has many faults...
...Lunt has ever done and that is saying a great deal...
...Babe Callahan finds, in her plight, a gorgeous opportunity for his business...
...Miss Eames imbues the outwardly angular character of Carrie with a tremendous and a richness which make Carrie an utterly engaging and human individual, a vivid, living example of the great New England paradox...
...It will be recalled that this play tells the story of a girl bred from the soil who has a choice between two brothers and, swept away by youthful romanticism, marries the wrong one...
...Ned McCobb himself was once a sea captain, but has now been reduced to being ¦captain of the Kennebec ferry-boat at Merrybay, Maine...
...Be it said quite irankly that Carrie has no particular love for prohibition, but that her whole Yankee backbone rises in wrath at the thought of being compelled to yield to Babe under pressure...
...If this is what Mr...
...He has mastered completely the technique of transforming himself in appearance, voice, tension, and gesture...
...As the Empress Carlotta in Juarez and Maximilian, Miss Eames already showed an extraordinary advance in the depth and power of her work...
...Ruth Atkins has little of the poetic in her, but one feels that she could have respected and loved real manhood even in a poet...
...Although Edward G. Robinson has but a very minor part to play, that of a Maine lawyer, his work still proclaims him as one of the most finished actors in the Guild Company...
...The other brother, Andrew Mayo, the antithesis of Robert, is a man of small imagination but of intense virility, a man of uncompromising integrity in his relations to Ruth...
...This striving is not clearly indicated in Mr...
...But as Carrie Callahan, she has created something unique...
...There are few who will fail to appreciate the amazing contrast between this Maine lawyer and the stalwart Porfirio Diaz of Juarez and Maximilian...
...One never feels him as even potentially a poet...
...The more important fact remains that it is a tense, often very poignant, and certainly a thoroughly virile play in which the austere beauty of New England character is pitted against that amazing new product of the times, the character of New York's East Side...
...Howard is not a poet...
...The simple fact of the matter is that he does not ¦continue to hew to this line as closely as O'Neill is wont to ¦do, either in the selection of his characters or in the general form of his plays...
...He has a prison record and is proud of it— iot the novel reason that he "did time" at Atlanta penitentiary for a big offense instead of serving a term, like his brother, at a local prison for petty larceny...
...This distinction means a great deal to him when it comes to a show-down between the two brothers...
...Kelly selects the pitifully normal, Mr...
...Miss Margalo Gillmore also does an extremely sincere and moving bit of work in the part of the drudge, Jenny...
...One feels in her attitude toward her husband none of the fluttering anxiety to break through the terrible barrier between them...
...But he can no more help the attraction he exerts for her than he can help the course of the moon...
...He manages in an amazing way to give glamour to the unutterable toughness of this product of New York...
...The essential respectability of Carrie's Spa, with her two ¦children living in the adjoining house, is just the kind of cover he needs for his bootlegging operations...
...Into this atmosphere there jumps the lumbering, coarse and brutally romantic figure of Babe Callahan, George's long missing brother...
...In the course of the play, Carrie discovers that her husband has been stealing money from the ferry company...
...From this moment on the play becomes a battle of wits and character between Babe and Carrie, in which Carrie faces the further complication of discovering that her husband has brought more filth under her own roof by an affair with Jenny...
...They are firmly anchored to the life of today, not in the photographic sense represented by George Kelly, but in the thoroughly theatrical sense of presenting old-age themes in vivid modern terms...
...Brown is but the completion, the carrying on to a higher and tragic point of the material contained in Beyond the Horizon...
...Here is where inspired directing and acting have a chance to flood a little beauty upon the theme...
...By doing this he actually wins a certain sympathy and understanding which would have been entirely lost if he had sought for it consciously...
...It is one of the best pieces of work Mr...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 6
