Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK A SUMMER bulletin published by the Catholic ¦**¦ Theatre Movement has caused a great deal of excitement by reason of its outspoken condemnation of two current Broadway...
...1 HE present hopes of Russia cannot be disposed of in a paragraph, but it is interesting to make a brief note on the subject, in connection with t> ,1 .- our recent comment on American ComtSulletin on . t- l t t- > j- • 1 . munism...
...The present standard of life in Russia is so appallingly low that no American workman, however humbly placed, would adopt Communism...
...That is being natural, and there is nothing an Englishman likes so much in a visiting foreigner...
...It remains to marshal such relief as will once more tide farmers over a bad spell...
...The Same Speaking on the basis of his experience Q, , p as a welfare worker in Los Angeles, the Reverend Thomas F. O'Dwyer declared that a high percentage of family distress is due to low wages and unemployment...
...Green blushed to be expected to eat it...
...We HAVE objected before to the occasionally wearying pertinacity of American critics on the subject of the bad manners of American Divers tourists...
...But Mr...
...And if the thing is played like bridge (from every point of view), the participant can work up within himself tempests of excitement or despair...
...One welfare agency attributes 24 percent of acute domestic poverty to these causes...
...Of course there is another audience, comprising lovers of art and literature...
...It is an unfortunate trend, which undermines the morale of actor and producer...
...We merely felt that the criticism was repeated too often to be effective...
...He finds that the progress of industrialization is limited, in spite of some gains, by the lack of native engineering and administrative skill...
...1 HE same week which brought in news of portents like apples baked on the trees in Pennsylvania, and H. L. Menken elected to the Alabama 01 i • . Kiwanis, also brought Mr...
...O. M. Green, anangnai to Englishman) late of Shanghai, to the New York coiumns of the Herald Tribune...
...It is easy to be amused by the lesion in such logic, and to point out the undeniable truth that European veneration for the dead springs from the unquestioning and absolute Catholic belief in the resurrection of the body...
...REPORTS of crop losses pile up, the nation beholds a picture of devastation which blends all too well with the general business and industrial depression...
...It is only when the American begins to broaden his a's and get his clothes in Sackville Row that the island race finds him intolerable...
...Finally, by way of good measure, we give so much food for $.75 that Mr...
...This the spiritual director justifiably fears, though he may not wish to go as far as did a certain cure of Saint-Barthelemy, who said in 1665 that Moliere was "a demon covered with flesh and dressed as a man, and the most terrible scoffer and libertine known to history...
...The problem inevitably narrows itself down to a question of unemployment and minimum wage insurance...
...College boys normally read Lysistrata (we recall having so read it under the tutelage of a priest whose virtue we continue to admire) without any great moral damage, but there is probably not an educational institution which would care to put the drama on the stage...
...What the forward pass is to football, or the contemporary agile sphere to the diamond, that the spiral curves of the impediments are to Tom Thumb golf...
...Nor has the farmer, if Thomas F. Mahony's analysis of the Mexican wage-earner's position in the beet-growing industry, read to the same meeting, is correct...
...But how to enforce recognition of such rights is almost as much of a mystery as ever...
...All the other ills —. , of farming are more or less temporary u° and subject, in a measure, to correction...
...Some cause must underlie this trend...
...And we respectfully suggest that the English are much the same...
...Few jobs of this kind he has tackled seem more difficult, however, than this...
...Here, indeed, is one of the worst examples of exploitation on record...
...Credit will doubtless also be made available on terms commensurate with the occasion...
...However, we never meant P , to go as far as does that clever English journalist, Mr...
...In a series of examples selected from his files Father O'Dwyer made the situation clear...
...Nichols does seem to deny it...
...But this is necessarily small and cannot be recruited from the general public owing to the circumstance that theatre tickets cost more than most people can afford...
...Nevertheless the real contemporary drawing-card of Lysistrata is its sex appeal, which isn't very formidable in Greek argot but turns out to be comparatively racy when expressed in up-to-date New Yorkese...
...Castigating One of these, a show concocted by the the inimitable Mr...
...Having The himself been profoundly touched by the Jewel of old-world custom of baring the head the Just and genuflecting in silence as the dead pass by, he is making an earnest effort to induce public and religious agencies to foster these rites of reverence in his own city...
...IjOBBY JONES is undoubtedly a canny wielder of niblicks and mashies, but the honors of the game are going to Tom Thumb...
...He asserted that the remedy should come through recognition of the workingman's rights rather than through charitable relief agencies: "Industry has no right to use the labor of the workman, skilled or unskilled, for the attainment of its own and force a charitably disposed public to supply the deficiency in a living wage...
...In all such cases a great deal depends upon the audience and the circumstances under which the play is given...
...and this, if one may credit Mrs...
...It may prepare some minds for Catholicism, just as good manners prepare children for benevolence and socialmindedness...
...Most of the patrons accept a play as an interlude between dinner with a brace of cocktails and a sojourn at a night club...
...We have not compared the versions, but there is little doubt that the Aristophanic original would hardly appeal to many directors of conscience as an aid to spiritual progress...
...The fight against it is honorable but success is not to be expected promptly...
...It seems to us wiser and more charitable to welcome the impulse to treat death as august, for what it is worth —and to add that it may be worth a good deal...
...The other play is Lysistrata and concerning it more argument is possible...
...When he lost his hotel, one of our courteous fellow-townsmen went three blocks out of his way to find it for him...
...And short of this, if this specific practice helps to cure even one American community of that dreadful, unseeing blandness in the presence of mortality which is part of the price we pay for our untragic history and our "achieving" temperament, it will be doing a humanizing and civilizing service...
