The Play

...That much is plain...

...At the Longacre Theatre...

...On the human side, the issue is definite enough...

...But the undefined off-stage needs of a suffering humanity do not supply her with an adequate foil, nor with a sufficient motive for final repentance and conversion...

...I feel certain that a reasoned appeal coming to managers from high authority, and resting the case on courteous instinct alone would go far to wipe out the abuse...

...It has only one fault (shared with four-fifths of the current plays) and that is the use of blasphemous expressions...

...October 9, x929 THE COMMONWEAL 59 x world to come, she will not find herself at liberty to indulge in the pleasing pastime of flinging flowers at her equally selfwilled companions, until she has, at least, offered a very humble apology to those Pontiffs whose commands she flouted, and perhaps performed some little penance, to show she really feels her unworthiness, instead of merely singing the words, which is quite a different matter...

...The author's own direction seems largely to blame for the exaggerations which occasionally break the illusion so earnestly built up by Mr...

...But in the development of the story, it manages to play upon every infantile audience instinct looking for and expecting "the worst," and supplies enough in the way of intimate disrobing scenes and locked bedrooms to satisfy the constant frequenter of so-called French farce...

...The writing and construction are both excellent...

...An issue is drawn between his wife and his work of reform...

...also the fact that his son, when he inherits his father's fortune, refuses to be party to many of the schemes by which his father dominated the city and even controlled legislation in Washington...

...This setting and these effects, designed and painted by Cirker and Robins, have a vast deal to do with the final result, but not more than Mr...

...even children soon come to love it...

...But it comes alarmingly close to coincidence with known facts--with unsolved murder mysteries, with wide-open and protected speakeasies, with criminal treasure chests of amazing resource and with a political cynicism that staggers the intellect...

...With bleeding feet and bowed backs they plodded on, and that is perhaps one of the reasons that we never acquired a cultivated taste in Church music...

...You may think, when you come out of the theatre, that there is not a public official left who is not the beneficiary of liquor corruption and its partner, murder...

...Only it is not farce, and deals with real emotions...

...At the Avon Theatre...

...Perhaps Mrs...

...He told me to stand out of the way," replied the boy proudly...

...Subway Express, written by Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison, and staged, with an exceptionally competent cast, by Chester Erskine, is the kind of play that makes its novelty serve a genuine dramatic purpose (as distinct from novelty for its own sake) and that mixes all its elements of humor, horror and suspense with an almost infallible sense of fine theatre...

...It creates and maintains its illusion throughout...

...I am not sure that the old Irish woman wasn't right who said that it seemed to her that singing at all during Mass was in shocking bad taste...

...Mary Nash, who is always a very capable actress, makes the temptation of Roy Hammerman quite understandable and definite...

...Could Mrs...

...But he knows whereof he writes...

...He has clone it in terms of a swift and tense melodrama whose scenes are set in a restaurant speakeasy...

...We must remember that even the drama of Roman martyrdom generally involved a concrete expression of the choice to be made--the chance to obtain release by offering incense to the Roman gods...

...Virtue and villainy, good thoughts and bad, must both be objectified in the theatre, symbolized in such a way that opposing forces meet on similar ground and in similar terms...

...In spite of my battered condition I still have a conviction that we may expect "good taste" from the majority of the people...

...We are only like rather bad children, quite outspoken in our Father's house, where we are very much at home and sure that we love its glory...

...The singing of plain-chant would by no means interfere with the singing of the vernacular hymns, deservedly dear to most of us...

...Still I raise my head, neatly bandaged of course, to say that I got something out of it anyway...

...In this sense, if you want to stretch a point, it follows the arrow of a moral pointer...

...A man is murdered before your eyes...

...In dialogue and characterization, the play is almost on the level of Philip Barry's best work...

...Clark Gable as the host, accused of the murder due to a practical joke of his own, Elaine Temple as a helpful sea captain's daughter, and Mary Fowler as the reckTHE COMMONWEAL October 9, x929 less wife whose philanderings cause the tragedy, all do excellent work...

