Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

"The Old Soak" of Don Marquis Furnishes a Good Word for a Horrible Example

HEYWOOD BROUN

THERE must be some sort of initiation to which every reviewer submits before he begins the business of going to the theatre to write about plays. The details of the ceremony are hazy in our mind by this tme but we have a vague recollection that there was something in the oath by which we were pledged to remain true to form and technique. Proper penalties for disloyalty were prescribed and accordingly before saying that The Old Soak is great fun we are obliged to mention the fact that it is a very bad play-

It could be a much better play without sacrificing the fun. The conventionality of the plot does not help at all. But, curiously enough, neither does it hurt very much. On the whole Don Marquis has disarmed criticism by the engaging manner in which he has done those parts of the play which are simply dreadful. His manner is that of a child saying, "I'm not standing in the corner any more." We got the impression that the dramatist was telling us, "Now if you'll just bear with me for a little while and remain quiet during some stuff about a young clerk that steals the bonds and all that, you and I and the Old Soak can have a lot of fun together."

Fair Play For the Demon Rum

FOR us this promise was made good. We were able to bear up even though the young man became short in his account and ran around with an actress and fell in the clutches of a villainous old deacon. Al, the ex-bartender, and the Old Soak, and the hootch drinking parrot were merely waiting their chance. The plot was no more than a few remarks by the toastmaster.

The best of The Old Soak is as richly humorous as anything which has been written for the American stage in our time. Comparison with Light nin' is inevitable. Here again is a figure sketched from life and tinted by a fantastic imagination. Winchell Smith was able to take Frank Bacon's creation and surround it with a pretty good play, or at any rate a play in which familiar conventions were used dexterously. The stuffing in the Marquis play is not nearly so good as this, but at least it serves to heighten the humors of the Old Soak by contrast.

Unquestionably this central figure is treated sentimentally. But the joy of the occasion lies in the fact that for once the horrible example is exalted. By an act of dogmatic courage, liquor is pictured as a benediction which burns away everything gross and material in man. Of course New York theatregoers are familiar with theories of salvation by home-made peach jam and country air and now the formula is reversed. The demon rum shows that at heart he is not such a bad fellow after all. Perhaps this is merely a wile of Satan, but everyone who is at all moved by pity for the under dog must rejoice at having a good word said for the lost and the dissolute.

Harry Beresford has brought to the role of the Old Soak an extraordinary, winning wistfulness. He is neither sweet nor roguish and the heart of the playgoer warms to him. Almost as good is the performance of Robert E. O'Connor as Al, the bartender. It is Al who boasts to the wicked bootlegger that the business cannot get along without him because he knows "every drinking man in Nassau County." Incidentally the bootlegger is not represented as wicked because of his traffic but rather on account of the fact that he bootlegs for money and "not out of a friendly feeling for liquor." But the best line of the evening goes to Clem Hawley, the Old Soak, who remarks, "Heredity runs in our family."

The Wit of "The Torch Bearers"

AS far as wit goes, 'The 'Torch Bearers by George Kelly seems to us the outstanding piece of the season. It is a two act play stretched into three and nothing much is left for the last third of the evening . But before the play crumples and dies it has more than justified itself , in merriment. Mr. Kelly is a playwright of the varieties and he feels no reverence or responsibility for plots. His farce-comedy concerns nothing more complicated than the fact that an American business man comes home after an absence and finds that his wife is going to take part in some amateur theatricals. He thinks that she will be terrible. He goes to the play and finds that she is. Here are two acts. The last conveys to us the man's anger about the amateurs which seems quite unreasonable and is not very interesting.

The fun lies in the shrewd and full detail with which a dress rehearsal and a performance by the amateurs are displayed to us. Perhaps the play makes a certain demand for an audience which has itself ventured at one time or another into amateur theatricals. This however, hardly necessitates a hand picked collection of spectators. The Vanity Fair reviewer, for instance, has never ventured farther in dramatics than once assuming the role of a member of a mob in a college production, and yet all the incidents of the rehearsal scene of The Torch Bearers seemed to him familiar and delightful. Mr. Kelly has given us the ambitious leading man who is beginning to take up gestures in a serious way, the young woman who tries to get a tear into her voice and the ever so competent coach who keeps breaking into to speak about tempo.

