The Play
S., H. L & Skinner, R. Dana
Right You Are if You Think You Are ALMOST any way you look at it, this play by Pirandello violates all the canons of Broadway success. It speculates throughout three acts on the abstract nature...
...He and his wife live in a dingy tenement...
...The Thief SOMEONE has said that Alice Brady achieves the benefits of repertory by appearing in one artistic failure after another...
...Your disap^ pointment is confined to the curtain lines just quoted, from which you suddenly discover that the whole structure rests on a play on words...
...Big scenes, when they come off as scheduled, are of the essence of the theatre...
...In brief, Pirandello is puzzling only to those who like to puzzle themselves by never defining words, or by using one word a half a dozen times to mean a half a dozen separate things...
...For the rest, the Guild has lavished on this stimulating play a cast including, and delightfully, Clare Eames, Helen Westley, Henry Travers, Dudley Digges, and Hortense Alden...
...his mother-in-law in a comfortable apartment...
...Yet in spite of these handicaps, she is steadily emerging as one of our best actresses for emotional scenes...
...Whether as the lecherous Caesar in Androcles, the virile Diaz in Maximilian, the epileptic in the Brothers Karamazov or the dynamically insane Ponza in the present play, he has the inborn faculty of getting so completely inside his part as to submerge his own personality entirely...
...This is tragedy...
...They are annoying only when they are intended to be big but listen small...
...H. L. S...
...Emery's mellowness strikes one as bemg like that of an ancient apple...
...Of course this is nobody's business and promptly becomes everybody's business...
...She has a vaguely competent look which makes it a little difficult to set her down as the clinging vine, and her voice carries a similar quality...
...But I venture they will find even more than they expect...
...The others in the cast, including even Gilbert Emery, are only fair...
...She is helping Ponza to preserve his illusion at the tremendous sacrifice of never seeing her own mother, and of giving up her right to live forthrightly as her own self...
...He is one of the few actors who pass beyond impersonation to the real artistry of interpretation...
...A young farm-hand, smitten with calf-love, drinks, brawls, curses and takes his life a year later when the girl becomes the second wife of his middle-aged rival...
...As to Mr...
...She has learned the value of modulation and variety...
...Even Ruth Mason's passivity and pathos seem well within the author's intention, and the minor characters achieve a composite picture of decadence and danger that is almost as spectral at times as the unforgettable beggars' dance in The Dybbuk...
...This particular scene, in which Voysin (Lionell Atwill) rediscovers that his wife (Alice Brady) is not only a thief but a coward, willing to let someone else assume her guilt, and then learns that she has stolen with the one object of making herself attractive to him, possesses enough sound drama to adequately fill a couple of ordinary plays...
...Led by their pastor, the neighbors invade his house, bay sanctimoniously round the stubborn sinner, and drag him to his knees...
...Reginald Mason as Laudisi is acceptable when you can understand his words...
...One suspects that is why so modern-minded a group as the Theatre Guild took special delight in presenting it, for it is part of the mood of the day to flout all objective standards in the interests of private judgment...
...His baby sickens...
...She has gained poise since then...
...Her performance in The Thief is decidedly worth seeing...
...Hardy Gilchrist is an agnostic of Ingersollian t5rpe, strong, shrewd, kindly, but with a theological equipment that is less than no help when the evidences of sorrow and frustration around him aiHict his anthropomorphic soul...
...Robinson, it is one of those baffling mysteries why the Guild should allow him to leave the permanent company next season...
...Miss Mercer has a quality of tender simplicity approached by very few actresses...
...The Guild first put on this play for special matinees, as a sort of trial balloon in deference to supposed Broadway taste...
...And so is Mr...
...it has the longest title, bar none, of the season...
...Now here is the story of Right You Are in a nutshell...
...And although he visits his mother-in-law, Signora Frola, every day, he never allows her to see her own daughter...
...There is no reason why Bernstein's The Thief, in revival, should not interrupt this system...
...Paul Green, one of our newer writers for the stage, contrives to fling a missile that is compact, substantial, and likely to keep its place very near the top of the pile...
...But as a play about objective truth, seeking to justify its own title, what has it accomplished...
...Such is advanced modern thought...
...In The Field God, a very powerful and moving play of life in America's backwaters, presented at the Greenwich Village Theatre, Mr...
...Lightning strikes his barns and a murrain descends on his stock...
...Having set up his Bible bogies convincingly, Mr...
...He is helped by a very remarkable cast, and by a direction whose watchfulness only flags a little toward the end of the play...
