The Play

...And for hearing the song, we must thank Gilbert Miller...

...Miss Le Gallienne's group at the Civic Repertory has, in fact, done far better than the Guild in the choice of plays, offering a well-varied selection from all countries and times...

...It is the turmoil of congestion and the struggle of individuals to achieve inner freedom in a whirlpool...

...But in the early season he went "contemporary" and ignored universal values in the production of that lugubrious and unilluminated piece called Machinal...

...Men rarely know when death lies just ahead of them, and Journey's End had little meaning apart from this special knowledge of its characters...

...They provoke some thought about the mental capacity of managers, and what is likely to happen to our swollen theatrical industry when that capacity is finally matched against aggressive and intelligent competition...

...Someone once said that the stage was a profession for good actresses but only for the finest actors—meaning, I suppose, that only men of true artistry can hope to emerge from the mass sufficiently to command genuine respect...

...Of all of O'Neill's recent plays, Dynamo is the most superficial and confused in thought, and the least authentic in feeling...

...She almost made that faltering play called Flight seem credible and important...

...But of all the new comedies, only one had a flavor of classic universality and that was the homely bit called Kibitzer...

...Its resources in casting have saved several of its productions from complete fiasco, but surely one can find nothing in Man's Estate, Caprice, The Camel through the Needle's Eye or even in a thin translation and adaptation of Faust to stir enthusiasm or imagination...

...Certainly the Theatre Guild has collapsed miserably...

...One little comedy, Jonesy, combined swift entertainment with the pleasant thought that youth and age have a real meeting ground...

...Blanche Yurka, in her Ibsen season, gave New York a long-awaited chance to appraise her splendid range, but she was about the only actress of established position to add distinctly to a previous reputation...

...It is only at the Theatre Guild or at Miss Le Gallienne's theatre that we get a chance to see the same actors in a wide variety of roles...

...Perhaps the most notable emergence of a fine talent is in the case of Miriam Hopkins (promptly snapped up by the Guild) who has graduated from the featherbrained flapper of An American Tragedy into work of genuine distinction...

...It would have stiff competition under the theatrical conditions we are supposing a decade from now...

...The old men of Athens could undoubtedly see the same thing as they looked down from the Acropolis...

...Still, in spite of finding Holiday one of the most delightful comedies of the year, one must admit that it might conceivably be as good on the talking screen of the future as in its present form...

...Inevitably one comes to Journey's End...

...At all events, aside from Edward G. Robinson (undoubtedly the finest character creator on our stage) Dudley Digges, Alfred Lunt at his best and a handful of others, we have very few actors whose work leaves the impression of versatility and distinction...

...The best plays of the season were exceptionally good, but the average made even the word mediocre a term of praise...

...She was no better than when acting in Estlin Cummings's play, Him, but this time her fine work had the advantage of being seen in a Broadway theatre and in a successful play...

...But even such examples have their measure of interest...

...In the highly important matter of acting the season was more fortunate than in the choice of plays...

...June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 133 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Season In Review THE official theatrical season, which has more or less given way to the period of summer musical shows and timorous tryouts of plays backed only by slender resources, furnished many examples of sheer ineptitude...

...But where is the force of new drama...

...But what is so rare as a Robinson on Broadway...

...Some trivial and amusing contributions by Milne, Drinkwater and Lonsdale set no landmarks...

...Few plays of the last ten years have so splashed the blood and thunder and pathos and pity of life upon the speaking stage...

...At least that is the impression produced through the fad of type casting...

...It sang a greater theme than war...

...It is a play you could restage in almost any period of civilization and in almost any known city...

...One does not find it yet on Fourteenth Street...

...That stalwart old showman, William A. Brady, who makes no audible claims to "art" production, hit upon (somewhat timidly, so legend has it) Elmer Rice's Street Scene, and in this lucky strike came as close as any one person or group to selecting the kind of play that may mean the life of the future theatre...

...Theresa Helburn, the manager of the Theatre Guild, is probably right in predicting that a few years from now, most of New York's seventy or eighty playhouses will be given over to talking pictures, as the official entertainment industry, and that plays will be confined to a few theatres, under responsible and intelligent management, where only the finest actors will still play, and only plays of real distinction and value will come to life...

...Individual achievement during the year, aside from these groups, has been rare...

...It certainly will not come until the talking movies show a radical improvement over their present primitive crudeness...

