The Play and Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
22 THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Stage in Retrospect IN SEVERAL respects, the major season of 1929-1930 now drawing to a close has been...
...It does not quite carry through the thought of death being the beginning of complete life...
...Journey's End comes a close second in these respects and is, in addition, an amazingly fine example of the power of understatement...
...Red Rust was a terrific social drama of Russia in the doldrums, suffering—so experts on Russia tell us—from being twisted in adaptation to suit the tastes of French and American audiences...
...Death Takes a Holiday is the most interesting in abstract idea, falling short by a curious oversight from being a masterpiece of mysticism...
...and so establishes a unique field of realism as its own...
...Undoubtedly the day is passing, and rapidly, when mere entertainment value is enough to assure success to a stage play...
...It must be well written and well acted before it can hope for a long life...
...The passage of weeks has only convinced me more and more of the essentially false note this play strikes— the result of a sincere attempt at simplicity by an essentially sophisticated mind...
...22 THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Stage in Retrospect IN SEVERAL respects, the major season of 1929-1930 now drawing to a close has been far more important than a mere summary of its productions would indicate...
...What we regard as inherent crudities today may turn into inherent values tomorrow...
...Topaze is at least cleverly written and beautifully acted...
...We can also say that up to the present, the screen is most acceptable when it works for values the stage can never bring out (such as outdoor action, historical setting etc...
...Many Waters was another poignant bit of work which fell short of real popular success...
...But there is one very subtle way in which the screen may win a decisive victory over the stage—and that, if you please, is a matter of economics affecting the actor...
...The mechanics of the new medium are being improved at an astonishing rate...
...It has demonstrated, for example, that plays of real vigor or charm need very little tonic, that even a general business lull following a sensational market disaster cannot subdue the steady patronage of the worthwhile theatre...
...Among the few comedies which linger in the mind, the most pretentious is, of course, Shaw's latest satire, The Apple Cart...
...Not all the good plays this year have achieved a vigorous life...
...No two are of the same type, and yet all of them have enjoyed either distinct financial success or a chorus of critical praise and serious discussion...
...The last year has witnessed a complete revolution in motion-picture potentials, making the outcome of its struggle with the theatre even more difficult to predict...
...An actor can now use every part of his training and skill...
...But this season has been notable for the general excellence of its major productions...
...Of the group, Uncle Vanya is by all odds the most distinguished in casting and direction...
...It is a rather feeble thrust at best and would fail dismally under any other auspices than the Theatre Guild with its solid subscription list...
...The only possible explanation is that Quintero plays demand an unusual perfection of ensemble and an almost perfect timing of action to bring out their full flavor and humanity...
...Still other important plays in the serious vein included Barry's recent Hotel Universe, Gorki's At The Bottom, Chekov's The Sea Gull in two separate versions and a new production of Tolstoy's The Living Corpse...
...The screen has increasingy taken over the story-telling function, and people are attracted to the legitimate theatre only when it offers something unique in its kind...
...These plays are all serious in theme, and two, at least, are distinctly philosophical...
...Before the advent of screen dialogue, the problem was simple— screen acting was only half an art...
...The Talking Screen in Prospect IT IS dangerous, however, to assume that the screen is limited to a small part of the field once occupied by the stage...
...More and more trained talent is being drafted from the stage to the screen through this simple economic pressure...
...It is quite amazing how often minor faults like this will destroy the unity of effect and dull the response of audiences...
...The season has also shown, through the amazing variety of its successes, that public taste is unconfined and does not run by years to a few limited types of plays...
...The only thing we can say with reasonable certainty is that a mechanical process can never fully equal the direct vision of human beings, and that the theatre will always have this thin margin to capitalize...
...The really serious breakdown in public taste comes with the success of Strictly Dishonorable, which is as misleading in values as it is clever in construction and expert in acting...
...The theatre is coming to be valued for those very things which the screen cannot supply—subtleties of fine acting, shades of expression which demand the unity of one stage setting and continuous action, and the warmth of living and believable human characters...
...They are certainly not plays written for the tired business man...
...This is actually the first year in which the stage has had to cross swords seriously with something as new and potentially vital as the talking screen...
