The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER IT RARELY happens that one playwright has three plays running on Broadway at the same time. It has, in the past, happened to O'Neill, to Shakespeare and to...
...At the National Theatre...
...The theme is all about students at a co-educational college, and centers chiefly around their overnight parties at road houses, raids, disgrace, fatal automobile accidents and the like...
...In the case of modern writers, such an occurrence is generally due to a mixture of revivals and new plays...
...In other words, one feels that Mr...
...Cross-Roads IN HIS third play of the season, Mr...
...Too late...
...The warden, already somewhat conscience-stricken at the part he played earlier in Robert's life, would, one feels, have exhausted all the detective talents of the state before throwing the boy in the dungeon or trying to make him turn traitor to his fellow-prisoners...
...Flavin's serious plays, the difference between his authorship and that of George Kelly is this: that Kelly has been progressively unsuccessful in his more serious efforts, whereas Flavin, starting with some distinction in serious work, has shown a deft hand in character comedy...
...You would never have suspected Martin Flavin as its author-not, at least, after Children of the Moon and The Criminal Code...
...No man's surname was ever more prophetic of the place he was to occupy on the American stage than that of Donald Meek...
...There should be a charitable limbo for all such half-baked efforts by otherwise intelligent authors...
...A subtle suspense pervades the second act which induces an almost hysterical laughter in the audience, and which makes you want to take an immediate hand in affairs to help straighten them out...
...But what he actually achieves is merely a picture of sexual irregularities aggravated by needless misunderstandings and immature ideas...
...The point is that Mr...
...Flavin is more nearly comparable, in promise at least, with the best of Sidney Howard's work, and certainly, in Children of the Moon, he touched, and with quivering force, one of those themes we associate chiefly with O'Neill...
...Judging from the contrast between this and Mr...
...It has too many glaring defects, especially as seen in retrospect...
...Flavin has rewritten all the old stuff so well, deepened the etching of his characters so acutely, and, for two acts at least, maintained his suspense so delightfully, that the whole affair is as fresh as morning dew-which has had the habit of being fresh every morning for thousands of years...
...It is only in the last act that Mr...
...It is a play dealing with mental states and the distortions wrought through environment...
...Flavin's power of inventive detail seems to slacken, and with it something of the illusion of the play...
...Martin Brady, the district attorney, faced by an approaching election, sets out to get, and does get, a conviction...
...But it is not, in spite of all this, a great play...
...Yes-it can't be denied...
...One almost hates to breathe the truth and to admit that Broken Dishes is another play about a henpecked husband in a house of women...
...But Graham's employers lend him the services of their business attorney, a man as unfamiliar with criminal practice as a new-born babe...
...An excellent cast gives Donald Meek joyous support, with Bette Davis conspicuous in a winning and lovely performance as the Cinderella daughter...
...The play in general is put together with exceptional skill...
...Several years later, Brady is made warden of the state's prison where Graham is still serving his term...
...Flavin has earned the right to be known as one of our most versatile authors...
...Small bits of characterization are added to the familiar types which make them stand forth as individuals...
...Pure coincidence steps in for the first time and the ultimate solution of the difficulties becomes somewhat artificial...
...At other times, sheer coincidence plays too big a part...
...He maintains at all times a rich humanity which, at a moment's notice, can turn your loudest laughter into a lumpy throat...
...The "bad breaks" are too often of the author's own making-happenings that are not really inherent in any of the situations...
...It stirs positive enthusiasm...
...It is a play abounding with pity, understanding and a fine indignation at the rigidity of human legal codes, at the clanking, crushing machinery of the law driven by the unselfish actions of small-minded men...
...Of course Donald Meek has something to do with all this...
...The Criminal Code, Broken Dishes and Cross-Roads are all new products of his active pen, presenting, as between themselves, abrupt and striking contrasts...
...By the use of a grey curtain and a half a dozen other well-chosen devices, he does as much through scenery to heighten the dismal gloom as the story of the play itself...
...At the Ritz Theatre...
...It dealt with the power of a selfish mother to distort the minds of those about her...
...There is not a bad piece of casting in the play, and William Harris, producer, contributes also an excellent example of stage direction...
...Staged by none other than Guthrie McClintic, and supported with stage settings designed by Robert Edmond Jones, Cross-Roads is just one of those theatre happenings that leaves you a trifle embarrassed for the author...
