Judge — May 20, 1922 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

ey | Ludwig Lewisohn vs. America HERE are two things we have always been meaning to do, and _ never got around to. One is to write a story about a fight between a giant and a dwarf, in which the giant licked the dwarf; and the other is to write a book about the theater which doesn’t say that it is going to the dogs. Neither thing has yet been done; but with a garden to look after, the job of getting back on our wooden clubs constantly confronting us, and so many good plays to see, we honestly can’t seem to find the time. Ludwig Lewisohn, a dramatic critic whom we always read, with whom we frequently agree (he will probably be sorry to hear that), and whom we profoundly pity because he takes his job so seri- ously, has just issued “The Drama and the Stage.” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.). Mr. Lewisohn doesn’t say the theater is going to the dogs, to be sure; he merely implies that, so far as America is concerned, it is there already. Of course, there are a few good plays now and then. The Theater Guild puts on something of Strindberg’s or Shaw's, or somebody else takes a flier in Russian or German realism. But, on the whole, we gather that our stage is without truth or vision or moral purpose. Well, on the whole, it is. But somehow we can't get nearly so solemn about it as Mr. Lewisohn. In fact, we probably couldn't get nearly so solemn about anything as Mr. Lewisohn. Mr. Lewisohn is a Jew. He belongs to the race which is responsible for both the worst conditions in our American theater, and the best conditions. The real estate operators who call them- selves theatrical producers, and who have strangled experiment in our play- house by raising rents, are Jews. But so are the idealistic young people who tun the Theater Guild, the best and most intelligent theater America has yet known. It proves nothing except, perhaps, that the Hebrews are natu- rally adapted to theater management. However, while I am not at all sure that the Anglo-Saxon stock which settled America wouldn’t be quite capable of the rent raising, I am sure By WALTER PRICHARD EATON that Mr. Lewisohn’s solemn soul- searching in the playhouse is foreign to them; and that, while he under- stands very well the drama of Ibsen and Hauptmann, he is constitutionally incapable of understanding the drama of Cohan and Craven. His point of view is interesting, his remarks on plays and acting are illuminating and always sincere, his book is well worth reading. But it sounds perilously like the book of a foreigner. He would have America, of course, come around to his way of thinking; every honest critic wants to swing people to his way of thinking. But it does not even occur to him that he might make an effort, at least, to get America’s point of view. It does not occur to him, for instance, to review “The First Year.” I LIKE “The Weavers” of Haupt mann, or “Justice” by Gals- worthy, as much as he does; but I am bound to admit that, so far as the American theater is concerned, “The First Year” is a more important play. When Mr. Lewisohn, by ignoring it, implies that it is nothing but the bosh and bunk and sentimental clap-trap and trivial horseplay he finds so preva- lent on our stage, he, of course, for- feits at least fifty per cent. of his usefulness as a dramatic critic; at any rate, outside of New York City, he displays a profound ignorance of the American attitude toward the drama. For that attitude determines what a critic can accomplish, and how he must accomplish it, no less than what a playwright can accomplish. Our farces, says Mr. Lewisohn, are anemic and clownish. Perhaps; but “Seven Keys to Baldpate” is some- thing totally different from anything out of the Palais Royal, and to us in- finitely less anemic, less clownish, and more satisfying. He also scores us for not appreciating Shaw—and this in face of the fact that Shaw has made a fortune out of America alone, that probably more of his plays have been acted here, a greater number of times, than the work of any other living dramatist, and over a period of 26 twenty-seven years! The truth, of course, is that we greatly appreciate Shaw because, like us, he can be serious without pulling a long face about it. We haven't, to be sure, any Shaw of our own. And we have got a lot of clap-trap dramatists—like every other nation. But for many years we have had a racy native en- tertainment which took the theater just about as seriously as we were willing ourselves to take that some- what overestimated institution, and made no pretense at pontifical preach- ment or Freudian analysis. “The First Year” is an excellent example. It is through this native drama that the improvement Mr. Lewisohn and all of us desire must come. A play like “Ambush,” which he makes so much of, is in reality of almost no impor- tance in the American theater. On the other hand, the work of Eugene O'Neill (whom he also ignores) is of first rate importance, because O'Neill, for all his brute seriousness of imag- ination, works in the American idiom. Perhaps the divergence of view point is hopeless. Mr. Lewisohn gives poor old William Archer a terrible dressing down because he wrote “The Green Goddess,” after translating Ibsen. But why shouldn't he? If we'd translated Ibsen, we should feel more like writing the “Music Box Review.” Doubtless, too, Mr. Archer needed the money. The theater isn’t such a sacred place that it is any dis- grace to write a melodrama for it, or even to enjoy a melodrama init. In fact, a great many intelligent men and women are rather bored in the theater by the kind of play Mr. Lewi- sohn likes, not because they do not understand it, but because it seems to them at best but a rather feeble ren- dering of reality. Like Grant Allen, they want a farce or a vaudeville. Alas, to be quite honest, Mr. Lewi- sohn's humorless, critical attitude strikes us in much the same way. It bores us a trifle. We would rather watch George Jean Nathan turning cart wheels in Judge. or Alec Wool- cott making naughty faces in the New York Times.