The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
644 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, I929 when he was a boy, and how he and his brother netted them in the rye lot at the edge of the woods. They would cut a slender hardwood sapling forty feet...
...I have little doubt that my grandfather's great-grandfather used one like it as a boy in England before he sailed across the salt water to these New England shores...
...How else can one describe a play which takes two very ordinary lives and gives them that curious illumination which comes only from the most intimate picture of what they have passed through together...
...Cohan as an underworld gambling master, the proprietor of a fashionable joint...
...For the rest, however, Gambling makes a pretty good stage yarn, helped out in no small measure by good acting including that of Mr...
...They would cut a slender hardwood sapling forty feet long, bend it into the form of a half-circle, and make it fast flat on the ground...
...Plays such as this should go far to break the spell of brash hokum which has recently passed for authentic realism...
...Such literary art is rare beyond price...
...Cohan himself in the central r61e...
...The form in which the story is told is simple enough...
...The difficulty lies in showing why and how they are one, and that is why only great art can bring them to real ~usion...
...No romance...
...Cohan in acting honors...
...As I had not used a gun long enough to count on making a successful flying shot, I waited and waited, crouching at the border of the sedge vainly trying to get a glimpse of the bird which was continually changing its position, but would not come in sight...
...In general, it is free from any of the sophisticated suggestiveness which pervades so many plays of the moment dealing with similar subjects...
...No urge toward finer things...
...Yet there is, in the exaggeration of the mother's type and hardness, a slightly false note which the play never quite overcomes...
...She is caught unaware in a storm of worship for one of the men working on the place-with results which, during later acts, are set forth in unsparing detail...
...After the last hay load was in the barn I took my gun--a short-barreled muzzle-loader which had a way of scattering the charge better suited to close range than for longer shots...
...For in the trials, hopes and tragedies of this couple, you find one thing magnificently unshaken and rising always stronger--the mute understanding and love that unites them, unsung, almost unrealized, yet worthy of a poet whose instrument is strung with the chords of life itself...
...His women characters either border on muslcal-comedy sweetness or have a tang as hard as rock salt...
...It is not an easy play to give well, and the results achieved only serve to point more strongly than ever toward the advantages of the repertory system, so excellently exemplified in Fourteenth Street, as a means of attaining perfect ensemble...
...News comes in the first act that his ward, whom he has tried to keep far from his own familiar surroundings, has been murdered...
...so my word must stand or fall as the credulity of the reader shall determine...
...She has been given the difficult part of a woman with a caustic tongue and heavily calculating disposition--quite different from such a type as she played in The Wisdom Tooth...
...She caught a few grasshoppers and then started out across the pasture on a bird hunt, but quickly returned pursued by an angry mob of king birds, blackbirds and swallows...
...Not one field-mouse had run out from beneath the haycocks as they were pitched onto the rack...
...The situation is so far from universal in the present day and in this country that it can be accepted only within its own confines...
...An experience of my own while hunting may strike the reader as hardly believable...
...Starved lives...
...Gambling rates in the upper brackets among the many mystery plays now on Broadway--although the spectator has lost interest in the detection of the murderer long before the last act, in his absorption in the characters themselves...
...644 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, I929 when he was a boy, and how he and his brother netted them in the rye lot at the edge of the woods...
...As they leave, the manager looks at the playwright, as who should say, "there you are," and the playwright agrees...
...It may be only the conquest of character, of soul, rising above the defeat of every material effort...
...This time we have Mr...
...Her seventeen-year-old daughter has been brought up in a state of unsuspecting innocence which only such an atmosphere could foster...
...This is true even of his latest mystery play, Gambling, in which the most interesting feminine character he has drawn for a long time commands attention chiefly through her hard-boiled tactics and philosophy...
...What Monckton Hoffe has not told us in his deeply etched lines, Mr...
...Woodchucks and crows kept persistently out of range that afternoon, and I hesitated to kill blackbirds or squirrels in the summertime...
