The Play and Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
192 THE COMMONWEAL June 18, 1930 THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Milestones IT BECOMES increasingly evident each year that something must be done to maintain intact,...
...When it does, those particular scenes merely indict the rest of the show the more heavily...
...Never once does he catch the inner spirit of the Chinese actor, so that what might have been a clever idea becomes merely second-rate burlesque...
...The "honor system" becomes almost as great a source of heroics as "dear old alma mater" in the college plays of a few years back...
...There is not a star (in the technical meaning of that word) in the cast...
...Age has only increased that shy sensitivity...
...New York has been lucky to have this chance to see his art again...
...Miss Stickney carries the transition with perfect poise and adjustment...
...It is only occasionally that the present Garrick Gaieties gives us what we have a right to expect...
...But to allow him to fall so far short of his best work as he does in an impersonation of Mei Lan Fang is merely stupid...
...Among the really par numbers are How to Write for the Movies, an excellent brief and sharp satire...
...By toning down the bitterness or the cynicism or the hardness of age, the director can make you feel the tragedy of advancing years and hold it before you until it overshadows the bright enthusiasm of all the youth on the stage...
...Such performances as Becky Sharp last year and Milestones this year should never become mere memories until they have lived the long and sturdy lives their rich excellence merits...
...This idea, I believe, begins in the grammar school, migrates to the back fence, and comes to maturity in the bar room, the sales convention and the prohibition drawing-room...
...The music by Kay Swift and the lyric by Paul James have the classic stamp...
...There is now an increased undercurrent of false sophistication—of the kind, that is, which still believes that the only worthwhile form of wit is that which hovers around bedrooms...
...It was all deliciously fresh and spontaneous, rash in spots but clever nearly always...
...Herbert Ransom is particularly forthright and effective as Arthur Preece, the engineer turned laborite-politician, and Gerald Hamer is at his suave best as the young Lord Monkhurst of the last act...
...It turned into the first Garrick Gaieties, with a cast composed of junior members of the great Guild, and enlivened by music and lyrics from that then unknown pair Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart...
...My lingering impressions were of a rather solemn play, distinctly artificial in many of its twists and turns, and rather lacking in the deep humanity which warms the heart...
...Others deserving special mention are Ernest Cossart, for his pompous Ned Pym, Warburton Gamble for a thoroughly beefy Sam Sibley, Selena Royle for the excellent character change she portrays in Emily, and Catherine Willard for a portrait of Nancy, the ex-typist, which does not depend on obvious exaggeration...
...The brittleness of plot remains in the Players production (that forced repetition of incident in succeeding generations) but in all else it has taken on glow, warmth and color...
...Fiske in The Rivals"—whereas the names of featured players follow the name of the play—as, "Jed Harris presents Uncle Vanya with Walter Connolly and Osgood Perkins...
...But the fact that plays lend themselves, in spite of fixed lines and situations, to just this kind of alchemy is part of the fascination of the theatre...
...In a sense, Milestones—that prewar play of three generations by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock—is the most significant production of the Players to date...
...The entire cast and the director have produced from a slightly shabby manuscript an engrossing and warm play with the glow of true theatre at its best...
...Code and The Last Mile would inevitably induce the screen world to put on a few plays about prisons...
...Numbered Men A THEATRICAL season which included The Criminal /a...
...Hildegarde Halliday is also among the veterans present...
...Audrey Ridgley as the impetuous Muriel on whom the last act turns, is singularly direct and pleasing...
...Take any play dealing with parents and children, whether it be Milestones, Romeo and Juliet or Abie's Irish Rose, and try the experiment of reading it twice—once from the viewpoint of the parents, and again from the viewpoint of the children...
...Comparisons are a trifle unfair, since only these three parts carry through all the acts...
...Miss Bondi, who is one of our best character actresses, fails only in the third act, during which she shoves her voice to an unnaturally high and nasal pitch in a mistaken effort to indicate the feebleness of age...
...If you form a clear mental picture of Conrad Nagel as a high-minded counterfeiter and convict, you will catch the spirit of this story rather precisely...
...Or, by exaggerating the unreasonableness of those who have forgotten their own youth, he can make the tender fire of the young illumine the entire picture...
...Now the sedate Theatre Guild itself presents a revived Gaieties—a slightly overgrown and awkward child, arrived at the self-conscious age...
...The most notable performances are those of Dorothy Stickney, Tom Powers and (for the first two acts) Beulah Bondi...
...The distinction is an important one in the theatrical world...
...The Little Father of the Wilderness TO ADD the spice of "all star" to the occasion, the Players added to this year's bill a revival of this one-act play originally written for Francis Wilson by Austin Strong and Lloyd Osbourne...