...Her baby dead, the woman suddenly becomes the protagonist in revolt, and stings her mate to a final abjuration of the terrors that have poisoned his life...
...He has an ailing wife to whom only the darker side of the revelation makes any appeal at all, and neighbors who are the dregs of the old pioneer generation, mean, slanderous, envious, narrow, and slack-witted...
...Pim Passes By...
...Quite true, the daughter is leading two lives...
...Success was so prompt that it is now on the regular evening bill as one of the six current Guild plays, alternating weekly at the Garrick with Mr...
...Those who remember her as Queen Victoria, or as the mother in Outward Bound, will know what to expect in the tragic little figure that is Signora Frola...
...The Field God WHETHER or not evangelical Christianity is giving a stone for bread, there is no doubt at all as to the mass and direction of the stones that are being cast at it by contemporary authors and dramatists...
...Unfortunately (for the moderns) Pirandello has demonstrated only one thing—that he can write a highly diverting play...
...There are certain scenes of rate dramatic poignancy and others of highly strung suspense...
...It is like using "bread" one minute to mean food in general, the next to mean a baker's loaf, a third time to mean hot-cross buns, and then concluding with the triumphant statement that there is co one who can possibly know just exactly what bread is after all...
...In the last act, the daughter herself explains by saying, "I am Signora Frola's daughter...
...Pirandello extracts a large and delightful slice of comedy from this whole situation, the befuddlement of the gossips, the confusion of identities, the hopeless conflict of evidence, and the cynical observations of Laudisi...
...Miss Brady has certain definite limitations of voice and features...
...The important parts of Ponza and Signora Frola are taken by Edward G. Robinson and Beryl Mercer—and their work fairly bristles with distinction...
...Green bowls them over decisively...
...Later, Ponza explains that it is Signora Frola who is insane, that her daughter really did die, and that he is only trying to preserve her illusion that his second wife is really her daughter...
...Atwill's...
...and to myself I am nobody," whereat the urbane Laudisi, a character who always speaks for the author, asks ironically if all are now satisfied that they have the truth...
...Few more striking presentations have been ofFered us of late than that of Fritz Leiter, as the strong, tired and repressed farmer and doubter, or Neill Sykes as the young hill-billy driven by passion to a revenge that is as vile as it is tragic...
...Green reserves his great effect for the last moments of the play, when a final tragedy seems imminent...
...The play ends upon a note of chastened happiness, rather sharply conditioned, one feels, upon speedy removal to less fundamental contacts for the new life...
...The wife dies, cursing him...
...to Ponza, I am his second wife...
...Such is the practical value of Broadway canons...
...It follows, of course, the well-known Bernstein formula of a "big scene" in the second act, but why not...
...An alleviation of this dark life that arrives in the shape of a cheerful and efficient young niece by marriage, is turned to disaster by the suspicion and uncharity of his entourage...
...All of which probably accounts for the fact that it is one of the marked successes of the Theatre Guild season and, by and large, a rarely amusing, trenchant play...
...It is a tense and excellent play up to the last three minutes of the last act, when it solves the insoluble too rapidly...
...In Bride of the Lamb, she conspicuously lacked the power of restraint...
...Almost in tears, Signora Frola explains that Ponza is insane, that after an earthquake had separated him from his wife, he was unable to recognize her and now thinks he is married to a second wife...
...no sex interest...
...He leaves the matter of truth just where he found it, divided as it always has been, into one kind that is relative, because it depends on imperfect personal observation, and another kind that is quite absolute and easily arrived at because it is objective...
...it has virtually (or should we say virtuously...
...It is also an admission that what appears true to Ponza is not true to his wife or to Signora Frola...
...The busybodies of a small Italian town are disturbed because of the domestic arrangements of Signor Ponza, his wife and his mother-in-law...
...it has an "unhappy" ending...
...We can almost see father Aristotle laughing up his toga at Signor Pirandello's tardy rediscovery of an ageold axiom...
...It speculates throughout three acts on the abstract nature of truth...
...Nothing—unless you feel it necessary to defend the oldest of truisms that things are not always what they seem...
...Enough of tragedy also lurks in the lives of the Ponzas to give the play the wine of emotional intensity...
...How comforting to convince yourself that what you want to believe is true, and then to act on the assurance that it is true because you think it is...
...one of its two principal characters is insane...
...Undoubtedly Signor Pirandello, who likes to appear baffling, thinks he has demonstrated in this three-act "parable" the utter relativity of truth...
...Quite on a par with Alfred Lunt and Dudley Digges in general ability, he is the most versatile actor I have seen on the New York stage...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 1