...Good theatre usually demands that a general condition be given a concrete form, that if the hero is to make a sacrifice, it shall be for some tangible motive rather than for a general ideal which is none too dearly outlined...

...Hielscher but attend one of the great national pilgrimages at Lourdes, she might hear the plain-chant sung to perfection, together with a wonderful variety of vernacular hymns...

...A setting by Willy Pogany serves the pictorial illusion splendidly...

...The passion for realism seems to overlook the simple fact that these expressions are offensive to many in a way that has nothing to do with prudishness but a great deal to do with courtesy, finer feelings and reverence for the religious instincts of others...

...David and his singers might be astonished and perhaps disedified at the Twelfth Mass, even when well rendered...

...Sam Hammerman's trained nurse, Janet Hale (Mary Nash) is ambitious and largely of one mind with Sam as to handling realities...

...Hielscher herself, might become one of its foremost promoters, were she willing to look into it a little...

...No tangible issue is placed before the son, and for this reason his heroics ring a bit hollow...

...It only confirms a point I have tried frequently to make in this department --that a dozen tragedies, handling the deeper problems of life in their large implications and with bold language, are far less insidious, lumped together, than any one of half a dozen light comedies of recent seasons which feed the public surface thrills in sugar-coated packages...

...HELI~N HUGHES HII~LSeHI/R...

...Hawk Island ONTINUING the inventory of crime, Hawk Island, by Howard Irving Young, presents a murder on a lonely island off the New England coast during a house party at which a writer of detective fiction is the chief guest...

...At the Ambassador Theatre...

...I was just having a little fun for myself and the rest of us who are ignorant in the matter of music, and behold what has happened to me l It was never a steam-roller that squashed and mangled me like this--it must have been a tractor with lugs...

...He choses his work, and persists in it until Janet at last gives in and is convinced that she must work with him, cost what it may...

...Unlike the author of A Strong Man's House, Mr...

...I myself have heard singing in the cathedral in Florence which the sons of Core might not have approved of as a form of worship...

...As a background to all this, you have the mechanical perfection of a setting which not only gives you the realistic interior of a subway car, but provides all the illusion of motion, of jolting halts, of stops at stations and of resumed pace...

...A police detective boards the train, and, as it speeds on its way uptown, begins to unravel the amazing events...

...We of the people are liberal, and if anyone wants to express their religious feelings in song, far be it from us to cramp their style...

...Now when people speak of Theodore Maynard, I will say: "A clever fellow...

...Since Catholics have been told plainly and repeatedly just what they should sing, would it not express a more loyal attitude to ask, "How shall the faithful learn to sing plainchant, since they have been told it is their duty to sing it...

...To have Roy torn between his wife and a general "cause" is as ineffective as a battle between a visible prize-fighter and an invisible radio orator...

...In this case the theme could be stated as the conversion of a rou6 in the presence of comparative innocence...

...But Roy prefers fighting local corruption to following the advice of his wife...

...The entire action of Subway Express takes place in a New York north-bound subway car...

...Dunning writes as a crusader...

...Gable and Miss Fowler and Joseph Granby...

...It might hold water as a distinctly effective play if the motivations of its most important scenes did not depend on these same generalities...

...But it is a tense and mysterious situation for the characters in the play...

...might we not paraphrase that: "IUiterati non habent obedientiara...

...For good measure he has injected some biting satire directed at the collusion between civic betterment forces and the new prohibition underworld...

...But that does not alter an honest appraisal of the ultimate nature and intention of the play...

...The language is that of most modern realism (see above) but the situations of the play, though frank, are merely honest in relation to the whole problem which the play attacks...

...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Subway Express HE best constructed, the most ingenious and the most novel murder mystery of this season, or of many seasons for that matter, is now on exhibition under the sponsorship of Edward A. Blatt...

...After the old man's death, they marry...