...and They Always Come Back, easily the best comic-opera version of New York politics ever put into a review...
...The name of a star is placed before the name of the play—as, "Soand-so presents Mrs...
...It is at least seventeen years since I last saw Milestones...
...It tells of the return of Grover Whalen to his great department store, and comes to a climax with a song, Johnny Wanamaker, which emits nothing short of the Gilbert and Sullivan genius...
...They are the only ones demanding the extreme versatility of youth, middle age and old age...
...It is hard to say through just what magic two directors can bring out quite opposite values in a play of this sort...
...Such perfection of ensemble is rarely to be found on any stage...
...It is a sentimental little sketch, placed in the court of Louis XV, during the visit of a humble missionary, back from Canada, where he has performed acts of heroism quite beyond the comprehension of the French court...
...When so deeply intellectual a crowd as the Theatre Guild gets to work on a smart and intimate review, one rather expects a demonstration of brains, of understanding that life holds such vast stores of the ludicrous and the fantastic that to resort to smoking-car humor is a declaration of mental bankruptcy...
...Incidentally, Bernice Claire, who was so delightfully effective as the heroine in Song of the Flame proves rather flat and disappointing in straight spoken drama...
...When Wilson used to act in When Knights Were Bold some twenty years ago, I used to think him one of the funniest comedians on the stage, with a touch of sensitivity which lifted him far above the slapstick group...
...Very subtly and with infinite care and delicacy, Henry Stillman has staged this revival of Milestones in terms of youth—youth constantly reborn, forever seeking the plenitude of summer in the winds of spring...
...The New Garrick Gaieties /'^'HILDREN do not always grow up gracefully...
...At the Winter Garden...
...In the past, the Players have generally included one or two first-magnitude stars in their revivals and a long list of distinguished featured players —Otis Skinner as Falstaff, for example, or Mary Ellis in Becky Sharp...
...The Soda Fountain, giving the terrors of modern concoctions...
...The magic of gay and irreverent youth pervaded the air...
...This one number comes the nearest to catching the full magic of the old Garrick Gaieties and the Grand Street Follies rolled into one...
...It emerges from the drabness of a social preachment on progressives and reactionaries into a story of real human lives, torn and tortured by egotism and arrogance and duped into submission by the appeals of selfish sentimentality...
...192 THE COMMONWEAL June 18, 1930 THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Milestones IT BECOMES increasingly evident each year that something must be done to maintain intact, for more than the allotted week, the revivals put on by the Players Club...
...The revival is the occasion for the reappearance of Francis Wilson himself as the bashful and bewildered little missionary, Pere Marlotte...
...A number of the actors are what Broadway terms "featured players...
...Among those uniting in this tribute to Francis Wilson—for that is what the occasion amounts to— are Walter Hampden, Jerome Lawler and Margalo Gilmore...
...As the Players have re-created it, it is primarily a play of youth...
...Gone are Rodgers and Hart (although the metrical lyrics of Hart are freely copied throughout) ; gone also Romney Brent and Libby Holman, Dorothea Chard and Betty Starbuck, June Cochrane and Eleanor Shaler...
...But the cast of Milestones is conspicuous for its extreme excellence unbenumbed by either cold starlight or brilliantly featured personalities...
...Edith Meiser remains, as do the scrawney Sterling Holloway and the stalwart and dependable Philip Loeb...
...Moreover, another element has entered in...
...Triple Sec, a rather too lengthy satire on modernistic opera...
...To use him at all without giving him full scope such as he enjoyed on Grand Street, is poor economy at best...
...Tom Powers indicates not only the physical but the mental changes with genuine insight...
...Numbered Men is fairly good as melodrama, but it goes the current stage one better in spraying sentiment over the inmates of a prison...
...A Famous Lawyer at Home, in which Philip Loeb demonstrates what crossquestioning can do to a breakfast table...
...Perhaps the greatest disappointment is Albert Carroll...
...At the Guild Theatre...
...The result is vastly encouraging...
...The difference in feeling you will gather from it is quite amazing, even though most plays of the kind are written in entire sympathy with the younger group...
...But something is missing besides familiar faces and interesting personalities— and that something is the fresh audacity which breaks forth when a group of youngsters are on their mettle to do or die...
...A large cast of notables helps to make this little sketch a thing of life and pathos...
...A minor producer will sometimes star a player temporarily to add to his own producing prestige, but those whose names are always billed first, under whatever management they appear, are few and conspicuous...
...As Pere Marlotte he is utterly captivating...
...In the case of an acted play, it is largely the director who determines for you which viewpoint you will take...
...A few years ago, a theatrical child appeared on the stage of the old Garrick Theatre almost unsponsored by its august parent, the Theatre Guild...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 7
