The Play
Skinncr, Richard Dana
616 THE COMMONWEAL October 16, x929 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER .4 Hundred Years Old LMOST any play by the Quintero brothers----especially in Granville Barker...
...But I venture to believe, without having read all the works of these authors, that no one of their plays catches the light from more facets of human vagary than A Hundred Years Old, in which Otis Skinner is now appearing as the centenarian...
...Like the good nurse attending Dombey's new offspring, we do not presume to state facts as truths, "but merely offer them as mild suggestions...
...It was all so simple --merely another link in the evolutionary chain of democracies...
...He stands upon its summit and surveys those who would never have been were it not for him...
...Deadly poisons can be taken in such minute doses that for a time they seem to have no harmful effect...
...It comes unexpectedly in the romance between Trino and Currita---one of the shyest and tenderest breaths of romance a poet could devise...
...Candle-Light HOSE who were politely bored by A Hundred Years Old will probably find the same delight in Gertrude Lawrence's new starring medium---Candle-Light by Siegfried Geyer ---that they found in Strictly Dishonorable and half a dozen other comedies which play fast and loose with human behavior...
...And the press of this country, largely supported by Catholics in our metropolitan centres, treated us as though we were not...
...For this play gives you, with consummate skill, the meeting of youth and great age at that very moment when each seems to itself the centre of existence...
...It is a delicious contrast, not too obviously indicated, but there before you in all that it whispers of the life miracle...
...True, we can't prevent them from thus sitting...
...Of all the observable facts in psychology (whether classic or modern) this one admits of about as little discussion as any...
...The general irresponsibility of our present age is largly due to immaturity of observation...
...Papa Juan may have forty descendants, but Trino has eight great-grandparents, of whom Papa Juan is but one...
...Yes---he is just a bit of an agnostic, without the full flame of faith that shines from little Currita's eyes, but wise enough in his faint scepticism to encourage faith in others and to live as God would have him...
...And, needless to say, they are sitting in perpetual judgment on the thoughts, words and deeds of their Catholic fellow-citizens...
...Quarrels, jealousies, long-standing feuds, ugly puritanism, all raise their heads to thwart him...
...Plays that cater to this irresponsibility through the dramatic fiction that everything always turns out well are simply dishonest and hypocritical...
...But what we can do now and then is to think and act as though this court were in recess occasionally...
...One even suspects that his faith, beneath his words, is strong indeed, with something of that quality of those who believe without seeing~ and who demand no signs and wonders beyond the wonder of life itself...
...COMMUNICATIONS AGGRESSIVE DEFENSE AGAIN Reading, Mass...
...Probably the most marked characteristic of this unfortunate complex is the defensive attitude which we are eternally assuming-ready at the slightest provocation to apologize when apologies are certainly not in order...
...Its basic idea is wrong...
...Certainly not...
...Like the others of its kind, Candle Light is exceedingly well written, bespattered with many delightful epigrams and crowded with thinly veiled adaptations of farcical stock situations...
...O the Editor :--To assert that the Catholic population of this country is a wofully insignificant factor in the political and social life of this country, is to state a truism---mosscovered with age...
...They pursue the even tenor of their ways----aping and imitating and following--instead of originating and molding public opinion...
...Perhaps our crowning achievement in the field of seIf-effacement or debasement was our calm and unperturbed attitude during the recent Mexican persecution...
...The youthful egotism of the scion matched against the patriarch the one who looks up to what he has received and the one who looks down upon all that he has given...
...At Maxine Elliott's Theatre...
...While this persecution was in full swing, Catholics as a body in this country, with a few notable exceptions (and even these exceptions were duly apologized for and explained away) dared not make any outward demonstration of their inward feelings in the matter...
...It colored, twisted, distorted and suppressed the really vital...
...Otis Skinner's artistry has never shone more brightly than in his portrait of Papa Juan...
