The Theatrical Callboard

Critical Notes Before the Curtain Rises

KENNETH MACGOWAN

THE tapering off of the New York theatrical season in the spring means fewer productions and more hurried ones. The established managements do not care to present plays to the small audiences and for the short runs that are inevitable in April and May. Theatres consequently go begging, and smaller producers, many of them making their first production, seize the opportunity to secure an opening on easy terms. Optimism sustains them through the three weeks of rehearsals, but their plans are seldom of the sort that can be heralded in advance. Only two announcements of any real interest may be made with regard to the coming plays in April.

Maurice Browne on His Own

SOME time close to Easter Maurice Browne will retire Candida from the Greenwich Village Theatre and mount Strindberg's rasping tragedy of sex-conflict, Creditors. It will be part of a season of repertory which Browne has long hoped to give New York, but which he has had no adequate opportunity of presenting at any time during the ten years that he has worked in America.

In 1912 this English player, director and poet opened in Chicago the pioneer among the Little Theatres which have since sprung up all over the country. From the beginning the Chicago Little Theatre had the distinction of Browne's own acting and of his wife's, Ellen van Volkenburg, and a new point of view in direction and setting. During five seasons Browne continued in the tiny playhouse made from a suite of rooms in a downtown office building. During these years he re-animated the presentation of Greek tragedy—The Trojan TTr ample—by treating the chorus in an individualized and human fashion; he gave sanctuary to experiments of playwrights seeking new forms, such as Cloyd Head; he presented Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, Schnitzler's Anatol, Shaw's Philanderer, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Rupert Brooks' Lithuania and work by Yeats, St. John Hankin, Alice Brown and W. W. Gibson. When the war crippled his theatre in audience and backing, he moved to Salt Lake City, where he widened his repertory. For the past two years he has worked with the Cornish School of Seattle, founding finally the Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Between times he has visited New York, presenting Medea for matinees, not under the happiest of circumstances, directing Margaret Anglin's presentations of Iphigenia in Aidis and The Trial of Joan of Arc. His wife lately staged Arthus Davison Ficke's Mr. Faust for the Provincetown Players, after the fashion in which it had been produced in Seattle. But in the season which Browne has undertaken at the Greenwich Village Theatre he finds his first opportunity of presenting the work of his eclectic repertory venture under conditions of his own choosing.

A Negro Drama

THE negro is steadily, if very slowly impressing himself upon the serious American theatre. Jazz is not to be his only monument or the late Bert Williams his only spokesman. In the field of the musical show and the popular song the negro has done some uncommon things, from the days of Williams & Walker and Under the Bamboo Tree to Shuffle Along and the white man's parodies of his music. Now in Taboo comes another effort to bring the life of the negro into the legitimate theatre. Augustin Duncan is presenting in Taboo a drama of voodooism written by Mary Hoyt Wiborg. Again, as in most of the pictures our stage has seen of the life of the coloured people, the playwright is a Caucasian. The American poet, Ridgely Torrence, supplied the dramas which Robert Edmond Jones mounted some five or six years ago with his Coloured Players. Recently we have seen the genre comedy Come Seven and the sociological tragedy of Washington's black belt, Goat Alley. In Jones's productions all the players were negroes, and some of them had to play white parts. In Come Seven Broadway actors put on burnt cork, while in Goat Alley, coloured players took all the roles. In Taboo there will be, for the first time, an extensive mingling of white and coloured actors. Three of the parts are white, and will be played by whites; while the many coloured parts will find players from the coloured theatres. Marie Stuart, so fine in Torrence's Granny Maumee, and Alex Rogers, writer as well as actor, who appeared on the same program in The Rider of Dreams, will appear in Taboo.

Walt Whitman on the Stage

THE next production of that venturesome and far-visioning institution, the Neighborhood Playhouse, should prove the most daring it has yet attempted—except for the presentation of Thomas Wilfred's Colour Organ. This is the performance of a "dramatic festival" based on a poem by Walt Whitman, Salut au Monde. The project originated four years ago but was held in check by difficulties over the music accompanying the chanted verses. Originally excerpts from MacDowell were to be used. Then a disciple of MacDowell, Charles Griffes, suggested the composition of new music. He died before the task was quite completed, and now Edmund Rickett has put the score in finished shape. While the verses of Whitman are chanted, dancers will display in pantomime—a little after the fashion of Le Coq d'Or—a drama devised by the Misses Lewisohns to interpret the poem.

A New Chaplin Film

TWO of the most interesting histrionic events of the month happen upon the screen. One of these is the appearance of a new production by Charlie Chaplin. Pay Day is another two-reel picture, not so long or so pretentious a film as The Kid. It is a vaudeville of barely connected incidents. It presents no opportunities for pathos or for feeling of any kind. But it is as amusing as the run of his shorter pictures and it shows him again as the master of physical and facial pantomime. It teems with ingenious incidents; it is, in fact, another excellent example of the unique form of broad, conglomerate burlesque which has been developed in the American screen comedies. There is after all, no parallel for this kind of screen art; there are only suggestions of it in musical comedy and in the cornmedia dell' arte. When the same sort of vehicle is produced with an adamantine comic like Buster Keaton in the place of the sensitive Chaplin, you get a measure of how much the art of Chaplin really counts, how much there is of the most subtly humorous acting in Chaplin's face even when it seems the most impassive.