PLAYS: UNPLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY

Pshaw! for Most of Them, and One Good One for Shaw

THERE ought to be a big chance in the play-writing business for a man who is lucky enough to know of a happily married couple. A play built around them would be as smashing a novelty as was the first Biograph entertainment. If, in addition, this couple happened to have,—oh, no, that is too much to ask. . . . Well, since I have got that far, I might as well finish, but I want to make it clear that I am not ingenuous enough to believe it practical. If, in addition, this happily married couple happened to have normal children, who weren't too. worried about their sex to eat three square meals a day, all the play-wright would have to do would be to keep his source of information a secret and go on writing a series of the most astounding dramas ever presented to a New York public.

Of course, he would be misjudged at first, but he would have the thrill of a pioneer in his work.

UNTIL then, we shall have to put up with the same old conventional, hide-bound stuff, afraid to move out of certain unconventional ruts, afraid to call a spade anything but a surgical instrument. Take " 'Ception Shoals", for instance. This play was evidently written to be a hum-dinger. The author, Mr. H. Austin Adams, late of the pulpit, probably had in mind hitting the public right between the eyes with a few well-chosen and unshellacked truths, but the public has been so often hit between the eyes of late that it is calloused in that particular spot, with the result that blows delivered there do nothing but tickle.

Now, mind you, nothing that the ex-Rev. Mr. Adams has omitted from "'Ception Shoals" can be blamed. He had got it all there. I shut my eyes during part of the performance and it sounded like a reading from the "Self and Sex" Series which I used to send for, (to be addressed to me, care of "General Delivery"). But, on the whole, the same effect could be got by distributing little pamphlets at the door to the patrons of the theatre as they went home, and letting Nazimova play "The Doll's House" or something else of a bright and cheery nature.

As it was, the audience took it pretty cheerily, which is probably not what Mr. Adams meant them to do at all. I attended a matinee performance, and was practically the only registered voter present, with the exception of one who came with his wife. And I may say, that I felt that I had been compromised. The ladies in the audience may have been impressed with the BIG, VITAL TRUTH of the thing, but they didn't let any of the good lines get by without a titter. If " 'Ception Shoals" pounded a lesson home to them, so does A1 Jolson. And I, for one, felt that the least that I could do, after sitting there all afternoon with a lot of strange women, was to call my wife and ask her to come in to dinner and some good concert (preferably a chamber musical recital) in the evening.

I SUPPOSE you think that I am afraid to tell the plot. Well, I'm not. Only it has nothing to do with the play. It deals with a young girl named Eve who has been brought up in a light-house on an island off Southern California. And incidentally, that island must have been a good eight or ten thousand miles off the coast. Her guardian had never told Eve any of the secrets of life, but that just showed how little he knew about Eve. She knew everything else hut the secrets. She knew there was something being held back.

The progress of the play is concerned with the sex-awakening of this uninformed young person. It soon ceases to be merely a sex-awakening and becomes sex-insomnia. Sex has a perfect right to awaken if it wishes, but when it takes to running all over the house and the abutting property, in its pajamas, it's time to be mixing up a sleeping potion for it. Even after Eve has been present at the birth of a child, and has been told a few plain facts by its mother, she still can't keep her mind on her studies. There is just no pleasing some folks.

Mr. Adams has done a clever, thing in ending his play with a very effective bit of tragedy. After seeing Nazimova, hugging her pitiful shawl-baby to her breast, go out into the black storm to answer the call of the spirit boy, one simply can't josh the rest of the play so much as one would like. A joke's a joke, and the joke of the thing ends when she brings out the little cradle and rocks to sleep the bundle of baby-dresses to the tune of an insane lullaby. Even the ladies in the audience didn't laugh at that. Mr. Adams is fortunate to have Nazimova to lend a touch of artistry to his clinic.

THEN, when we have been sufficiently assured that no one can be really happy in this life until he or she has taken a course in Advanced Obstetrics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, we find, after a visit to "Seremonda" that no one can be happy in this life anyway. We may flatter ourselves that we of today are about as miserable and unhappy in our home-life as any one could be, but, take it from William Lindsey and "Seremonda," the good old times in France in the 12th century were the original dark days. The minute the curtain goes up on the hall of a castle, you may be sure that things are going badly for the nice people in the cast. Nothing ever comes out right when the scene is laid in the hall of a castle.

"Seremonda" is very well-staged, unless you happen to believe that the best way to suggest a thing in scenic arrangements is to leave it out. Julia Arthur is also very well staged and makes some of the old-timers in the audience wonder if they too may not have stood the past fifteen years as well as she has. Altogether, it is quite satisfactory as a play, if that kind of play is satisfactory to you. But it still leaves the old problem unsolved as to what became of the villagers of a medieval town when they got through singing and dancing in the village square.

I have never seen a play of that period yet in which there were not at least one dozen townspeople, evenly matched, who apparently had no other business than to lurk off stage until a given signal and then prance on and perform a carefully executed folk-dance in front of the tavern, laughing and chattering the while until you'd really think they were saying something. And then—pouf! Like a shot they are gone, laughing and chattering until the last one is out of sight, when they all evidently step down into a bulkhead, for the noise stops as suddenly as it began, fortunately just in time for one of the principals to get off a line.

NOW what troubles me is, have these people no homes to which they can go? Are they a floating population, who, during the dancing and singing season, come to town and hire themselves out to fill in the long waits in village dialogue with spontaneous laughter? Of course, it is none of my business, but sometime I am going to follow a crowd of those villagers off stage and see where they go and why they stop laughing so suddenly.