...Essentially a complex version of croquet, this unpredictable amusement will assuredly increase the sale of putting irons and exact severe resolutions from anti-gambling societies before it finally becomes the model game which no boy will agree to play...
...but the failure of nature to afford right conditions for the growth and harvest of produce is a calamity against which there is no insurance...
...Harper has been making tours of observation in Russia for the last twenty-six years, so the results of his present expedition have a cumulative force...
...We spent the major part of a week-end looking for a hotel beside which there was no diminutive course, adorned with excruciating traps and rock-strewn hills and the upshot was that we produced a dollar and tried it out...
...This gentleIn Honor man has brought a new crop of sportsof a men, knickers, quarters, earnestness, Short One form and all...
...A CIVIC leader of Dallas, Texas, is campaigning widely to promote a "respect for funerals" here such as is shown in Europe...
...They do not care to think, to meditate, to study—in short, to do any of those things which figure in the theory that the stage is a platform for either poet or teacher...
...Transportation is therefore an important element in any plausible scheme for relief, and it is gratifying to see the immediacy with which the railroad executives have sized up the problem and made ready to handle it...
...Speaking, at least, for his fellow-Britons, he assures us that what they really object to is the American who tries to "adapt...
...It proves beyond the shadow of a legitimate doubt that the trouble with most sports has been the premium they set on endurance, proficiency and ability to perspire...
...The fascination is extraordinary...
...However clumsily the alien may imitate us, it tickles the national ego to have him at least try...
...It may be that charity cannot, in the ultimate analysis, be deprived of a central position in the matter...
...Mr...
...Ah,' he said in great good humor, "you have me there.' " As to our much-advertised street noises, we are evidently not in it with Shanghai...
...Nichols weights his argument with an instance from the other side of the water—an Englishman in New York who earned universal detestation by running down the British Empire and trying to use American slang—our doubt becomes active disbelief...
...Father LaFarge s dismissal Communism of the latter> which we quoted kst week, receives reinforcement from Dr...
...The shrewdest thing about the architects who devised this form of wasting time is the nicety with which they have injected the element of luck...
...Beverley Nichols, writing in one of New York's newspapers...
...Carroll, was manifestly Theatre designed to sell out to the usual vapid sporting crowd before the police could turn off the lights...
...It may be true that the world's good dramatic art is being institutionalized—that such enterprises as Salzburg and Oberammergau are pointing the way to the only possible conservation of the intelligent and decent theatre...
...From this point of view the study of Hebraic property law, as distinct from Roman property law, may prove to be illuminating...
...And when Mr...
...1 HERE was much intelligent discussion of economic issues at the recent Denver meeting of the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems...
...Even the L change-makers enter the lyric...
...Revivals are usually greeted with applause as differing from the current output, even though singularly few of them enjoy anything like a run...
...and it is all excellent...
...Let our nationals speak their own speech, enter the most exclusive Pall Mall clubs hatless and clad in yellow tweeds, complain of the climate and the currency...
...The worst of the drought was felt in "patches" over a wide area...
...When he appealed to a policeman for directions, "I thought he was going to ask me home to supper...
...Harper's conclusion is that, in spite of Bolshevism's splendid "press," the rest of the world is not as interested "nor as vitally influenced as the Moscow leaders or antiSoviet propagandists like to believe...
...Helen McCadden's study in our present number, is hardly endorsed by experience...
...WEEK BY WEEK A SUMMER bulletin published by the Catholic ¦**¦ Theatre Movement has caused a great deal of excitement by reason of its outspoken condemnation of two current Broadway productions...
...Hoover is unusually competent, and the industry with which he has set to work in spite of the Washington climate has done much to restore the luster of the "old Hoover"—the administrator and expert of days before politics and congressional intrigue...
...One of them "was a little severe on my uncertainty as to the value of a nickel," but was beguiled by being asked if he knew the value of a London "bob...
...Green would open eyes and ears of acutest disbelief at the civic authorities who have been lecturing us lately on our bad manners...
...We never denied that Americans engaged in being bumptiously American on their travels should be suppressed...
...We are, in fact, "extraordinarily quiet," and he gathers that "it is a point of honor" not to sound that horn which the Shanghai driver "uses as a weapon of offense to blast his way through...
...It has the advantage of being the least time-bound of Aristophanes's comedies—that is, it is the least replete with comment on events regarding which the modern public has no knowledge...
...He finds us a combination of boy scout and Chesterfield...
...We ourselves are inclined to think that a European observer has found it in the increasing habit of looking upon the theatre as an addendum to the night life of an industrialized population...
...Samuel N. Harper, professor of Russian history and institutions at the University of Chicago...
...The task is one for which Mr...
...Critics in Paris, Berlin and Vienna write, very much in the manner of our own sages, of plays which are boresome, silly, dirty, vapid...
...A Catholic practice, even without the core of Catholic belief, is apt to be better than no practice at all...
...1 HE recent career of the New York theatre has been characterized by a blight which has settled upon all the world's dramatic art, if we may judge from reports...
...Tom Thumb golf is pure game—that is, it exacts nothing from you excepting a knowledge of how to do it...
...We doubt it...
...It is hoped that more propitious weather may do the rest with rains sufficient to revive hay and pasturage, if not to save a good proportion of a wilted crop...
...This is handsome indeed and whether we believe it or not, we thank Mr...
...that the "class struggle" between Communists and non-Communists grows deeper and more bitter: above all, that Bolshevism is in no danger of spreading its contagion to us: "In the thirteen years the Soviets have been in power, Communism has made virtually no headway in the United States...
...Green for giving us, as he would say, the refusal of it...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 17
