The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
~;64 T H E C O M M O N W E A L October 2, I929 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Sea Gull ANY consider Chekov's The Sea Gull his finest play. It was presented last year in a...
...You cannot easily be bored unless your own mood is momentarily hay-wire, or unless your feding toward the nineties is just one of polite repugnance...
...Robert Ross as Konstantin rounds out the ensemble with an intense and understanding portrayal of the young writer whose suicide closes the cycle of the play...
...Miss Le Gallienn,'s own very expert playing of the lovestarved Masha, the lovely Josephine Hutchinson's fragile portrait of Nina and Paul Leyssac's aged Sorin (the man who never did any of the things he wanted to do in life) are all excellent bits of acting, but their greatest value comes from their perfect modulation into the general tonal scheme...
...But even with these handicaps, this tragedy of selfcenteredness moved on with oppressive beauty and dear pity...
...Jerome Kern's music, in both orchestration and melody, without proclaiming itsdf his masterpiece, gives rich satisfaction...
...Robert Chisholm deserves mention for no other reason than that he has what is probably one of the finest high baritone voices on the musical stage today...
...As in an eclipse of the sun,' we see only the pale fires of the corona, so the plays of Chekov leave us with the false and dim illumination from spiritual forces mostly hidden...
...Drapes were used instead of scenery and the cast was distinctly uneven in quality of performance...
...and, having observed, knows how to sum up a whole race of men in a gesture...
...This year we have a full-scale production of the play at Miss Le Gallienne's theatre, and can begin to catch in full measure the overtones which make it a memorable piece in stage literature...
...She conspicuously lacks variety of method...
...Instead of bringing out the one true realism of life as experience shows it to us---that disintegration and resurrection are both forces constantly at work--it plays the chords of decay too loudly and too often, leaving the notes of rebirth to be carried weakly and tremulously...
...At Hammerstein's Theatre...
...If you love them for their outrageous costumes, their gingerbread exterior, their subtle dignity, their bouncing energy, their perfumed hypocrisies, their sweeping sentimentality and their relative simplicity, and if, above all, you love them for the particular expression of these qualities in New York (as against, let us say, Boston or Chicago) then you will find Sweet Adeline an evening of incomparable delight...
...Helen Morgan faces the handicap of a carefully built up reputation...
...64 T H E C O M M O N W E A L October 2, I929 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Sea Gull ANY consider Chekov's The Sea Gull his finest play...
...Ben-Ami's Trigorin is one of the best things I have ever seen him do, and Miss Maddern as the possessive and addle-pated actress-mother of the unhappy Konstantin gives real strength to what is certainly a key character of the play...
...In the present case, her work frequently becomes monotonous...
...If there were not half a dozen good reasons for thinking Sweet Adeline one of the best musical plays in many moons, Charles Butterworth would be a sufficient reason in himself...
...He is the Charlie Chaplin of the speaking stage: a small, pathetic figure with mouse-colored hair and round, vacant eyes, who can, with the most deadly serious face, utter the most complete nonsense in a way that stings with satire...
...His acting is selfconscious and stiff and gives the unfortunate impression of self-satisfaction...
...There are several others on the long list, but these five actually deserve a few words of honest di~ cussion--and could anything be rarer in musical plays nowadays ? Violet Carlson is the small clown type, quite delicious in her exuberance, but with a true comedy sense which knows how to break through the clowning for furtive moments to give a telling touch of sincerity...
...The same is equally true of a theatrical group...
...It was presented last year in a modest but convincing fashion by a group of co6perative players and brought a deserved round of applause from the critics...
...We sense at last the full purpose behind her long and arduous work in developing a company in which no one is a star, amd in which each contributes to a perfected ensemble...
...Behind the personality stands a true sense of authority, of being larger than the job in hand, of having such a complete command of the stage situation and of the audience that gestures, intonations and nuances at once become larger and more effective...
...Among the featured players in Sweet Adeline are Helen Morgan, Violet Carlson, Irene Franklin, Charles Butterworth and Robert Chisholm...
...The new members of the company, Jacob Ben-Ami and Merle Maddern, finding themselves at once in this atmosphere, drop naturally into the parts assigned to them, as two or three new players might be added to an orchestra...
...Miss Le Gallienne's production of the play, on the other hand, reaches something far beyond the hopes of even her devoted weU-wishers...
...Irene Franklin--grand person that she is---brings the needed touch of the older school, one which has so few competent successors among the youngsters...
...But that is not the whole story of the school I refer to...
...Behind the mask of dumbness is an intelligence that observes with merciless acumen...
...Such delicious effects as Miss Le Gallienne obtained last year in The Lady from Alfaqueque, or the poignancy which she wrings from even the most trivial moments of The Sea Gull are not the result of inspired direction but of infinite pains and constant readjustment of human values among a group of actors constantly playing together...
...You can say---quite meaninglessly--that Miss Franklin has abundant personality...
...They are unhurried, and for that reason never slow...
...As we find so frequently in the work of supposedly great realists, The Sea Gull suffers from a declining spiritual tempo...
...It is a masterly description of a moment, but not a masterly comment on llfe in its impassioned *trivings...
...Every production detail has been lavishly provided, and several individual performances are rare indeed...
...She is thoroughly interesting only in the plaintive songs under spotlight when she can draw down her mouth until the lips tremble, and make you believe that of all living beings she is the most bravely unhappy...
...The Sea Gull fails equally to carry the full interplay of spiritual light and shadow in human lives...
...Probably the supreme artist of the lot is Charles Butterworth...
...Musicians know that it takes two to three years to develop a true ensemble even within a chamber-music quartette...
...But you forgive him this and more when he sings...
...A moment of eclipse is real, without question, but not in the universal sense that it carries the major truths of light and darkness in the physical world...
...Artists of this school know how to time their effects perfectly simply because they are willing to take time...
...At the Civic Repertory Theatre...
...Sweet Adeline HETHER or not you join the general chorus of eager acclaim for Sweet Adeline, Arthur Hammerstein's musical romance of the gay nineties, depends entirely on your attitude toward the last days of the last century...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 22