And, while I am there, I am going to speak to someone about the way in which the serving-maid in the tavern is treated. That girl, in a medieval play, has no privacy whatever. Any stranger who happens by, any one of the cast who happens to want a drink, in fact, the whole transient population of the town, to say nothing of the old inhabitants, all seem to have the privilege of kissing the serving-maid, or at least of pinching her cheeks and ears. One of the first things a stranger does on entering the place, after the dancing townspeople have got out of the way, is to hug the servingmaid. If the Children's Aid Society haven't interest enough to take action to protect the poor thing, the least I can do is to bring the matter to public attention.

(Continued on page 105)

(Continued from page 45)

"HER Husband's Wife," on the other hand, has very little marital disorder and no sex problem, But it has a very noisy drunk, which is just about as bad. If the play were about the curse of drink, or the benefits of drink, it would be different, but just as the thing is almost over and people are beginning to feel for their hats,. Mr. Thomas has said to himself: "Well, I need about a page more of dialogue to fill." So he loads Mr. W. Graham Browne up with liquor and gives him "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" to sing, and the piece ends early at that.

As for the rest of the play, it is just such a one as amateur companies the country over are giving in the Gibbs Auditorium for the benefit of the Temporary Home and Day Nursery. A young wife, who feels that she is about to die, picks out a second wife for her husband, one who will take good care of him but will not make him forget his first love. The little woman thus selected as a pinch-hitter doesn't take the suggestion in the right spirit at all, and decides that she will give the "invalid" wife something to think about. So she fixes up her hair, goes in for fancy dressing and blossoms forth into such a generally attractive person that the wife decides not to die after all, but to stay around and take care of her husband herself.

I may have dreamed it, but somewhere I've heard a plot like that before. In fact, I think I wrote one like it once myself and then some kind friend, whom I have disliked ever since, told me that it was old stuff. "Her Husband's Wife" made a false start some years ago and then dropped out to wait until the new subway should be finished or something like that. Maybe that was where I heard about it. It is hard to say.

At any rate, Marie Tempest is refreshingly matterof-fact in the part of the pinch-hitter, and adds about twenty per cent to the value of her lines by her good, sensible Bostonian manner of taking and giving a joke. The part of the hypochondriac wife who decides not to die is deliciously done by Laura Hope Crews, who. bobs her curls and squints up her nose in a way that is, to speak technically, great. The entire cast would be better if they didn't have to jump about so much, for a character never really gets started on a line before he has to leap behind some one, or over a table, or into the next room. All that is needed arc a dozen swinging doors to make it a perfectly bully bangity-bang French farce. Now, when you have such excellent comediennes as Miss Tempest and Miss Crews, you don't have to jump about to get a laugh. Neither do you have to drag a noisy inebriate into the thing. Such resorts should be saved for less capable companies.

AND now let's stop being nasty and sophisticated and really enjoy ourselves. After a tour of some of the season's successes, written and acted under the Protective tariff by Americans for Americans, to drop in on. Gertrude Kingston's company in its trio of plays by Shaw and Dunsany is like laying aside "Life" to take up "Punch". It made me almost cry for sheer joy to hear the good old words used again to make new lines and to realize that here were situations, not tableaux.

Shaw may be unsound and unworthy; he may be a charlatan, and he may sneer at sacred things. He might even sneer at the Monroe Doctrine, for aught that I know. (When he does, I will gladly pay ten gold dollars for a seat). But as an evening's entertainment he makes the rest of the boys sound pretty adolescent. Having heard the bon mots which brought down the house in the plays above mentioned, just to sit and listen to the long dialogue in "The Inca of Perusalem", which might have been considered tiresome under ordinary circumstances, was meat and drink to me, and it was only on . being assured that "The Queens Enemies" and "Great Catherine" were to follow that I was kept from standing up in my seat and shouting, "Please, Miss Kingston, do it all over again. There's a good girl. You don't know what it means to me."

"The Inca of Perusalem" is a tasty bit of satire on the Kaiser and British royalty. It says on the program that it was written by "A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature," but they can't fool me. No one but Shaw would think of having an English princess afraid to send back her tea to be warmed. And, incidentally, Miss ComptonMackenzie looked for all the world like one of the Royal Family, with her 1894 coiffure and unoffending stare.

BUT in "The Queens Enemies" and "Great Catherine" the real bits of the evening are dispensed with. The former, by Dunsany, is remarkably staged and costumed, and I picked up one valuable bit of information from it. I had always thought that those Egyptian head-dresses were sheets of zinc. They look like that in all the carvings I have ever seen. But I saw one on one of the Queens enemies, and it was nothing but a towel. I should have hated to go on through life thinking that they were sheets of zinc. Supposing I should have come out with it at some tea or something. If for nothing else, I got my money's worth from that performance. But, in addition, I derived one man's-sized thrill when the ingenuous little Queen, excellently portrayed with the elbows and wrists by Cathleen Nesbitt, pulled her gentle and childlike little joke on the assembled captains of the host of her enemies. She certainly had me fooled, too.

THE last of the trio, "Great Catherine" is delightful. I don't know exactly why it is delightful, so don't ask me. Maybe it was the sight of an English captain in a red uniform dumped by an inebriated prime-minister on the bed of Catherine the Great of Russia. Maybe it was his cruel and unusual punishment at her hands, or rather her feet. Maybe it was just because the whole thing was good, solid white meat from start to finish.

Gertrude Kingston is so good as Catherine that you are apt not to notice it until the performance is all over. Then you think back on the thing and say, "By George, that wasn't really Catherine! What an ass I was! That was only some one making believe."

It may be that I am over-enthusiastic about the Kingston bill. But think of what I had been through before I got to it!