...Here is a play, if ever there was one, which tells its own story with the acme of restraint, as forthright and simple as the lives it portrays, and as tender and compassionate as truth itself...
...There is, in the finest art, no line between romance and realism...
...My little sparrowhawk Cleopatra had been calling all day for fresh meat...
...We find ourselves in the atmosphere of one of those narrow provincial French towns toward the end of the nineteenth century-narrow not so much in the moral sense as in the pressure of public opinion, the minuteness of the interests of its inhabitants and the impossibility of escaping watching neighborly eyes...
...The subject-matter of the play is not particularly cheerful...
...Grain was then scattered for bait, and with a string fastened to the trigger the boys lay in hiding in the bushes, until down from the sky darted wild pigeons by the thousand, crowding and fluttering thicker and thicker and covering every inch of the ground in their eagerness to get the bait...
...nor did she venture on another bird hunt alone after that for weeks...
...But of one thing there is no doubt--that in the acting of the entire company, and of Josephine Hutchinson in particular as the girl, you will encounter a perfect expression of stage ensemble, of powerful restraint and of tender nuance, rarely to be matched...
...It was the busy haying season and Cleopatra had ridden out into the field load after load, perched on the tall stake at the front of the hay-rack...
...The rest of the play concerns his own persistent and tenacious efforts to solve the crime, only to discover a deeper cause than ever for sorrow when the full circumstances preceding her death are brought to light...
...It needs only the eye of the great artist, of the man who penetrates beneath detail to stark truth, to find struggle as the most obvious realism, the one thing never absent from life...
...such acting comes but a few times in a stage generation...
...No imagination...
...But this is only Monckton Hoffe's way of opening up to you a charmed secret--the real truth about the lives of this middle-aged couple...
...The efforts of Madame Bourrat to conceal the advent and birth of her daughter's child, and, after its death, to find someone willing to marry the girl herself, form the substance of the play--a narrative of bitter cruelty and of wide-eyed terror...
...The Bourrat household in particular is a dark confine, completely dominated by Madame Bourrat and her pride in family and appearances...
...Then the string was pulled, and the sapling, released from its tension, snapped to its original position carrying one edge of the net along with it, and ensnaring perhaps a hundred pigeons, while the others, rising in air, disappeared beyond the tree-tops...
...Very ordinary people indeed...
...But to catch the least part of its richer and deeper truths, one must take it in its poignant and at times heartrending entirety, and abandon one's self to an understanding of those unspoken things which batter and caress, shake the foundations of one's being and then softly mold the wreckage into what we lightly call character--and know inwardly to be the flame of spirit...
...He is not a great playwright, and never will be, for the simple reason that he cannot, for the life of him, draw the portrait of a sympathetic woman without making her unbelievably sentimental...
...It is, in essence, a study of conflicting maternal instincts, with many exceedingly tender scenes...
...At the Civic Repertory Theatre...
...The butcher's cart passed our place only once a week, and as we used no ice then, the problem of keeping her supplied was difficult, for she would go hungry rather than taste meat that had hung long enough to suit the human taste...
...Next the bow of sapling was lifted and bent over and caught beneath a trigger where the pegs held the other edge of the net in place...
...Her characterization in the present instance is one of the most complete of its kind I have ever seen...
...Naturally the play suffers from the particularity of the circumstances...
...They would like very much to see The Cinderella Princess--one of three plays the manager then has running--would prefer it, in fact, to another play of serious realism...
...We do not need to be told that here is romance...
...But to fuse the realism of life with the romance of the spirit, there must be the faith that moves mountalns--even if that faith should be found to lie only in the hearts of a humble English building contractor and his wife...
...If the obstacles are poverty, sickness, death, the struggle is all the greater because the obstacles are more inescapable and not of deliberate choice...
...In Goodrich's Natural History, published in 1876, an illustration shows a net exactly similar to this, set on the bank of an English stream and tended by two English boys...
...A playwright and a manager are discussing theatre audiences, with the inevitable conclusion that they are made up of hopelessly commonplace people, who have never known romance in their own lives, and so seek through the theatre a species of vicarious romance with which to brighten their existence...