...We know no other home for our people did not take a "detour" when the roads became rough down through the centuries...

...I had a controversy with him once--" this rather reminiscently...

...1 Strong Man's House EE WILSON DODD'S new play, in which Mary Nash is starring, suffers primarily from an overloading in generalities about political and economic corruption in a mythical mid-western town...

...It is distinctly above the average in construction and suffers chiefly from overexaggeration in the attempted comedy relief...

...There are many moments when the play takes on the hue of reality and force...

...Certainly the Church ordains silence for the most solemn part...

...he was asked...

...Never do you lose the sense of the crowd and the interplay of emotions under stress, with minor characters touched off here and there in instantaneously revealing lines and actions...

...Strictly Dishonorable HE theme of this light and deftly written comedy by Preston Sturges is that of an incipient love affair, "strictly dishonorable" in intentions on both sides, which ends in a strictly honorable proposal and acceptance of marriage after the man in the case realizes, before it is too late, that he is dealing with an impulsive child...

...I got my inspiration for this from the story of a boy who boasted that the king had spoken to him once...

...On the whole, Strictly Dishonorable is an excellent example of the way in which the telling of a story is frequently of far more importance to its ultimate effect than the theme...

...In the actual telling, the theme becomes a detailed account of seduction with the logical climax cut out to circumvent the censors (whoever they are...

...The task of the theatre isto make the universal apparent in the concrete...

...Sweet Land of Liberty NE of the authors of Broadway, Philip Dunning, has done a pretty thorough job in exposing (with pardonable exaggeration) the dank trail of civic corruption, as followed since the advent of prohibition...

...The comedies are unreal, insincere either in theme or the telling of it, and cater directly to infantile emotions and vicarious thrills...

...The obedient minority who have already tried to master it, have been abundantly rewarded...

...Thirty or forty people were in the car at the time...

...What did he say...

...But we are never favored with any definite illustrations of this corruption...

...It is not a mystery play, since the audience knows everything that happens...

...With Sam's connivance, she makes Roy Hammerman fall in love with her...

...Other people, other manners...

...At the Liberty Theatre...

...E. VON RYCKEN WILSON...

...Lactantius is quoted as saying, "Literati non habent fidem...

...A cultivated taste is something else again, and it is not always good...

...Nothing disagreeable is injected without good and sufficient reason...

...Yet you not only fail to see who murdered him, but discover in time that he was not murdered by the shot you saw fired but in another way and several minutes before the shot itself...

...It is a matter that can be remedied in half a minute and with one blue pencil--which makes the nature of the fault all the more blatant...

...On the one side, then, we have a very vital and definite fact--Janet--and on the other nothing more definite than dark hints about "the Senator" and sundry schemes which seem to have the general purpose of oppressing mankind...

...Jack Lee as the murdered man does perhaps the most sensational bit of acting seen in a long time--and for a reason you can appreciate only after seeing the play and knowing its strange secret...

...The tragedies are generally sincere, cerebral in their expression and inexorably logical in their development...

...Erskine's masterly stage direction of the crowds, nor than the acting of a gigantic cast, led by Edward Pawley, Dorothy Peterson and Edward Ellis...

...The dying Sam Hammerman has been the centre of considable corrupt activity...

...The two forces are not comparable, in strictly theatrical terms...

...Mankato, Minn...

...Dunning has objectified every force at work and every situation into which the characters are thrown...

...I am not singling out Subway Express for this comment, but intend it for all plays indulging in the same habit...

...As to being "unliturgical people" that is not what ails us at all...

...This weakness of Mr...

...Dodd's play is thus fundamental...

...O the Editor :--"I did but taste a little honey on the end of the rod that was in my hand and now I must die...

...Probably that is an overdrawn conclusion...

...To make the play seem real, Roy would have to have some objective form of corruption to engage his sympathies---the results of oppression, for example, as summed up in a family threatened with extinction because of refusing to work for the political machine...