"PETRIFIED FOREST" COMES TO LIFE AT THE BROADHURST
"Petrified Forest" Comes To Life At The Broadhurst The Week on the Stage By Joseph T. Shipley THE SENTIMENTAL AGE f-TUB PRTHIF1FP FOREST." By Robert Sherwood. At the Broudhurtt. Alan i» an...
...Try again: A sentimental dreamer, author of one novel and then drifting, finds in an Arizona gas station and lunch room a charming maid...
...Peggy Conklin, as Gabrielle, makes r#sl the yearn of unplumed youth...
...Chisholm, and the fearful killer Duke Mantee...
...A kindly killer, running from a gang massacre to freedom in Mexico, is ( sentimental enough to atop in his .flight and fire the beneficent bullet...
...Being ar...
...Under our own masking*, our stony control, which of these— each of us asks—am I? All these stories, and implications, and more, are woven into "The Petrified Forest" by Robert Sherwood and built into an artistic unity by Leslie Howard, whose suave personality pervades the work and gives the frustrate weakling the strength of a wider than individual significance: through him we see the plight of the intellectual, the "in-betweener," in these days of vehemently taking sides...
...For a brief spell, some person or incident may wake us from this petrified state, and we reveal our inmost selves—as here do" thisfrustrated novelist, the big boy Boze, the yearning Gabrielle, the wife of the wealthy Mr...
...Here in tfsnmatic sequence these souls are bared, and ,we watch, fascinated and a bit uneasy...
...she readn the failure her pet poem, and in its words he dreams that she shall reach the heights he has gazed on from below...
...Child of an American Legion lion and a French woman who in desperation has gone back to Fiance, Gabrielle shows this dreamer gome of the drawings she has been making in secret, and confides to him her .dream of going to France to be a great artist...
...Alan i» an "in-between," born in 1901, one of the generation "too young for th« war and too old for the revolution...
...and there he wants to be buried...
...Fate gives him the chance...
...and daddy .wants to go to Hollywood, where there's a bigger and better American Legion...
...When liberal, intellectual, are terms of contempt, when—aneh men as the novelist in the play, pressed by the overwhelming move- ( ment of the world toward "some way out'' (though it wars again, over the direction...
...Hitching his way to the Pacific to consider drowning in its depths, he finds the perfect symbol for himself in Arizona, in the petrified forest...
...By good chance she has a volume of the poems of Villon...
...are either born by the current or cast aside «»^driftwood, jetsam P_f the tides of time...
...But skinflint grandpa won't cash his Liberty bonds...
...These days when one who is not ready to give his life for a m--, «•— cause is deemed already dead...
...So there's only ope .thing to do: the failure (and former gigolo) makes Gabby the ¦beneficiary of his |5,000 life insurance policy, and dies...
...intellectual (but also a weakling) this swift-moving world, with the violent activity of the Communists and the gangsters, has made him feel frustrate, useless...
...Blanche Si has an excellent moment of bellion against her staid ird tions...
...Try once more:) Life is for most( of us a forest in/ which we are (to', some extent willingly) petrified, held strong-hearted and not revealing our true selves by all sorts of conventions and inhibitions...
...Humphrey Bogart it natural, almost friendly, kil end the rest of an excellent i combine with these to make " Petrified Forest" not only excil but the most stimulating play the season...
Vol. 18 • January 1935 • No. 63