...The trappings matter little...
...At last I raised my gun, aiming at the sound, until it seemed to come to my ears right along the gun barrel...
...Then I fired, and wading out among the rushes, keeping track along the line of shot-punctured reeds, picked up my water-fowl and carried it home to my hungry little falcon...
...The only witnesses of my shot were the redwlnged blackbirds and dragon-flies...
...Truex and Miss Vanne tell us in gestures of muted eloquence...
...Cohan has given her...
...Your feeling about it will depend largely on whether you care for such material in the theatre...
...Many Waters breathes the spirit of an artist, and holds you inexorably with the romance that knows neither time nor place, circumstance nor limitation, seeking only human understanding...
...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Many Waters HERE are moments, it is true, when the American presentation of Monckton Hoffe's play, Many Waters, verges on that softer sentimentality which ultimately obscures deeper feelings...
...Lighting on the broad rim of my straw hat, she scrambled round and round it, chattering with excitement, then took refuge beneath it, perched on my shoulder until the crowd of her pursuers had scattered...
...No indeed...
...It is unsparingly frank in its discussions and situation, but not in the salacious manner...
...At the Fulton Theatre...
...As the two are talking, a middle-aged couple come to see the manager to arrange about leasing him their home for the summer...
...At Maxine Elliott's Theatre...
...Your sympathy is directed entirely toward her growing maternal love and the pity of the ignorance which her mother imposes on her to the last...
...There .is plenty of chance for the good old Cohan brand of pathos...
...Mary Philips shares with Mr...
...They are one...
...Scene by scene you are told of the passing magic--of their accidental meeting in the park during a thunder shower, of their swift and sudden love, of their mute and frightened marriage before a magistrate, with two scrubwomen as witnesses, of their rise to a moderate livelihood, o.f the daughter in their lives who has loved too soon and in a way forbidden, of her death in childbirth just as bankruptcy is facing her father, of the irony of his trial when he is reprimanded for spending too much on the education of his daughter, now dead, of the slow and painful return to a modest income with a little house in the country--the very house now about to be leased to the scornful manager...
...At last I heard a water-rail crying among the rushes...
...The spirit in which the battle is waged measures the degree of romance, not the ground on which it is fought nor the costumes worn nor the elegance and grace of the weapons used...
...The net was fastened at one edge along the sapling, and the other pegged down with forked sticks...
...Mademoiselle Bourrat T MISS LE GALLIENNE'S, down on Fourteenth Street, they have followed up their amazingly sensitive performance of The Sea-gull with an equally adept rendering of Claude Anet's Mademoiselle Bourrat...
...When the manager asks them some pointed questions about their lives, they laughingly disclaim anything faintly resembling romance...
...The sentimentality I spoke of does not come in the writing of Monckton Hoffe, nor in the superlatively sensitive acting of Ernest Truex as the husband and Marda Vanne as the wife...
...Theirs have been very ordinary and simple lives...
...Gambling EORGE M. COHAN has only to set his mind to it to make you realize what amazing resourcefulness he commands...
...Yes--an amazingly simple story, simply told, but with a fidelity to emotional values that almost sets you quivering, does, in fact, force you to a tension relieved only by the silent growth of an unquenchable flame...
...It comes merely in certain details of presentation, in incidental October 23, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 645 music and in the captions of certain scenes which unhappily endeavor to translate for the audience that which needs no translation...
...To complete his romance from this raw stuff, he has to find the spirit of conquest in some human breast--no more and no less...
...The true essence of romance is struggle and conquest...
...But the season for marsh birds opened July I5 in those days, so I followed the water course in the hope of getting a shot...
...That should be enough...
...Let me make it plain that there is no obvious attempt to glorify the girl's love for the gardener...
...No ancient tale of knights in armor can win the glamour of romance unless it is keyed to struggle and conquest--for that is the story of life itself, a true and sometimes even desperate realism...
...in it a gesture and a glance are quite as full of meaning as even the pungent lines Mr...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 25
