Beaten, Bewildered Victims Are "We The People" (The Week on the Stage)
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
Beaten, Bewildered Victims Are "We The People" The Week on the Stage By Joseph T. Shipley THE "RAW" MATERIAL *fi'E, THE PEOPLE." A play in twenty eeetin. By Elmer Rice. At the Empire. The raw...
...Revolution...
...indeed, the play is a aort of monodrama: all American life is exposed as it widens to the opening eyes of the patriotic school teacher, Helen Davis, as she looks about or reads the papers or hears her lover tell of his family's ways...
...This is the vague question the middle class is beginning to face...
...Death by starvation...
...and—the remainder of the cast...
...We, the People" shows the awakening of a typical, loyal, old American middle-class family, its gradual recognition that this is no' a land of milk and honey, that "liberty and justice for all" is the expression of an ideal, a pious wish, not a fact...
...None of them is fully developed, nor his point of view argued...
...Herthe Thiele and Rorthea Wieck head the cast...
...it is staged with fidelity and an eye for the dramatically effective, and the large cast carries superbly along...
...The film as shown at the Cameo has completed English titles, which were written by...
...Jennie Goldstein to Star at Holland Theatre Jennie Goldstein and her entire supporting company in "The Struggle for a Mother," the actress' current Jewish dramatic hit, will begin a limited engagement in that play as guest artists at the Brooklyn Rolland Theater, starting today...
...All these many levels and aspects of life are the more sharply contrasted in that no effort is made to make them blend...
...it preaches no creed: it shows...
...What is the answer...
...as in life, one path crosses another, now consciously one- force drives, now unconsciously two purposes conflict...
...The Negro servant lashes at white interference in Haiti—where the runaway son, turned marine, is killed...
...The Corporal has received an arm wound in the war, and three bravery stripes, and the flu' (which returned most every year), and all seemed equally accidental, once he bad been "caught in the draft...
...If I had to pick individuals for special mention, I should point out Maurice Wells as Cotton Mather's descendant, Professor Sloane, Frank Wilson, as the Negro servant: "Too bad that God ran out o' whitewash...
...Opening in a school room, with the teacher scolding an Italian shoe-mender because his son damns the bosses in class, the play shows how this young teacher comes face to face with facts, as under the pressure of economic forces they cannot Understand or control the family disintegrates, just as war and poverty break up the family of her lover...
...How can Helen know...
...at Washington, he was drifting along—toward what...
...rtoine, out of w irk for two years, at times arrested for vagrancy but released because of his war record, given the "bums' rush" with the B.E.F...
...but how can she, how can any of the hitherto contented bourgeois—now that their life has betrayed them —find a way out...
...Madchen in Uniform" Third Week at Cameo "Mfidchen in Uniform," success, ful Continental film, directed by Leontine Sagin, will be held over for a third week at popular pricei at the RKO Cameo Theatre...
...but for a full and dramatic presentation of the symptoms of the disease, go visit "We, the People...
...The drama is no place to seek solutions for the problems that our social system is dying under...
...A slice of life," they say of naturalistic novels...
...NotaUes Laud "Yoehe KaJk" A galaxy of notables, representing the theatre, literature and, communal leadership, who have hi the past few weeks viewed Maurice Schwartz's production of "Yoehe Kalb' at the Yiddish Art Theatre, have expressed in letters and telegrams to Mr...
...Not only every phase of life, from college*, jp .factory to Washington Senate to mortgaged small home and impoverished farm, is shown or pointed with a passing finger, but every type of American, satisfied scion of wealth, patrotic middlc-olnss townsman, rebel of several sorts, passes over this varied scene...
...Schwartz their admiration for the play and their 'nthusiasm for the production...
...yet not even "An American Tragedy" gives as many thick slices, raw, of American life as Rice has proffered in the twenty swift scenes of "We, the People...
...I can not think of a single phase of the breakdown of ideals- and character Bnd institutions and finance, one trail of their consequences, that is not at least indicated in this moving photograph...
...The misery, the wretchedness of life, its gross unfairness, are all too apparent...
...The play, in which the noted Yiddish star scored a success at her own Bronx Prospect Theater, will be offered as the week-end attraction at the Rolland...
...Lion Feuchtwanger, Morris Ge.it, Claude G, lloweis, Max D. Stuuer, Fanni* Rrice, Lew Leslie, Benjamin Holz¦hii and Jacob Billikopf...
...Do you know...
...B3 its slender savings crumple in ruined banks, as its homes and farms are torn from long-striving fingers, as all the solid bases of its ideals and aspirations turn quicksand...
...America being essentinlly a bourgeois land, Rice has of late been consistently middle-class in...
...The raw material of revolution la spread on the stage of the Empire, once the home of beautiful trifling, now ironically chosen for the most comprehensive survey of our civilization the drama yet has offered...
...The beaten, bewildered Btate of mind the play pictures is epitomized in the Excorporal who makes one of the speeches at the meeting where the .Davis boy is arrested...
...Ma*inofr, Fannie Hurst | Eddie Cantor, Rabbi Nathsa Krass, Dr...
...his background and implied philosophy...
...Despite the newspaper outcry, this is not a propaganda play...
...Stephen S. Wise, Rabbi Louis I. Newman, Dr...
...The program scheduled for Saturday evening will be devoted to the music of Russia and will include The League of Composer's Quartet and Sergei Radamsky, tenor...
...the judge who condemns young Davis to death is son of the owner of a great syndicate of newspapers, friend of the employer who has discharged Davis's father, who is shot in an unemployment parade outside the factory gates...
...always the weaker, the poorer, is forced into further poverty by the wealthy and strong...
...the late Donald Freeman...
...Henry Cowell Over WEVD Henry Cowell, composer and pianist, presents an International Exchange Corfcert of the work of, contemporary European composers | every Saturday night at 8:15 p. m. over Station WEVD...
...It is, however, a sort of dramatic tract, for at the end, without preaching a doctrine, it cries for an end of abuse, of rank and rankling injustice...
...While "We, the People" lacks the poetry, the "gift of metaphor," that might lift it to great art, it moves with a gathering of realistic details that accumulate masr force...
...Among them are: Jed Harris, Channing Pollock, Carl Van Vechten, Fan...
Vol. 15 • February 1933 • No. 5
