Judge — February 28, 1931 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

lic GEORGE J weeks ago at the Bijou Th exactly the kind of play that a censor- ship, if we had one, would get terribly worked up about. It is only for this reason, and because of the philosophi- cal titbits deducible therefrom, that I venture to mention the exhibit at all. atre, was s the rubbish did, with il- men, with an aged spinster who elabo- rately hinted that she had had her share of esoteric fun, and with dia- logue concerned largely with leering allusions to matters customarily re- served for dime anatomical museums and the Sunday sermons in our more fashionable churches, it is reasonable to suppose that it would have been pie for the indignations of official moral- ists and censors. With loud yells of wrath, with lengthy interviews in the newspapers, with much applause on the part of the clergy, and with Canon Chase, Mr. Sumner and the editor of the Christian Science Monitor serving congratulatory free pink lemonade all around, the hired smut-dousers would undoubtedly have earned their wages three times over in an expenditure of their zeal upon it. But, since official censorship was not yet in office when the play was produced, what were the sad results upon the susceptible mind of the public? They were just these: 1,, the susceptible and easily corrupt- ible public was so bored by the show that it couldn't sit it out; 2., the dirty lines evoked only derisory and dis- gusted groans; and 3., the producer lost his socks on the enterprise. In order to corrupt a public's mor- als—assuming that a play could do any such thing—it would be necessary for it to combine the persuasion of a gifted and clever philosopher, a very aphrodisiacal young woman, a couple of quarts of champagne, with maybe three or four Cointreaux as chasers, a Strauss waltz directed by Stokowski, 0 and a satisfactory assurance that one wouldn't have to get down to the office the next morning before noon. Well, I have been going to the theatre regu- larly for more than twenty-five years now—and I am no saint—but doggone me if I've vet seen a play, however much I’ve prayed for one, that had any substantial trace of that persua- sion. It would take a lot more hyp- notic writing, shrewd argument, agi- tating actresses and emotional can- tharides than the drama has thus far shown to ruin anyone above the intel- ligence quota of a censor or a married city magistrate. And when, as in the instance of such a cheése-piece as “In the Best of Families,” the writing is plain lousy, the smut is as heavy as lead and the acting is godawful, the only conceivable person who can be or who actually is ruined is the poor dolt who has spent his money to put the show on, Such shows not only do not exercise an immoral effect, but really exercise an eminently moral one, for even the Icosest fellow gags at filth when it is shoveled at him in all its nasty smell. To be even mildly stimulating, dirt— e the heroine of Bernstein's “The —has to put on lace undies and a few pink ribbons. One of the kids I used to play with in childhood days —a boy who promised to land in jail for rape, mayhem, bigamy and any number of such peccadilloes before he was twelve—grew up to be the only one of five s re and honest ministers of the gospel that I know of in America, and all because it was his papa’s saga- cious practise in the lad’s nonage to take him around to the town’s miser- able bawdy houses and dives generally and let him disgust himself with what he saw. The old-time bawdy houses are no more, but the papas of today couldn't do better than to buy out the house for such stuff as “In the Best of Families” and forcibly make their kids sit through it. If censors had any sense—which they have in the degree that jackasses have gold teeth 16 ACTIRIE NASIHIAN —they would encourage the produc- tion of these pornographic depres- sants instead of putting the lid on them. If they were honest, they would dig up the money from their own pock ets to subsidize plays of the kind by way of improving the community morals. Charitably and in their be half, I herewith propose a subsidized community playhouse for the good of public morality. As a repertoire 1 nominate not only this late Bijou ex- hibition, but these other plays pro- duced during the last two seasons: “A Primer For Lovers,” “The Amor- ous Antic,” “The Unsophisticates,” “Love, Honor and Betray,” “Little Orchid Annie,” and “Made in France.” * * « Avotien exhibit—although one of a far different. complexion—which developed violent symptoms of pruri- tus storehousibus soon after its curtain went up on the opening night was “Rock Me, Julie,” by Mr. Kenneth Raisbeck. The M. Raisbeck, it ap pears, is no low box-office fellow but one with a passionate impulse to do something in the way of drama that will earn him the accolade of the criti cal haut monde. That he would rather hobnob in the encyclopedia with the O'Neills and Kellys than at bank di rectors’ meetings with the Shipmans and Hattons is evident. But that he still has a long way to go before his back will show bruises from encomias. tic whacks is even more plainly evi- dent. Mr. Raisbeck who, I understand, is a sergeant-at-arms of Prof. Baker's play-brewery at Yale, suffers first of all from a vagueness so intense that it is impossible to figure out whether he is a genius or a Schafskopf. Either his meditations and ratiocinations ar: so intricately profound that the mer: yman cannot penetrate them, or y are so involvedly bewildered that y do not mean anything at all. In this, his first play, I believe, to be shown on Broadway, he had a tale to (Continued on page 32) comicbooks.com