...Berkeley Square is a trifle precious and inclined to be unhealthy in its hidden theme, but is quite exquisite in its rendering...
...Certainly public appreciation of this group bears out the thought that our theatre taste is improving...
...But now that is all changed...
...In this case, the only noticeable fault was in the structure of two scenes of the play, one of which shifted the interest and viewpoint entirely to a minor character, while another injected a discordant mood of satirical farce...
...Their vast audience, reached simultaneously in a hundred leading cites, makes it possible to pay the movie actor a wage out of all proportion to the best he can ever hope to get from the stage...
...The movies may charge only one-fifth of the theatre price for a first run performance, but they can multiply the number of those performances by a hundred...
...Both depend largely on a combination of sadism and sentimentality, and the patronage they draw is not very different ultimately from that of the tabloid press...
...It has many beauties, it is certainly not irreverent, but it fails to achieve real integrity...
...On the other hand, the record of the more stalwart productions indicates a hopeful rising in the level of public taste—if not always as to subject-matter, at least as to dramatic value, clear writing and resourceful direction...
...This may have been enough to turn the tide of interest away from it...
...It is a little difficult to see why, for example, such a play as A Hundred Years Old with Otis Skinner had to take speedily to the road...
...Bird in Hand has enjoyed an amazingly long run for so trivial and repetitious a bit of nonsense and mild wisdom...
...In other words, theatre taste is becoming distinctly more exacting in proportion as the screen assumes command of the broader forms of narrative entertainment...
...They cannot be found in a play of the crude narrative type, nor in any play produced under mediocre direction and with a haphazard cast...
...The outcome of the struggle is highly speculative, but the mere fact that it is now raging is bound to produce deep changes in the structure, temper and form of the American stage...
...Also serious, but much more obvious and in the line of older melodrama, were the two chief prison plays, The Criminal Code and The Last Mile...
...Moreover, he does not face the weeks of free rehearsal and possible failure of three out of four plays he acts in...
...The theatre has accepted this unspoken challenge in fairly good grace...
...I am referring, of course, to dramatic excellence as such, and not to the questionable themes which several plays have exploited...
...He may miss the applause, and the artstic satisfaction of re-creating a part every night in its entirety, but he can at least be assured of supporting a family...
...Miss Le Gallienne's company has discovered the exact formula, to the everlasting delight of Fourteenth-Street audiences...
...There are still a few showmen along Broadway who do not read the signs of the time and persist in producing mediocre plays in a mediocre way...
...As one glances back over such provocative plays as Death Takes a Holiday, Journey's End, Berkeley Square, Michael and Mary, A Month in the Country, Red Rust and Uncle Vanya, it is quite apparent that the current drama has not hesitated to make demands on the intelligence and deep feeling of its audiences...
...One has only to recall the filming of such plays as Journey's End and O'Neill's Anna Christie to realize that the talking screen refuses to limit itself to straight narrative or to material requiring unusual pictorial atmosphere...
...We are only in the first stages of talking-screen development...
...From this it follows that many plays which would have won favor a few years ago, when the theatre was the sole vehicle for dialogue entertainment, now find a chilly reception...
...These are qualities which inhere only in the wellwritten and superlatively well-acted and directed play...
...More and more, the only organization of the theatre which can hope to compete with the screen for the actor's services will be the group subscription theatre, offering its artists annual contracts, and providing an atmosphere in which the artist can realize his best ideals...
...One may even detect symptoms of a beneficial effect of talking-picture competition...
...Before we turn to the few successful comedies, there remains the popular idol of the day, Green Pastures...
...But the chief importance of the season rests on the appearance of a new form of competition...
...But the Otis Skinner production had the one and only fault of a lagging pace...
...The main point we gather from this brief backward glance is the great preponderance of serious works among the notable plays of a crucial season—plays requiring either a definite sensitivity on the part of the audience, or a distinct mental alertness...
...An entirely new technique of direction and photography is growing up to meet the new possibilities...
...It is of one piece with the usual Belasco type of comedy...
...Even the most distasteful of the comedies must have something more than vulgarity or sophistication to recommend it...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
