The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Infinite Shoeblack THIS play by Norman MacOwan is one of the best recent examples I have seen of the danger of writing a play around a preconceived idea, and...
...This year's program of the Neighborhood Group has interesting variety of form...
...It would be a more difficult experiment, perhaps, since it is easier to compose a dance form than an exquisite tone poem...
...The latter's method is to state the theme as an assertion, and to use imaginary characters to prove its truth...
...Gustaf-son were the most nearly in the picture, both musically and dramatically...
...Will the whole finance ministers and upholsterers and confectioners of modern Europe undertake in joint-stock company, to make one shoeblack happy...
...This method is fatal to all authentic feeling in a play, because the characters, artificially manipulated, never give the impression of reality...
...But to ring true, that sentence must be in question form, the answer to the question to come from the exact nature of the individual characters involved...
...The story has in it elements both of pagan and Christian origin and this mixture of spirit has appealed with peculiar potency to the composer...
...This does not mean that Sadko is lacking in form, but only that the subject itself is one which calls for variety rather than unity...
...It is probably a fact that the majority of people are more susceptible to visual than oral impressions...
...It goes without saying that the idea is muddled to begin with...
...This is all the more unfortunate since both Leslie Banks and Helen Menken give admirable performances and make the utmost of the few opportunities given them for consistent portrayal...
...They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two: for the shoeblack also has a soul quite other than his stomach...
...This sound method of asking a question in a certain situation and answering it through individual characters is vastly different from the mistaken idea of a play theme employed by Mr...
...At Maxine Elliott's Theatre...
...The rest, lending themselves readily to impressions of the eye, watch the movement of the dance-drama intently and let the music become subordinated to the position of a fitting accompaniment...
...Grenville Vernon...
...The third number is a modernistic representation of the spirit of New York...
...This Mary (Helen Menken) is slow to yield to Berwick's impassioned preachments, delivered first in a sordid rooming house and later in the glamorous setting of Cairo during the war...
...The theatre is no place to prove an idea through a forced plot...
...The first derives its thought from the second love incantation of Virgil's Eighth Eclogue and indicates the progress of the soul through three planes of existence-the physical, the mental and the spiritual...
...Setti's chorus has done nothing better in the twenty-two years he has headed it...
...The passage, quoted in full on the program is as follows: "Man's unhappi-ness, as I construe, comes of his greatness...
...The present play suffers, then, from an inverted glimpse of man's nature...
...Every good play must start, of course, with a simple theme-with a situation so plain that it can be stated in one sentence...
...It is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite...
...But to say that the spark of the Infinite is a cause of unhappiness is like saying that the cause of Lucifer's tragedy was the brightness of his first glory...
...In these qualities Sadko is not deficient...
...He loves color rather than line...
...The ballets were elaborate enough but in them there was too much mechanics and altogether too little inspiration...
...Of the singers Miss Fleischer's Volkova, Miss Bourskaya's Liou-bava, and the small part of the Norseman sung by Mr...
...He sets out to rescue a young woman of some cultural attainment who is confessedly a courtesan by nature and practice...
...It suffers still more from trying to make fictitious characters illustrate the idea...
...Andrew Berwick (Leslie Banks) is a Scotch student of mathematics with a penchant for Carlyle...
...Because of this overpowering and definite impression of the visual image on most minds, it would seem to be a more logical experiment to create first the idea of the dance-drama and then to have suitable music composed for it...
...The few who can form mental images from sound impressions are of the highly imaginative type who inwardly resent any impressions in conflict with their own...
...Finally, to bring him happiness, she consents to marry him and become a working-man's wife...
...The second, using an aspect of the Faust legend, contrasts the tragic doubts of the earth-bound solitary with the consolation and peace found by those following more simply the guidance of the supernatural life...
...At its best, the art of the play is to show how individual characters will react to a given situation-whether tragic or comic-remembering always that the more easily the characters are recognized and understood, the more widespread is the interest or the amusement the play will arouse...
...Many unlikely plot contrivances have to be used to bring the story to its sad end, and as few of them are inevitable or in any sense direct consequences of Mary's nature, they succeed in no respect, and certainly not in sustaining the intended tragic mood...
...The Lewisohn Quest MISS Irene Lewisohn, as the moving spirit of the old Neighborhood Playhouse group, is still in search of a new art which will fuse the dance-drama and music...