...The acting is superlatively adept and thus you have a spun-sugar coating for all those things which, if we lived in an honest and forthright world, would be immediately recognized as moral irresponsibility...
...For, like it or not, in most instances, American non-Catholics constitute the court of last appeal in our judgment on such matters...
...For the rest, the play has simple enough elements...
...The best you can say is that the Scandals do not sail under false colors and are quite frankly vulgar...
...It is no easy task for Papa Juan to gather his brood about him in peace and harmony...
...It has always held the magic power of re-creation, and as each new generation has sensed the eternal magic, Papa Juan has drawn from their discovery new life and strength for himself...
...Fred Tiden as the dyspeptic Evaristo, Octavia Kenmore as the bitter-tongued Dofia Filomena and Mary Howard as the forlorn little Eulalia are all exceptionally deft in their interpretations...
...Then, etched sharply against the centenarian, you have young Trino, his great-grandson, to whom life is as the gathering of the winds of time, centering in his own delightful person something of the curious nature of everyone whose life has poured forth to make his own...
...On his hundredth birthday, there is but one thing he still seeks of life itself, and that is another glimmer of the eternal impulse...
...Undoubtedly we were afraid that our IOO-percent Americanism might be questioned, or challenged, by our non-Catholic friends...
...616 THE COMMONWEAL October 16, x929 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER .4 Hundred Years Old LMOST any play by the Quintero brothers----especially in Granville Barker translation--provides enough of the simple fibre of life to beguile the attention and sympathy of any but the most bored sophisticates...
...It ranks with his Falstaff as one of the few masterpieces of the modern stage...
...A dishonest statement repeated often enough is sure to find believers in the end --and so the work of destruction by attrition goes on...
...For all his experienced wisdom, his maturity breaks down into the harmless egotism of the patriarch...
...The mere repetition of this bald truth, however, disturbs the philosophical composure and mental selfcomplacency of many of our "foremost laymen," whose "broadmindedness" is of such a queer admixture that their intellectual expansiveness simply cannot tolerate their rebellious brethren (impertinent atoms...
...But that does not alter the fact that they are poisons, and that if the doses are repeated often enough they will bring if not a final catastrophe at least a definite injury...
...That Catholics in general, for some unknown reason, seem to be unmistakably a~icted with what is popularly known as an inferiority complex scarcely seems a debatable point...
...And if and when our "mild suggestions" are unceremoniously brushed aside, as is usually the case, we retire again into our shells seriously debating the wisdom of our impertinence...
...We do not take the trouble to trace the links between cause and effect, between light-hearted defiance of natural laws and the tragic results in broken families, neurotic children and increasing mental disease...
...It is a curious, but perfectly obvious, fact that ideas tend to realize themselves in action...
...Was it not a perfectly natural thing in this enlightened age...
...This play, by its very theme and the treatment of that theme, tries to cut into the exact centre of why we live and love---but in terms so fragile, so delicately human and humane that you might easily mistake it, as at least one newspaper critic seems to have done, for a mere human-interest portrait of Spanish village types...
...At the Apollo Theatre...
...If you do make such a mistake, please lay the fault to your own overstrained nerves and the brash influence of the many recent plays you have seen, but do not fail, at least in retrospect, to think of the moments when A Hundred Years Old has laid bare, though always in beauty, some of the springs of your own existence and of those who will come after you...
...A lavish scenic display, music of a fair order for this type of review, a generous dosage of off-color material and a few numbers of merit...
...I say this as advance notice of a much lengthier rer next week, in which, I hope, there will be a chance to show the turn of the times in the modern theatre and the response to it by modern audiences...
...The element of dishonesty also enters in when we come to appraising this particular type of light comedymagain without reference to degree...
...Would we allow Rome to run our government...
...Whether we take the epidemics of certain types of suicides or murders, or whether we look into broader fields of intimate human behavior, we invariably find that an idea, if suggested under proper conditions of attention on the listener's part, produces at least a tendency toward corresponding action, especially if it is made to appear pleasant and easy of fulfilment and without unpleasant consequences...
