The Spanish Art Theatre

...Catalina Barcena rendered The Romantic Young Lady as only a great Spanish artist could render it, with the complete understanding of Spanish reserves, dreams and conventions' If the play strikes our audiences as a bit impalpable, they may remember that strongly peppered meats are likely to dull the finer qualities of the gustatory organs, and ask themselves, in estimating this work, if they are really capable judges...

...However, when Maria Guerrero essayed peasant roles and when Seiior Mendoza, her husband, played his realistic parts, these critics were overwhelmed with remorse in the presence of a revelation of the grandeur of the Spanish theatre...

...This is the realism of the sunshine, of the honest and the progressive contentment of happy people, without a background of Elmer Gantry, newspaper clippings and the scandals, fogs and cyclones of our tropical dramatists...

...The absence of make-up and dressing-room touches, which Is sometimes trying to a foreigner, actually seems to escape the notice of Spanish audiences In their profound appreciation of the every-day realism of the presentation...

...Gregorlo Martinez-Sierra is one of the Spanish leaders in the modernistic reforms of the theatre...

...The basic principle which Is so persistently overlooked is that the audience is on the stage with the players...

...Catalina Barcena has all the charm, address and savoir-faire to make a great characterization in such a drama of conventual setting...

...The Romantic Young Lady, a trivial but acceptable episode—simply the blowing of a young man's hat into a Spanish drawing-room— is made the basis of a series of charming incidents, bringing out home character and the personal idiosyncrasies of middle-class society...

...Whether or not It was the presence of a young actress of unusually sympathetic charm, Catallna Barcena, or the result of long readings of old Spanish literature so rich In natural details, at least the play seems to create Itself, rather than to show the cleverness of the writer...

...There is hardly any plot, no nexus, no climax...

...and Mrs...

...In the Road to Happiness, which was the strange, if characteristic, choice of Martinez-Sierra as a vehicle in which to present himself on the New York stage, we have the story, in the narrative rather than the dramatic school manner, of the adventures of a beautiful young woman on her hard journey through life...

...It is this healthy old intimacy, derived from the classic theatres of pagan days, that persists and Is renewed in Spain today...

...the narrative drama winds its way on to the finale, honest, naive and general, where Blanca Rosa Is left sighing: "Leave me here a little while: memory is best...

...It possesses graphic and literary qualities only as accessories, not as essential principles...

...There Is no Benevente in this work: the click of the hammer is not heard in this atelier...

...Oscar Wilde found an excellent medium in this artificial interpretation of the English stage and gave us his clever stage short-stories that were never dramatic...

...As for the game of improbabilities played so deftly by Broadway producers, where the fish and fowl lovers vent their aberrations in Chinese and Congo settings: where black meets white, and never the twain shall part: we are all too much implicated to speak with any degree of assurance in judgment of such a rare and complete development as the Spanish stage and Its drama...

...In Shakespeare's time, the nobles sat upon the stage, and the pit, as well, took a part in the dialogue...

...John Drew, John Gilbert, Julia Marlowe, and other great ones, can you hear this...

...It will be highly interesting to watch the reactions of our audiences and critics when the Spanish Art Theatre presents The Cradle Song, which has given the American Eva Le Gallienne so fine a field for the display of histrionic delicacy...

...The translation has been the joint work of Mr...

...If they ever have time to read between their frequentatlons of the theatre, should realize that the stage Is not a picture, nor a book, nor even a novel...

...Spirits of Mrs...

...New York has already had a taste of this drama in the very delightful presentation of the title role at the Neighborhood Theatre by the American actress, Mary Ellis...

...THE persistent misinterpretation of the modern Spanish theatre in the minds of American critics is again manifesting itself in the notices and reviews of the performances given in New York by the Spanish Art Theatre...

...With the Quintero brothers, he represents the class drama, the simple delineation of actual life, the unaffected conversations of the average home, the honest types of every-day citizens, without those sensational episodes dealing with morons, degenerates, and criminals which make so large a part of what our stage calls realism...

...It will be another outrage upon the arts if our New York audiences overlook these qualities, for in the recognition of foreign achievement we accept or abandon our claim to be a great cosmopolis as well as a metropolis, in which the arts can abide side by side with the clamors of trade...

...The early pages of Lazarillo and the novelettes of Cervantes come back In that first scene, when the dying Blind Man counsels young Blanca Rosa, "Never set foot in a city, never beg, but earn thy bread by labor, accepting sorrows as they come...

...We are beyond the heavily upholstered days of Henry Irving and Fanny Davenport, but we are still In the hands of cubistic stage-setters and Bernard Shaw speechmakers...

...The desire to find fault with methods and actions that are an essential part of the reforms instituted some fifteen or twenty years ago by Spanish playwrights seems based, not only upon a lack of catholicity of judgment, but upon a positive resentment against a novel school that has won the approval of European critics at large, been demonstrated here in New York by the Irish Players, and become part and parcel of the stage in Scandinavia and Germany...

...Granville Barker, and presents a beautiful version in English of a play the delicacy of which might be easily disturbed...

...The actors in many of the modern dramas walk on and off the stage in the street dress of their characters...

...Dramatic presentation is a popular function which is only partly achieved by theatres-intimes...

...One senses the same misconception In Somerset Maugham and In many of our American stage carpenters, whose work shows the joining and nails of the trap-box school of Scribe and the thesplan gurgulations of Sardou...

...In the second comedy...

...It is a play for more sensitive perceptions than generally haunt our playhouses...

...Maria Guerrero played the heroic dramas of Spain in a large, broad manner that impressed the newspaper critics as belonging to the "old-fashioned" stage when, in fact, it was the last expression of the grand manner of a famous school of which our critics seem not to have even a recollection...

...So much has been written about the Spanish drama and the stage conditions where the casual and even accidental shifting of lights and tawdry scenery is not unknown, that it would seem that our critics...

...The appearance here last year of the Mendoza-Guerrero Company was marked by an open expression of this intolerance, which some people traced to ticket-office influences on Broadway...

...In the face of this, what is one to think of Mr, Bernard Simon's criticism, that "the whole troupe [of the Spanish Art Theatre] would be better off if they did not give way to that temptation to steal a glance at the audience every now and then...