...Johnson is an admirable artist, but his is not the heroic school...
...They would prefer to listen to suggestive music with their eyes half closed and to create their own dramatic accompaniment...
...The performances retain a double character in which, according to one's personal inclination, either the music or the dance predominates...
...Those who saw the Russian Ballet dance them in Paris in 1910 must have realized what could have been made of them...
...As to The Infinite Shoeblack-it is a strange combination of resolute and high ideas in rather tawdry settings...
...Her presentations of the Cleveland Orchestra and a company of dancers in interpretations of significant musical numbers have become annual events in New York, animated, unquestionably, by the most soaring ideals and resulting in a great deal that is beautiful and engrossing in visual effect...
...This does bring tragedy to those who bury themselves completely in the cares of the world...
...Soudeikine's costumes and scenery are glorious...
...Whether the fate of Sadko, produced on January 25 at the Metropolitan Opera House, will be any happier than has been the rule is yet to be determined, but it is certain that it is a work which is worthy of serious consideration...
...Moreover in the character of Sadko the music has a heroic, almost bardic quality rare in modern Russian opera...
...It is in the choruses, in the ballets and in the shifting color and rhythms of the orchestra, rather than in distinct musical characterization that Rimsky-Korsakoff excels...
...The three musical numbers upon which it is based are Loeffer's A Pagan Poem, Rabaud's La Procession Nocturne and Werner Janssen's symphonic poem, New Year's Eve in New York...
...For this reason, a good theme can usually be worked out in at least two entirely different ways...
...He is a Romeo or a Pelleas rather than a Sadko...
...But the two arts never fuse successfully into a new art...
...Sadko MR...
...Rimsky-Korsakoff is not a composer of the first rank, but he is certainly more than a mere technician...
...In short Sadko is Russian not only in its employment of national folk-tunes, but in the spirit which animates it as a whole...
...The music is decidedly reminiscent of Charpentier's feeling for Paris as expressed in Louise, and the dance representation, except for occasional moments in Martha Graham's work, is broken, irresolute and mediocre...
...But at least it would do no violence to preconceived mental images...
...he wears it with distinct discomfort, almost as if he felt it were a strait-jacket...
...GATTI-CASAZZA'S experience with operatic novelties has not been an altogether happy one, at least in recent seasons...
...Indeed his only novelties to remain permanently in the repertory have been L'Amore dei Tre Re and Der Rosenkavalier...
...This creates, it is true, a degree of fusion, but not a balanced one, such as I am sure Miss Lewisohn is seeking...
...We might illustrate this by the theme of Hamlet...
...It is rather an absorption of the music by the dance than a union of the two arts in a new art of enlarged dimensions...
...Serafin's direction of the orchestra is masterly, and Mr...
...The Metropolitan does a moderately effective job of it, and as far as the singing of the chorus, the playing of the orchestra, and the settings go, a superlative one...
...Man is unhappy when he forsakes his better self, but that is vastly different from saying that his better self is the cause of his misery...
...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Infinite Shoeblack THIS play by Norman MacOwan is one of the best recent examples I have seen of the danger of writing a play around a preconceived idea, and of letting the action spring from this idea rather than directly from the individual characters...
...The third number is the least successful in all respects...
...The opera is based on an old Russian legend and possesses the barbaric color of the semi-oriental...
...What he is trying to describe in reverse English is nothing more than the idea of a free will battling within a nature that has an inclination to evil as well as to good...
...The fact that man is made in the image and likeness of God can and should be turned even more toward inspiration and the inner flame of the supernatural life than toward the unhappy conflict which Carlyle implies...
...All who love folk-music and folk-stories will surely want to hear and see this opera-I say "see" because Mr...
...it goes without saying that he is a master of orchestral color, while the freshness of his melody and the appeal of his rhythms has always been evident...
...The Russian is never quite himself when he is clothed in logic...
...Of these, the second number is by far the most successful in the coordination it achieves between visual representation and musical mood...
...The author has taken as his central idea a passage from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, and has proceeded to find manni-kins to fit the idea and carry out its implied doom...
...But her nervous system never recovers from the birth of her child...
...She dies in Berwick's arms, trying to keep alive his illusion that he has rescued her from her instinctive self...
...The first number is a little too angular and stylized to achieve the same feeling as the music, although the dance pantomime of both Martha Graham and Charles Weidman is intensely alive and beautifully graded...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 18