...who now and then speak out of turn, as it were...
...Who knows but that, if they became conscious of the fact that they were being ignored, they might not take themselves so seriously...
...The point is not the degree to which a given presentation of an idea is destructive, but the simple fact that it is destructive...
...American Catholics dared not raise their voices, while in far-off Europe public mass meetings were held to protest against the inhuman and unnatural acts of the Calhs r6gime...
...The supporting cast is excellent, so that the production can be criticized only for the general slowness of certain scenes permitted by James Whale, the director...
...Always, in the Quinteros' writings, you will find beneath the simplest phrases a keen perception of those emotional impulses which govern by far the largest part of mankind, and so win for themselves the strength of universals---the gentle nostalgia which leads the wanderer across wide continents to the place of his birth, the egotism of the born poet whose sufferings are still largely mental and imaginative, the clinging to one's native soil, the impulse to create new life and the many molds of romance into which it is poured...
...On and on life has roiled for him, but never in dull monotony...
...A little pageant of life has passed before you, with its hopes, its loves, its meannesses, its hints of tragedy, its failings both of youth and age, its faith and partial doubt, and all imbued with richness by the universal rhythm of creation it betrays...
...They are a product of one extreme of the time, just as A Hundred Years Old and Many Waters and Sweet Adeline reflect the reaction setting in at the other extreme...
...Moreover, the precise reason, in a given instance, for our apologetic tone and behavior is usually a little beyond our mental purview...
...George Ighite' s Scandals HE tenth birthday of George White's Scandals finds the mixture much the same as ever...
...But, while we were quietness itself on the Mexican situation (from a false sense of propriety) our non-Catholic brethren were extremely loquacious about the matter...
...Youth in such terms does exist, but it needs such a play as A Hundred Years Old, and such fresh and spontaneous acting as Miss Arbenz and Mr...
...Outward intensity, particularly in many modern plays, is merely a cover for absence of inner understanding...
...Broadly speaking, then, a play which suggests through the personal charm of its characters, through its superficially amusing situations and through the easy and happy solution of all its situations that moral laxity is a convenient and delightful mode of life exerts a destructive tendency...
...It was dearly explained to the masses in this country that Mexico was but striking the blow which would eventually liberate her from the bondage of Rome...
...At the Lyceum Theatre...
...At the Empire Theatre...
...Of course...
...Many Waters HIS play, which comes to us after a long and successful run in London, is one of the most enthralling bits of modern romanticism of many seasons...
...This, perhaps, makes a few side remarks on the matter of ideas in plays fall apropos...
...There are the poor relatives and the rich, the poets and the communists, the lovable and the pestiferous, the whole lot of them coaxed, implored, humored into temporary accord for the one great occasion--and mostly by Papa Juan himself, no decrepit figure, but a robust old oak whose secret, if he has any, has been "to live as if there were a God...
...October 16, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 617 Every time you tell the truth about one of these "charming" comedies, you find a dozen angry persons who call you a prude or deplore your lack of sophistication...
...Albright give us, to make us recognize and greet it with a shout of joy...
...To old Papa Juan, about to celebrate his hundredth birthday with three succeeding generations surrounding him, life takes the aspect of a high mountain...
...But two of the loveliest pastels seen in many days are provided by Mary Arbenz as Currita and Hardie Albright as the engaging Trino...
...The outward emotional range of the play is slight...
...But that is not the point...
...Naturally no person with common sense would say that this or that single play is going to drive adults from the theatre bent upon a life of intrigue and illicit amours...
...There is, for .example, Gabriele, whose child has no recognized fathermand it ~s not until Papa Juan asks about the sins of those who marry and never bring children into the world that he begins to turn the tide of charity toward her...
...At the close of the great day, with the music of guitars drifting in from the grounds without, Papa Juan is at last content...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 24