...Erin O'Brien-Moore, as the heroine of Street Scene, also had her first complete chance to demonstrate a combination of intensity and poetry...

...But it is very rare to find someone like Spencer Tracy who can give even a conventional modern part a commanding sincerity...

...Katherine Cornell, Alice Brady, Mary Ellis and a few others only confirmed what we already knew about them...

...Holiday, in spite of its trivial incidents, struck somewhat deeper by asking in its own clever and light-hearted way the universal question: "Must we work for work's sake or for something a little closer to contentment...

...It achieved the unique distinction of bringing forth an entirely new central dramatic character— the man who can always advise others but who can never make up his own mind...

...She is also right, I think, in her assurance that the play, as we now know it, will never pass entirely from the scene...

...They are more than acceptable...

...It failed, I think, because it lacked proportion and human richness...

...Among the actors, there was even less evidence of growth, in spite of many admirable performances...

...Turbulent and alive, and not without wisdom emerging from its madness and its dumb terror...

...Frangois Villon would have recognized life as he knew it in Street Scene...

...They are cheaper to produce than the old-fashioned movies (chiefly because they require fewer sets) and they will, some day, give the curious the satisfaction of hearing as well as seeing the work of fine theatrical artists...

...But we shall see it eventually, and it will be a good day for real theatre-lovers...

...The competition within the legitimate theatre itself will be between such management groups as the Theatre Guild itself (now an almost nation-wide institution, with subscription seasons in many cities) and individual managers who adhere to some genuine ideal and will be well content to draw modest returns from their enterprise, instead of seeking only speculator's profits...

...The lines of battle seem to be forming...

...The talking movies, though still instruments of torture, are undoubtedly on their way to becoming the standard form of amusement for the masses...

...The Sea-Gull, bravely produced on the cooperative plan, was in the Le Gallienne tradition of standard plays...

...It was more limited than Street Scene...

...The day of this new competition may be several years off...

...Perhaps that is why there has been more notable improvement in the work of these two groups than anywhere else on our stage...

...As a human document, revealing O'Neill's inner struggle, it was intensely interesting...

...We seem to be in the position of having an endless supply of capable actors and actresses without having many really fine artists...

...With this probable development in mind, a glance at the season just closed is illuminating...

...The half loaf of the shadow stage will never give the complete satisfaction of the full loaf of the speaking stage, where the immediate warmth of personality is felt, and where the finest achievement of the actor's art comes to life under the impulse of a visible audience and with the stimulus of continuous character creation...

...Arthur Hopkins has a name for theatrical taste and a sense of values...

...But as a play of any universal significance, it was a pathetic travesty...

...Basil Sidney is improving rapidly, the entire Theatre Guild group stands for solid distinction, and here and there you see a fine talent, as in the case of Elliot Cabot, maturing...

...But the Civic Repertory bids fair to become a cradle of the classic and near-classic drama, rather than a nursery for upshooting native genius...

...With the exception of Wings over Europe, it has not produced a single play of more than casual and passing interest...

...It will probably be paralleled by a development into semi-professional status of many little-theatre groups throughout the country, so that in every city of reasonable size you will find an organized show business with first-class talking movies, and an organized theatre giving a few wellselected and fairly well-produced plays, possibly strengthened by a system of exchange guest artists...

...Despite its modern incidents and setting, it spoke a universal language...

...Miss Le Gallienne is another possible exception, through the unexpected excellence of her Peter Pan, in brilliant contrast to her more serious roles of the past...

...The Age of Innocence was little more than a period portrait...

...But it carried the central truth of many great crises—of a Danton riding to the guillotine, or perhaps, more richly, of the countless unsung great who battle disease and plagues unflinchingly...

...We are grateful for the Quinteros' ever-so-human and trivial comedies, for the mirroring of Russian standard works (not for their own values so much as by contrast with, let us say, O'Neill) and we are glad to see a sprightly Peter Pan matched with an amiable bit of Moliere...

...Plays of "modern" life abounded, and added nothing to our insight...

...Perhaps my memory is unusually short (I am purposely making no reference to notes or programs) but it would be 134 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 difficult to name many other plays, especially new ones, which attained the calibre of rich theatre...

...Many of them perform smoothly and naturally...

...No one group has distinguished itself in the choice of plays...

...It, too, had a theme as universal as life and death in the thoughts of men facing eternity...