Judge — June 1933 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

| | | | HE theatre is pretty quick to recognize honesty in playwriting and to applaud it. But, having recognized it and duly applauded it, the theatre frequently fails to honor it with enough audience trade over a period of time to make it a good paying proposi- tion. More often than not the theatre prefers to lay out its customers’ biggest money for dramatic dishonesty and clever fraud. It is thus that an honest play like Albert Bein’s “Little OF is generally preordained for small box- office returns, while artiully concocted artificial stuff in which all the guests due at a New York dinner party are argued to have private lives indistin- guishable from those of the characters in Gorki’s “Night Refuge.” or in which a lusty young Tyrolean sneaks off to a mountain retreat with a palpitating fair one, dallies in a bed of crocuses with her, and contents himself with a wistful kiss, rounds up the mazuma Bein’s play has the critical virtue of persuading one of its first-hand knowl- edge and inner authenticity. It pictures, simply and with an often pleasing di- rectness, life in a boys’ reformatory; its bitter humor, its terror, and—so far as presumed consequences of social merit go—its complete reconstructive futility, Its relative measure of force and effect is derived from the very in- cence of its manner of writing. So . so good, But, with all his gifts, it is Bein’s acute misfortune that he has been unable to give his exhibit a rounded and full-bodied dramatic air. It persists as something insufficientl) developed, sketchy. It is like a good, hearty meal served with chop-sticks One of the encouraging aspects of the local theatre is the number of producers who at one time or another seriously and magnanimously considered doing this play. That so many discerned that it was worth doing even counterbal- ances the fact that eventually none o them actually did it. The present and al producer, Mr. Hammond, is to be commended for jumping in where the other angels failed to tread. He doubt- soy of George less has a commercial dud on his hands, but one hopes that he will find his due reward in the theatrical hereafter. Among the boys performing the play, t lad named Meredi another named Philips, and a small kid named Thomas are to be singled out for critical deco- rations NM farce concerned with the didoes in a tabloid newspaper office. It was ¢€ to dismiss it as a very poor play, wh assuredly it was, but in it one detected s that some professor like tge S. Kaufman might have ma- nipulated to fairly amusing ends, Even as it stood, indeed, it is my dollar that id Kaufman could have laid hands on it and, with some of his expert and tricky direction, converted it into passable pastime. The boys responsible for the exhibit are, I am informed, privy to the mys- teries of tabloid editorial sanctums but it needs no one to inform me, or any- one e€ who figured in their sparse udiences, that neither of them is privy to the mysteries of dramaturgy. That is one of the obvious de N Bites Dog,” by the MM. Lochbiler and Barton, was a ie says the afores eneies of our current showhouse. So many of its plays are not being written by play- wrights. We engage any number of young men with the right dramatic ma- terials who are unable to put them into dramatic form and an almost equal number of older men with the wrong dramatic materials, materials stale and hollow, who are gifted in putting them atic form. It is a pity the two groups can’t get together. There was some potentially amusing stuff in “Man but the in- competence of the authors and the di- rector left it in its cocoon. The whole enterprise remained in statu pupillari. into the drar “NINE Pine Street,” by the MM. AN Colton and Miles, based on the Lizzie Borden murder case, was a better job but it, also, called for more imag- inative playwriting and, above all, for 8 THEATRE Jean Nathan some style in direction. True enough, the authors greatly improved upon the original manuscript by two other hands. but at the conclusion of their second act they found that hardly anything d matic remained to be said and said it in terms that scarcely concealed its ab- sence, As visualized by the playwrights, the celebrated Lizzie was revealed as a k of O'Neill's “Mourning Becomes Electra,” a creature impelled by unmistakable, if unsta acteristics, all of Lavinia o1 rd, sex char- to a New England conscience, toward murder and sul e quent grim isolation from the outside world. The machinery of the play's plot followed pretty closely the f criminal record. The original manu- script, which was submitted some time ago to my critical eye, related that rec- ord baldly; the revising playwrigh showed more fancy by injecting into it ¢ flavor and acid of the New England of the day, along with a faint suggestion of various colorings of the period. But much more, as has been noted, was needed. Particularly as all suspense was automatically remov from the play beforehand by virtue the wide public familiarity with the events with which it dealt. Criticism of the performance of the leading role Lillian Gish, I leave to my colleague ous nething of N “Best Sellers,” by Edouard Bour- det, I could discern only very mild— very, tainment. It is possible that a sprightlier adapting hand might have injected juices into the play that would have given it some added life, but in its local revealment the whole thing, aside from a fairly divert- ing scene or two, seemed rather flat going. Nor was it helped any by the puzzling casting of its two chief roles. Bourdet, who reached his height in the excellent “The Captive,” has turned out to be a considerable critical disap- pointment. He has now written three. plays that have little more than a clef motif to hold audiences even in his na- (Page 32, please) very mild—en'