Judge — April 8, 1922 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

UGENE O'NEILL seems to be pushing his talent too hard. He is writing too much. He is not giving his plays time to grow up. He sends them out to work while they are still in swaddling clothes. They need more of his care, more of his atten- tion. It may be all right for a hack playwright to let his plays go out and work for him, but an artist must keep his plays at home and work for them. He must nurture them until they are mature. O'Neill is an artist, but he is conducting himself unlike one. “The First Man,” for example, no more represents the Eugene O'Neill of “The Straw,” “Beyond the Horizon” and “The Emperor Jones” than all the plays that Zoé Akins has written in the last eight years represent the author of “Papa.” It is the kind of play that might have been written by any one of a dozen American play- wrights. Had O'Neill left it in his desk drawer for a month or so, and taken another look at it, no one would have appreciated this more than he. There are in the manuscript flashes of his skill and power, but he has not taken time to develop them. The flashes thus give one the impression of so much stage lightning. Behind them is no storm of authentic human emo- tion. O’Neill’s play is an attempt to or- chestrate Strindberg for the bass drum, cornet and ratchet. It is loud with false alarums and cut-rate excursions. It is as if its author had been seized with an idea directly after the eighth cocktail and had written it down at top speed while the ninth was being shaken. There is no evidence of re- flection, assay, meditation. It is all as hot as the Sahara, and as monoto- nous and empty. Its central char- acter, a scientist whose dream of adventurous glory and love is invaded by the birth of an unwanted child, is a figure less out of life than out of a second-rate Brieux boulevard-bumper. A SECOND recently produced play, “The Hairy Ape,” while not with- out crudities doubtless similarly due to its author’s present self-pressure, is infinitely better work. The play lies in the spectacle of a great, dumb O’Neill, Cohan and De Pzchiotrzviskzi By Georce Jean NaTHAN brute’s futile efforts to adjust him- self to modern civilization, together with modern civilization’s reactions to him. This central figure, J. Isadore Neanderthal, is escorted by O’Neill through a succession of episodes that gradually batter into his groping con- sciousness the absence of any niche in the scheme of the modern world into which he fits. The end, a morsel out of Poe and the Rue Chaptal, shows us Isadore in the death embrace of a giant chimpanzee. Even a park zoo has no place for him. Whatever the critical faults of the play, there is no gainsaying that it is extremely effective in the theater. It is melodrama, but it is melodrama with intelligence substituted for “props.” The leading defect of “The Hairy Ape,” as of “The First Man,” is its intense thematic seriousness. The subject matter of neither play, it seems to me, warrants quite so much frown- ing gravity. O'Neill, for all that is said to the contrary, is surely a dra- matist not without humor, albeit derisory humor; yet in this brace of plays he narrows his eyes, tightens his lips, and goes at life with a stiletto. There is, of course, something to be said critically for such an approach, but I find that, on the present occa- sion, I am not the one to say it. WHERE O'Neill often looks upon life with the eyes of an under- taker, George M. Cohan habitually looks upon it with the eyes of a boot- legger. Life, to Mr. Cohan, is a melodramatic farce with a trick end- ing. I speak, obviously, of the Mons. Cohan as a professional playwright. For aught I know, he may, in private, view the world as a very dinky merry- go-round with a broken organ, and with Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind, Andreyev, Tchekov and Dr. Berthold Baer riding all the horses. But, re- flected in his plays, we engage the Mons. Cohan as the bad boy whose chief joy is placing a tack on the chair of any colleague who takes drama and life seriously. “Madeleine and the Movies” is the latest Cohan exhibit. Where “Seven Keys to Baldpate” exploded a torpedo 8 upon the pantaloons of the best-seller, the present farce clouts the moving picture scenario over the ear with a stuffed club. Although the general device is familiar through repeated use, Cohan still contrives to extract a considerable measure of fun out of the old punching-bag. George Cohan is a figure who has always interested me, even on such occasions as his plays have not. He is, perhaps, the most expert theatrician of our playhouse. No man under- stands so well as he the sheer me- chanics of the popular showshop. He founded a type of popular entertain- ment that has been copied profitably by a dozen other less original and imaginative caterers to the public taste. Though “The Fortune Hunter,” “Turn to the Right,” “The Champion,” “The Meanest Man in the World,” “It Pays to Advertise,” “Welcome Stranger,” “Thank You,” and a score of plays like them were not signed with Cohan’s name, they could never have been written had he not written them before their authors did. They are not “art,” these plays, but they represent the popular theater of America as no other plays represent it. FoR many years it has been more or less the critical fashion to sneer at Cohan. Fifteen years ago all those critics who considered Charles Rann Kennedy, Percy Mackaye, Da- vid Belasco and Augustus Thomas the true priests of American dramatic culture never missed an opportunity to belittle Cohan as a playwright on the ground that he wore a funny-look- ing derby on the street and talked through his nose. (Although it has nothing to do with the case, a popular Scandinavian playwright of some years ago wore an even funnier-looking hat on the street and also talked through his nose. His first name was Henrik.) To-day all those critics who consider Owen Davis’s “The Detour” and Clemence Dane’s “A Bill of Divorce- ment” masterpieces of dramatic art continue the habit of dismissing Cohan as a playwright on the ground that he is not a member of the Actors’ Equity Association, some of whose charming (Continued on page 31) comicbooks.com