The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 21 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Sea-Gull IF YOU want an excellent illustration of the relatively small importance of elaborate production in creating...
...Speaking of Talkies THE time is not yet when talkies can take the place of the stage...
...The Sea-Gull herself is a young girl who has always lived on the border of the lake and whose life is influenced by the converging lives, loves, hopes and struggles of those gathered on the estate...
...But in the new medium, we have the full resonance of the cannonading, the shouting of the sailors, the clashing of arms and the trumpets of victory, all as integral parts of the film, and capable of reproduction in the farthest reaches of the country...
...The Sea-Gull is rather hard to describe in terms of plot, chiefly because its primary interest lies in character and in the significant use of detail...
...It is a bit of life on a Russian country estate surveyed with all that rich, dark pity of which Chekov is capable, pity for aspiration unfulfilled, pity for impulses only half understood, pity for the twilight because it must give way to night, and pity for the cool dawn because it must soon melt under a burning noon...
...There is the steward's daughter, in love with the young writer, who marries a poor schoolmaster and treats him abominably because her only real love is not reciprocated...
...The creative and regenerating force of suffering seems to be almost lost...
...At the Comedy Theatre...
...The Actor Managers tried a similar experiment last year in special matinees of Lovers and Enemies, with marked success in making the audience forget the absence of formal scenery and become absorbed in the play itself...
...Walter Abel is not quite so monotonous as usual as the older writer...
...It prepared under the direction of Leo Bulgakov, and includes several actors of marked promise as well as others of proved ability and recognized standing...
...that they will go off together with the deliberate purpose of maintaining union without affection...
...The mere fact that Chekov uses her in this fashion indicates his own understanding of richer depths in suffering, and that he is not totally devoid of a sense of eternal re-creation...
...There is the young writer, seeking new forms, intolerant of misunderstanding, and discovering only bit by bit that the deliberate search for newness may be as unreal as the conventions of older forms...
...It is only one more evidence that the value of the movies, as entertainment, depends largely on the accuracy with which subject-matter is adapted to the medium...
...The play lays a firm hold upon you from the first and becomes, as it progresses, profoundly moving...
...Bulgakov's troupe can hang together and do more work of this calibre, they all deserve not only credit but ultimate success and a firm place in the New York theatre...
...Above all, we are asked to believe that if all this could happen to the curiously unreal puppets of Lili Hatvany, it has enough importance to justify a play on the subject...
...The present company is rather better than that assembled for Lovers and Enemies...
...For this reason, you find the young writer in The Sea-Gull shooting himself at the very last...
...But whatever value the play holds is certainly not due to the characters created by the author and exists in spite of them...
...On the other hand, to do Chekov justice, little Nina (the Sea-Gull) who has had to experience many of the severest trials in her effort to become an actress, including the loss of both lover and child, is able to go on, and with a certain radiance, because she has faith and has discovered, too, the exultation of creative work...
...To this extent the charge of morbidity would be justified, as it so often is in literature, not by the mere presence of introspection or unhappiness but by the essential lack of that balance to be found in all nature...
...Chekov seems to regard (or at least many of his characters regard) the thwarting tribulations of life as finalities from which there is no escape...
...May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 21 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Sea-Gull IF YOU want an excellent illustration of the relatively small importance of elaborate production in creating successful illusion in the theatre, you will find such an illustration in the current production of Chekov's The Sea-Gull...
...It deals, of course, with the attachment of Nelson for Lady Hamilton, and brings in the naval battles of the Nile and of Trafalgar...
...We are asked to believe that a woman of the world, and of many past affairs, meeting a man who has left a trail of unhappy ladies behind him, will seriously agree to conduct a love duel in which the heart of one or the other shall be the stake...
...I have just mentioned pity for the twilight and the dawn because those figures of speech help to illustrate this point...
...The Love Duel is unquestionably a waste of Miss Barrymore's time and talent, as I imagine she will soon learn from the box-office reports...
...The whole enterprise, in fact, gives one heart about the vitality of the theatre...
...The part of the young writer is played with intensity and understanding by Lewis Leverett...
...At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre...
...If we could set a term to nature—that is, if we knew that a particular dawn was the last dawn of the world, or a particular twilight was the last twilight—we might indeed pity both moments as moods about to perish...
