The Play

...Nor even, we must add, by Aline MacMahon's exceedingly sensitive interpretation...

...Uncle Dudley is the less able to stop the horrible sacrifice because of the fact that he once borrowed $5,000 from his sister and has never been able to repay it in actual cash...

...Like Martin Flavin's comedy, Broken Dishes, we have here an excellent example of what expert writing and characterization can do to lend fresh interest to stock situations...

...Dickinson's patent sincerity, nor even by his compassion for and deep understanding of his main character and her tragedy of cowardice and flight...

...Winter Bound, in its subject-matter, in its detailed and overexplicit treatment, in its occasional crudity of language and discussion, becomes merely a distressing dissection, never quite lifted out of the mire by Mr...

...But so far as universal importance enters in, the play is one of those unnecessary discussions which account for the anaemia of so much "modern art...

...This is by no manner of means a hair-line distinction...

...The slightest exaggeration of this unreality can lead to a definite resentment of male companionship, and end in a cowardly flight from the realities of marriage and its partnership in children and home...

...Dickinson has written sincerely, and often unwisely, about the effort of two girls to escape masculine attentions by wintering together in a lonely New England farmhouse...

...To brand it, even by innuendo, as a play dealing with consciously abnormal motives or actions is sheer nonsense-one of those careless mistakes which shows the slipshod thinking and confused mental judgment engendered by a vast deal of modern writing and pseudo-philosophical prattle...

...Jacques Martin, of Beatrice Terry (as the dragon mother, of course) and of a lovely little actress named Eleanor Hayden...

...If the theatre is to serve its main purpose of entertainment, it would seem the part of wisdom for authors to put more energy into making the familiar interesting than into hunting the unfamiliar, with the chance of finding it very dull after all...

...The subconscious implications, unrealized by either of the girls until toward the very end, would find a better forum for discussion in the pathological laboratory than on the stage...

...Dickinson has written a story of unconscious tendencies, unrecognized by the victims...

...Your Uncle Dudley trots out a hundred familiar faces, but makes you glad to welcome them, as you might welcome neighbors who take the trouble to make themselves amusing and interesting...

...Even normal inclinations, when only half understood, can produce serious consequences...

...It often serves as a mental bar for the writer, making him self-conscious...

...Your Uncle Dudley THE authors of that well-remembered comedy, Tommy (Howard Lindsay and Bertrand Robinson) have concocted a new play about the figure of a henpecked and good-natured uncle who supports in one household his mother, his sister and her two children...

...How he finally overcomes this moral obstacle, brings about the marriage of his niece to a deserving if uninspiring boy, and manages, as well, to seal a little romance of his own-all this is the plot material of a comedy which never pretends to any originality but which manages, none the less, to keep one in uproarious laughter from beginning to end...

...But we all know, too, the other type of friends who are never bores because they manage to say the same things over and over, but always to say them in a slightly different way...

...Much in the story is a powerful plea for letting the laws of nature take their course despite all the theories of overcivilized minds...

...Doctors frequently deal with mental disorders resulting from abnormal inclinations which have never been yielded to, but have simply never had the release of frank medical discussion...

...Women's colleges-can easily be criticized on the score that they help to create, in the minds of girls, an unreal kind of world in which women appear to themselves to be self-sufficient...

...The motives which prompt them to do this, being motives of escape from reality, are obviously neurotic in root, unhealthy from the start and fraught with the elements of tragedy which the play unfolds...

...After saying this much (in justice to its author) we can look at Winter Bound in its true aspect and still find much to criticize...

...To link it with Bourdet's The Captive is, I believe, totally and amazingly to miss its whole meaning and purpose...

...The entire cast, for that matter, is excellent, and the comedy deserves and will probably have a long and laughter-giving run...

...Dickinson has pushed this exaggeration to the nth degree, and made of it a case so special that it loses true social significance and becomes merely a very particular pathological study...

...But they are not consciously evil motives, and how they can be so interpreted by such an intelligent critic as (for example) John Mason Brown of the Evening Post is one of those mysteries which only prove that playing with smoke is very apt to make the public think one is playing with fire...

...One could easily cite a dozen lines and a dozen incidents to establish this point...

...Perhaps the root of the trouble lies in the fact that the public mind has been so thoroughly poisoned during the last few years that it is no longer able to make that supremely important distinction between potential evil and actual evil, between mental inclination, barely acknowledged if at all, and the deliberate yielding to evil...

...A simple and everyday case in point is that of the love-sick adolescent girl or boy-the loss of appetite at which parents smile, or the irritability which puzzles them...

...At the Garrick Theatre...

...The special problem, however real and intense it may be in the physician's clinic, can never suffuse literature (which includes the stage) with the rich power of art...

...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Winter Bound A PROFESSOR of the drama, Thomas H. Dickinson, has stepped from his niche into the arena of actual play-writing, and has produced a play of considerable power on a theme of distinctly abnormal psychology...

...Winter Bound is not, as several newspaper critics loudly proclaimed the day after its opening, a play of perverted human relationships...

...A lot of true artistry lies back of the viewpoint that not all material is fit for use on the stage or in literature...

...There is, undoubtedly, a wide-spread social tendency today toward the Amazon colony...

...We all have friends who are bores because they always say exactly the same things in exactly the same way...

...Many saints have walked this earth whose temptations have mounted to the fury of a storm...

...But Mr...

...Your Uncle Dudley is particularly fortunate in the delightful acting contributions of Walter Connolly, of that grand old lady, Mrs...

...The point is this, that art gains real vitality (and thus truly comes to life as art) only through dealing with universal problems...

...At the Cort Theatre...

...In later life, when the love instinct is fully and frankly recognized, and dealt with maturely, reason takes command of the situation and the general malaise is lessened through complete understanding of its cause...

...After all, the search for the unusual is always dangerous sport...

...The niece is the victim of a dragon mother who has determined to make her a great singer...