Life — November 24, 1921 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

Shooting Stars ss HE GRAND DUKE” is one of those grimly de- termined French comedies, in which Sacha Guitry, the author, has cried: “Look, look! I am gay (Je suis gai!).” But underneath it all you can see that there is a vein of satirical philosophy, or what M. Guitry and his translator, Capt. Achmed Abdullah, confidently believed to be satirical philosophy, for it is full of such searching commentaries on life as: “To be happy you must either marry the man you love or love the man you marry!” “I never think what I feel nor feel what I think.” “If the Garden of Eden had been full of men, Eve would still have offered the apple to Adam.” The whole thing rings just about as true as a tinfoil quarter. It may have been better in the original French, but I doubt it. In fact, Capt. Abdullah has been merciless in preserving the original French flavor, with the result that the comedy is entirely of one dimension, and the cyni- cism of such meringue variety as “Does she tell the truth?” “Of course not, she is a woman,” or words to that effect. Mr. Lionel Atwill is just the man to play the lead in “The Grand Duke.” He is an excellent actor, but you never for one minute forget that fact. You never, by any chance, think that he is the Grand Duke Feodor Michaelo- vitch. He is always an excellent actor, playing a trick part with ostentatious repression, and you are not at all surprised to see that he is wearing a wig. His per- formance reaches its highest point in agility when he answers “Yes” to ten or a dozen successive questions, vary- ing the monosyllable only in intonation and expert inflection. It should easily rank with Lillian Leitzel’s performance in Madison Square Garden when she turned over fifty times while hanging by one hand from a rope suspended in mid-air. The one spontaneous performance in “The Grand Duke” is that of Lina Abarbanell, and if some way could be found to keep her on the stage and at the piano throughout the play it would be one of the best musical comedies in town. vESY once in a while Pauline Lord comes along and shows us what real acting is like. Her work in “Anna Christie” is so distinguished that the ordinary phrases in a reviewer’s vocabulary (and most of them are ordinary) sound worse than saying nothing about it at all. So deep is her etching of the part of Anna Christopherson that it becomes a permanent delineation on the beholder’s mind and remains a part of his own experience. Eugene O’Neill’s play is not so momentous as Miss Lord’s contribution to it, but, for its first act alone, “Anna Christie” should be classed high among the season’s important plays. In the second act we are asked to accept not only love at first sight but love at practically no sight at all, as the almost simultaneous meeting, courtship and proposal are carried on in a dense fog at night on the deck of a coal barge. And in the last act there is that phenomenon which we always thought would just precede the collapse of Pike's Peak—an O’Neill happy ending. The author would have done well to put that fourth act in an open boat with food and water for three days and turn it out into the sea off Provincetown before sending the play into New York. But with its first and third acts, and especially with Pauline Lord and the support given her by George Marion, Frank Shannon and Eugenie Blair, “Anna Christie” be- comes one of the plays to be seen if you are old enough to vote. OLDEN DAYS” is “a comedy of youth.” This means that there is a great deal of exuberance and bounding in and out by the young actors and actresses who are the boys and girls of the play. Booth Tarkington has spoiled us for “comedies of youth.” It seems almost a penal offense tu take characters with which he could have done so much and set them to batting hokum back and forth at each other as has been done in “Golden Days.” And to think that “The Wren” failed, releasing Helen Hayes for service in this! car R several weeks now I have been nervous.and irritable, have lost interest in my food, and on one occasion snapped at a well-wisher who tried to help me on with my coat. My acquaintances began to shun me. On Monday I consulted a doctor.and told him my trouble. “What do you make out the cause to be, Doctor?” | sa He turned me out to pasture for twenty-four hour: then examined me. “I will tell you exactly, my good man,” he said. “You have, in the past year, been seeing altogether too many plays in which a young girl dresses up as a boy. You are high-strung and this irritates you and wears you down. You fret about it and allow it to prey on your mind. You must stop seeing such performances.” So this let’s me out of attending “The Skirt,” in which I understand that Bessie Barriscale masquerades as a cow- boy. It may be a good show, but doctor’s orders are doc- tor’s orders. Robert C. Benchley. comicbooks.com