...And dominating all of the characters in this crowded play, we have the actress-mother of the young writer, with her jealousies and petty vanities, her futile and destructive love, whether for son or lover, and her complete obliviousness to all the heartaches of those around her...
...I confess to being quite carried away by the sheer accord of sight and sound...
...All in all, this production, in its modest way, is a real and distinct achievement...
...E. J. Ballantine, as the old owner of the estate, shows the result of fine coaching by Mr...
...Even minor characters are given that fulness which sets them off as individuals, and helps to create, minute by minute, the illusion that you are really seeing to the core of humanity through this strange isolated group...
...There is the doctor who has become the urbane philosopher because he has lived to the hilt, and the old man who envies the doctor and still hopes to live completely...
...Like so much of his writing, and like so much of the work of the general Russian school it represents, The Sea-Gull lacks the accented note of resurrection necessary to give it completion and full universality...
...that this woman of the world will not only lose her heart in the process but discover to her great astonishment that she is to become a mother...
...and that it will all end happily in a Swiss chalet strewn with baby clothes...
...In the old days, the matter of reproducing the turmoil of battle would have been left entirely to the local orchestra and back-stage experts of the exhibiting house...
...But progress always merits attention, and it is certain that in one respect at least the pioneers in the new medium have done well...
...This tendency, and this alone, prevents The Sea-Gull from being what it might easily have been—as complete and engrossing a study of human conflict as you are apt to find in the near-classic theatre...
...Considerable devotion and willingness to accept sacrifice are required from a group of actors who will undertake the arduous business of rehearsing a play of this character with no guarantee of compensation for their time...
...22 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 The Love Duel IF MISS BARRYMORE objects to the repeated tributes which certain critics pay to her personality, as distinct from her acting, then it would be a fortunate day for her when she no longer chose a play such as The Love Duel (adapted by Zoe Akins from the original of Lili Hatvany) in which only her own charm and beauty can possibly lend substance to the most preposterous situations and the most absurd artificialities of plot, situation and character...
...Yet the prevailing mood, the mood indicated by a hundred little touches of character or irony, is on the side of exaggerated compassion and of that slow mental disease which we call self-pity...
...The players presenting it under the modest title of "a cooperative company," have elected, presumably for economy's sake, to use only the drapes and hangings found as standard equipment in many houses, and to indicate the change of scene merely by arrangement of furniture and properties, and by the drawing together or parting of the hangings...
...The proof of this lies in the completeness of the illusion created in spite of the scenic handicaps...
...But in the recurrent cycle of the day, we know that tomorrow's dawn may be even more enthralling than today's, and that twilight, sinking into the assuaging depth of night is the symbol of rest before new creation...
...It well deserves the enthusiastic endorsement it receives from the audience at the end...
...It is almost needless to add that the intelligent play-goer will be acutely interested...
...But I still need proof that mechanical device can, in a dialogue play, carry even.half the force of human beings speaking to you across the magic of the footlights...
...On the whole, the result ranks with the best in acting that more pretentious Broadway managers offer...
...Nothing like it would have been possible two years ago...
...She stands for the one small star of resurrection in the night of sorrow and despair...
...There is a vast field—above all in history— in which the movies can create illusion far more perfectly than the limited stage...
...Bulgakov...
...If Mr...
...They have not yet perfected the mechanics of dialogue to the point where it carries a satisfactory illusion, but what they have done is to perfect the technique of sound accompaniment to an extent that greatly enriches the sense of life...
...The three women, Barbara Bulgakov as the Sea-Gull, Dorothy Yockel as the unhappy daughter of the steward, and Helen Freeman as the dominating actress-mother, give performances of the highest calibre...
...There is the writer who has "arrived," and is still unable to call his soul his own because every impulse leads him to writing rather than to action and to reality...
...It is a far, far cry from the many beautiful moments in The Kingdom of God, even though that play, considered purely as drama, had many shortcomings...
...I had occasion recently to see The Divine Lady—for the most part a silent film...
...Although completely unlike Street Scene in every detail of setting and plot, it is none the less a play on the same order, picking up a dozen strands of individual existence and weaving them into a strangely compelling unity...
...Miss Barrymore is just enough of a person in herself to make you reasonably interested in what happens to her, and Louis Calhern has improved enough in his work to make his part of the concoction acceptable...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 1
