Life — April 21, 1921 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

Another Murder S propaganda against capital punishment and the theory A of the infallibility of district attorneys and thumb-prints, emesis” is highly effective. As thrilling melodrama it is only partially so, No one who has seen this latest play of Augustus Thomas’ can ever hear of a man’s being convicted because of his thumb- prints withont rushing to the telephone to call up the Governor and insist that there has been a mistake somewhere. And the next time a district attorney tries to convince us that any man at all is guilty of anything, our answer is going to be: . For in “Nemesis” a murderer so successfully leaves the imprint of another man’s thumb on the knife (by means of a simple ruse which it will cost you only $2.75 to learn) that the innocent man is sent to the chair by a persuasive district at- torney, while the guilty one stands outside the wall of Sing Sing and taunts the Empire State of New York with being his accomplice. You'll die laughing. QQ 988868 “qs is a good big idea, but not quite capacious enough to hold four acts and seven scenes. And no idea would be big enough to hold the first act, in which a lot of people whose names you are constantly getting mixed sit around in evening clothes and kid cach other on philosophy and psycho- analysis and quote DeQuincey with unconvincing familiarity. That line of dialogue is all right in some little art theatre which used to be an orangeade-booth, but when there is murder afoot in a man’s-size auditorium, it is no time for a seminar in parlor psychiatry. And it is no slur on the present tone of the American stage to say that it is practically impossible to assemble a large cast of actors and actresses in a drawing-room scene and set them to talking science without the lines sounding as lines sound which your little boy has learned by heart to tell the grocer. Mr. Cohan hf cted a polished and accomplished cast, in- cluding more than the average number of beautiful women and several impressive-looking gentlemen, all of whom appear highly intelligent, and yet as soon as the talk becomes a little more than ankle-deep you find yourself wondering what would happen if the learned young doctor, for instance, were suddenly called upon by some one in the audience to dilate on the subject on his own hook beyond the point to which it is carried in his copy of the script. No one need fecl insulted at being told that he or she does not give a complete illusion in quoting Greek writers or look like a person who would talk psychiatry. In fact, it is prefer- able not to look that wa: But playwrights ought to take into consideration in writing drawing-room scenes involving scientific conversation that the cast is not going to be recruited from the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. LIFE Furthermore, the scientific and cultural conversation which Mr. Thomas has furnished his characters in the first act is of a brand to heighten the effect of the whole scene’s being laid in Gopher Prairie on Gentlemen's Night of the Thanatopsis Club, | A eae UT once the plot is established and it is obvious that Olive Tell, as the young wife of the old silk merchant, thrills guiltily every time Pedro de Cordoba enters the room, the thing picks up. Emmett Corrigan is the old silk-merchant, and commits as quiet and matter-of-fact a murder as has been done on the local boards for some time. No fuss, no banging about. Just a momentary pressure on the larynx and a deft jab with the ever-present paper-knife (a paper-knife is never at hand when you want to cut leaves, but always when you are murder- ing someone. Is that right?), a dusting off of the hands with a handkerchief, followed by a careful pulling down of the waistcoat, and there you are! But all along you never can believe that he is going really to kill Miss Tell. She looks much too attractive to die in the third act of a four-act play. A courtroom scene also helps bring the piece to an interesting conclusion, especially with John Craig playing the District Attorney. For some reason everyone is always vitally inter- ested in a scene in which a witness details, on oath, that he took the Lexington avenue subway at 18th street at 5:15 P.M. and got off at 51st street and walked west to Madison avenue. I say much the same thing each night when I get home, and yet no one in my family ever falls out of her seat with ite- ment listening to my account, as I did listening to Mr. de Cordoba tell how he came downtown on a surface car to 43rd street and went into the Biltmore to telephone. It didn’t seem as if I could bear the nervous tension any longer when I heard him tell the court that he dined in a little restaurant on 44th street on the night of the murder. For one thing we must thank Mr. Thomas, and that is that he did not, for the sake of a happy ending, have the guilty silk merchant gallop up on a horse in the last scene and rush into the death-chamber, pulling a reprieve from the governor out from his belt and crying: “Stop! You are exccuting an inno- cent man, I killed my wife, not he!” Sis ER BENEFIT performance of Oscar Wilde’s “ An Ideal Hus- band,” in which Norman Trevor played Viscount Goring, served as a reminder of the passing of the “show him up” school of drama. In this type of play the plot revolved around the fact that the butler was told to show some one into the next room if he came, and that it usually was the wrong person who overheard the hero say something compromising about Lady Wadleigh. A rapid survey of the plays now running in New York re- veals none that depends on showing people in for its complica- tions, The butler in “The Green Goddess” is an important personage, it is true, but in the big showing-out scene of that play, in which he is dropped out the window into the gorge below, he is a more or less passive agent and not in a class with the diplomatic retainers of the Wilde school. The attempt on the part of present-day playwrights to carry on the epigram contest started in the '90’s, seems also to have comicbooks.com oo ae ee ee r r 1 1