...Broken Dishes YOU might have expected George Kelly, in an hilarious moment, to have written Broken Dishes...
...The irony of the "bad break...
...Flavin saw his ending before he began his pluy, and allowed nothing to stand in its way...
...It is a play that holds and fascinates with grim determination...
...A prologue in the district attorney's office gives the first tragic premise-a lonely boy who defends a street walker from insults and in doing so accidentally kills the scion of a rich family...
...But in the case of Martin Flavin-manufacturer turned playwright-it is happening today with three new plays...
...It jumps right into the middle of that vicious circle surrounding the criminal mind, and interprets the circle to you in terms of a young man wrongly convicted of second-degree murder...
...And in the final episodes, it is always painfully evident that Robert's confession is not the only way in which the prison murderer might be brought to justice...
...He is put in the dungeon and tortured...
...Anita Kerry as his daughter, Ethel Griffies as his nervous sister, William Franklin as the squealer and Walter Kingsford as the doctor all contribute bits of rarely restrained and affective work...
...The Criminal Code MARTIN FLAVIN'S first bow to New York was through a serious and mordant play called Children of the Moon...
...At the Morosco Theatre...
...Cyrus Bumpsted may be, as a program note says, his eight hundred and eightieth role, or something like that...
...Albert R. Johnson's settings for this play deserve special mention...
...Arthur Byron as Martin Brady, district attorney and later warden, gives one of those amazingly natural performances which establish him in a special niche among character actors...
...He is offered every inducement to tell, but, bound himself by the code of loyalty within the walls, remains silent...
...If so, at least eight hundred of those roles have had something to do with being henpecked and lovable...
...He never lets his character degenerate into farce outlines...
...It is at this point that drama begins to stalk the stage...
...Not only that, but another play in which liquor turns the timid soul into a momentary tyrant and saves the day...
...If you happen to have seen, many years ago, Galsworthy's play called Justice, you will have a good general impression of the type of play to which The Criminal Code belongs...
...It has too many good moments to be discarded as sheer rubbish, and yet, in many long stretches and throughout many highly artificial situations, it is so inept and bungling that you wonder how it ever came to actual production...
...Crazed by hunger, torture and the phantoms conjured in his brain through long years, Graham murders the man who has tortured him, not knowing that this same man has now come to set him free...
...Robert Graham has nothing of the criminal in him- nothing, that is, beyond the normal human mixture of good and bad, with the bad under reasonably safe control...
...The play thus suffers badly from forced situations, and also from patent theatricality...
...Like the tolling of an old cracked bell-too late, too late...
...Flavin has used many devices to heighten the points of his story-an interesting prison doctor to interpret Graham to us, Brady's daughter to warm the stone-grey prison into a place for romance, and a series of well-drawn cross-section types within the walls, men who prey upon Graham's imagination in one way or another as the heavy years roll by...
...But one must then hurry, in the very same breath, to explain that it doesn't make a bit of difference whether the plot is as old as Nineveh, or the characters as familiar as the morning ash-can dumper, or the situations as far-fetched as a farce...
...Drama quickly deepens into melodrama when the criminal code dictates that one of the inmates, a squealer, shall pay for his cowardice with his life...
...A good criminal lawyer could have secured a prompt acquittal...
...Therefore, let it be said at once that in writing this delicious and generally side-splitting comedy, Mr...
...His work as Cyrus Bumpsted is something which does more than bring praise...
...It has, in the past, happened to O'Neill, to Shakespeare and to Ibsen-possibly to a few others as well...
...Graham has the bad luck to know who did the killing...
...But the point is that he plays such parts superlatively well...
...He probably intends the play to be a serious study of the effect of machine education upon adolescence...
...The Criminal Code is quite understandable as a successor to Children of the Moon-utterly different in theme but displaying the same qualities of mind of the author...
...No real effort is ever made to discover the identity of the murderer except through Robert...
...It did not score a commercial success, but has remained deeply engraved on the minds of steady theatregoers as a work of considerable distinction...
...He does not know that the warden has his parole ready, nor that Brady, moved at last by the discovery that his daughter is in love with Graham (who has acted as the family chauffeur) is ready to forego forcing a confession...
...Flavin's outstanding fault of subordinating everything to preconceived plot is more evident than ever, and the artificiality of most of the situations deprives them of all the significance he attempts to work in...
...Flavin has let us down with a bump...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 4