This first act is satirical and the second act is burlesque. Now the performance is actually in progress and Mr. Kelly permits his audience to watch it from behind the scenes. From this point of vantage we are able to see the frantic efforts of the prompter to find the place and we are allowed to share the back stage horrors over every mishap. Although the players are amateurs one or two have professional instincts. Thus, when the heavy man's moustache falls off he makes only two attempts to put it back. One of the features of the evening is the performance of Mary Boland as the amateur leading lady. A fund of deft and ready comedy is at her command. It is an almost effortless performance.

An Individual Triumph

HOWEVER, there is nothing of news value in the announcement that Mary Boland has a gift for the theatre. To us the dramatic sensation of the month was the appearance of Helen Gahagan in Dreams for Sale by Owen Davis. Miss Gahagan is almost brand new to Broadway. Barnard College is only a step behind her and yet she gave'every indication of being an actress of high promise and considerable finish. Not only does Miss Gahagan seem to have the potentialities for depicting large and sweeping emotions, but she is well versed in the art of doing little things well. It was our impression that these small touches came to an actress only after years of study and experience. Apparently the years of effort in stock are not obligatory. At any rate they are not obligatory for Miss Gahagan.

This young actress happens to be unusually beautiful and that is generally a handicap. Often loveliness imposes a mood of reverential adoration on the part of an audience which makes it all but impossible for the actress to score at all in comedy. Miss Gahagan deals so cleverly with the comedy scenes which have been entrusted to her that it becomes possible to forget, or at least overcome, the acute consciousness that here is striking beauty. The play begins well and slumps into conventional melodrama of open spaces and close financiers.

Beauty, not of an individual but of a production, dulled our enjoyment of the Greenwich Village Follies a little. It seems to us that John Murray Anderson has an amazing sense of color, but we wish he would pick out somebody else to select his jokes. The costumes are silk and the humor is shoddy. One exception must be made in favor of Savoy and Brennan, who are even more rowdy than usual and enormously funny. We are also told by reliable scouts that Jack Hazzard has a hilarious number. On the first night this was delayed until well along toward midnight and escaped us.

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But aside from laughter The Greenwich Village Follies have almost everything. Magnificence and imagination are both present. The spectator feels again and again, "How beautiful!" without ever being moved to wonder, "How much did it cost?"

For us, the rest of the month marks a series of adventures in disappointment. Most poignant of these mishaps was The Endless Chain by •James Forbes. In The Famous Mrs. Fair it seems to us that Mr. Forbes wrote one of the best of American comedies. He has also to his credit such joyous achievements as The Show Shop and The Chorus Lady. Our diagnosis of the difficulty with The Endless Chain is a growing desire on the part of the playwright to preach In the unconscious of us all there dwells a John Roach Straton who will get us if we don't watch out. This preaching impulse is fatal to humor. Once a man begins to extend his forefinger he loses all sense of perspective. The dramatist intent upon a moral effect has to twist life about to suit his purposes.

In The Endless Chain, for instance, Mr. Forbes has set out to try and persuade young America that it is a bad thing to spend more money than you have. Of course this is very laudaKi. but many of the things which hapnen to the young couple of the play are ⅛ asters brought by the will of the play' wright rather than the inexorable hand of fate. One particular situation ⅛ the comedy is directly achieved by com pelling the heroine to keep silent con cerning something which she should have told by every law of logic and common sense.

Even the humorous moments are somewhat heavily managed. Epigram is fitted neatly into epigram, but Mr Forbes has forgotten to brush away the sawdust left by his carpentering The only triumph of the evening belongs to a player. Entrusted ' with a role none too convincing, Mis Margaret Lawrence, unabashed, proceeds to go ahead and give the best performance of her career. At the present moment it seems to us that acting in America has moved a whole stride ahead of playwriting.

Arthur Richman has not done justice to Marie Tempest in A Serpent's Tooth. Miss Tempest disturbs us a little by giving the suggestion that she is ever on the point of doing an aside.

Indeed some of her lines are spoken in that manner. But there can be no question that she is a marvelous technician in her own particular field. No one has so definite a method so surely in hand as Miss Tempest. It is best suited to brilliant artificial comedy. Mr. Richman has supplied an artificial comedy, but he has quite forgotten to make it brilliant.