Plays and Playwrights
Skinner, R. Dana
(This is the first of three general review articles by Mr. Skinner on the ig26-27 season in the theatre.—The Editors.) ABOUT the time that the leading newspaper critics insist . on a vacation,...
...George Kelly's contribution to the season was Daisy Mayme, a play of comparatively little theatrical interest although a distressingly accurate study of intensely mediocre people...
...It lays enormous stress on outward happenings and almost never includes the intangible forces which work for regeneration...
...His play, In Abraham's Bosom, was a remarkable contribution to the folk drama of this country as expressed in the life of the southern Negro of a generation ago...
...O'Neill is departing from the characteristic simplicity that his earlier work possessed and is striving to give a more ambitious rendering of mystical themes...
...This same mixture of elements was largely responsible for his failure of a year ago...
...I do not mean that their particular experiences are common to everyone in a physical or objective sense...
...Howard knew more instinctively about the characters he portrayed, but lacked the poetic daring to give his knowledge full expression...
...I strongly suspect Mr...
...O'Neill himself fared rather badly this year in having no new play produced...
...Green undoubtedly has qualities of poetic imagination and dramatic rendering which will shortly enable him to challenge the position of Eugene O'Neill as the premier playwright of the country...
...Among the playwrights who achieved special distinction this season, the name of Paul Green naturally takes first place as winner of the Pulitzer Prize...
...I am sure that Mr...
...If you will scan the list of plays that have endured for years or for centuries, you will find that no matter how strongly individual their characters become, their emotions and thoughts are those shared by the vast multitudes of people...
...Caponsacchi, on the other hand, was distinctly a melodrama in form and a rather crude one at that, but redeemed and lifted quite high through the sheer beauty of thought pervading it...
...Of the two, I am sure that most people will agree in finding Cradle Song the better play—not so much because of its dramatic qualities (as commonly understood, it had none) but because of its fine gradation of character study, its sensitive perception of values, and its daring departure from the superficial laws of dramatic action...
...On the other hand, we cannot afford to overlook, by way of comparison, a few works of extraordinary beauty and interest which, through the curious law of contrast, chose this of all seasons to emerge...
...But it was also depressingly one-sided...
...McEvoy's idea was better than his expression of it in the play...
...McEvoy disclosed a very keen sensitiveness to the sad flutterings of the defeated people of the world...
...One is now privileged to speak of "the past" season and to include in its scope every play produced since July 1, 1926...
...His two great successes of the season, The Silver Cord, and Ned McCobb's Daughter, both produced by the Theatre Guild, were well-executed plays with extremely interesting themes whcKe inner values he hardly touched...
...ABOUT the time that the leading newspaper critics insist . on a vacation, the New York season officially closes—only to reopen the next week with that queer brand of entertainment known as "summer shows...
...It makes a doubly interesting comment on the mentality and judgment of these producers that both the above plays were marked successes in a year when 138 of the 195 plays produced were failures...
...Something of the same defect appeared in Ned McCobb's Daugher where the theme was the struggle between the character of New York's East Side and the character of the Maine coast...
...There are certain elect people who believe that every play with an interesting idea must be a good play...
...His treatment of the theme of selfish mother love in The Silver Cord was distressingly superficial...
...But he managed to spoil the effect by opening his whole bag of tricks in the first act, and by endeavoring to mix a real emotional quality with highly artificial comedy...
...I say "privileged" advisedly because in many respects this was one of the most unfortunate seasons the stage has seen in several generations...
...The chief drawback in Mariners was the author's selection for its heroine of a type of woman so far removed from common experience as to destroy any universal feeling in the play...
...Unquestionably, Philip Barry had a delightful idea in White Wings—the fanciful story of a family of street-cleaners whose traditions of service ran back for many generations...
...But we generally find that what these characters do thousands of others have at least been tempted to do, so that the motives are understood by the audience and the experiences of the characters shared in imagination if not in fact...
...It generally fails to penetrate the curious idealism which hovers in even the humblest minds...
...Howard can hardly hope to come into his own as a playwright of real distinction until he finds courage enough to deliberately risk a failure...
...It is not enough only to hint at reality...
...In this category, we have notably the Walter Hampden production of Caponsacchi, and the Eva Le Gallienne production of the Spanish play...
...Cradle Song...
...But no play could be really effective which asks an audience to read the author's mind...
...This woman was an excellent candidate for an asylum...
...In a Garden, which also received praise from the elite...
...Howard was born a poet and has suddenly become afraid of his birthright...
...In the case of God Loves Us, Mr...
...The greatest fault of so-called realistic drama is its lack of inclusive realism...
...No one is more certain that he understands what the public wants than the average commercial manager...
...Another American playwright, Sidney Howard, has turned frankly into a showman...
...Now, if the truth must be told, none of these was really a good play...
...The manuscript of Lazarus Laughed—a play scheduled for production during the middle of last winter—indicates that Mr...
...One feels that such a play, when actually written and produced, will be his greatest success...
...the first produced by Winthrop Ames and the other two by the Actors' Theatre...
...There were many plays produced which for sheer vulgarity or general perversity of theme it would be hard to find a recent parallel...
...Of course the commercial manager might say in rebuttal that many plays selected for praise by the so-called "high brows" were also on the failure list—notably White Wings by Philip Barry, God Loves Us by J. P. McEvoy, and Mariners by Clemence Dane...
...It was a play with many very fine passages...
...Kelly is, of course, much more than an expert dramatic photographer, but unless he returns to themes which have a little more of the exuberance of The Show-Off he risks losing much of the magic of his earlier work...
...One constantly had the feeling that Mr...
...The object of any play, no matter what its type, is to create the illusion of reality...
...Neither play would have met the demands of the ordinary Broadway producer...
...And on many occasions he sacrificed sincere characterizations to the creating of a laugh...
...And no one more consistently provides what the public shows it does not want than this same omnipotent being...
...This play literally fell to pieces in the last act due to the supposed demands for expert shovraianship...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 10
