The Theatrical Callboard

Critical Notes Before the Curtain Rises

KENNETH MACGOWAN

THE theatrical event of the month of November was John Barrymore's Hamlet. The event of January, perhaps of the season, will be the introduction to New York of the company of the Moscow Art Theatre. The performance likely to stand out as the high point in the theater of December will surely be David Warfield's first appearance as Shylock. It is a part which he has long wanted to play, and to which after twenty years spent on hardly half a dozen parts, he should bring an enthusiasm of spirit invaluable to such a role. The Merchant of Venice will not reach New York until December 21st, but the reviewers of Baltimore, where it has had its premiere, report an impersonation of deeply sympathetic feeling.

From these accounts it seems certain that David Belasco has given lavishly to the play out of a spirit touched like Warfield's by the figure of the great and terrible Jew. It is a "massive production"— a rarity in these days when theories of giving Shakespeare in some setting as formal as the stage of the old Globe Theatre on Bankside have almost banished elaborate changes of scene. Belasco not only builds streets of towering height, but he contrives by mechanical ingenuity to introduce a fresh scene undreamed by Shakespeare: Shylock returning to his ravished home, no sooner passes in at the street door than he is visible within searching for his daughter.

Breaking again with the newer tradition of giving Shakespeare's plays as nearly as possible as he wrote them, Belasco gathers together in a single act the many scenes that pass in Belmont. These were written and originally acted as brief interludes between the gathering episodes of Shylock's bargain and the fate of the argosies—a technique of construction almost parallel to the cut-backs of the movies by which two stories arc kept racing abreast up to the climax where they clash.

Belasco has brought together a cast of uncommon distinction. A. E. Anson appears as the Duke, Ian Maclaren as Antonio, Philip Merrivale as Bassanio, Albert Bruning as Tubal, Fuller Mellish as old Gobbo, and Herbert Grimwood as Morocco. Youth is the feature of note among the women, Portia being played by Mary Servoss, Nerissa by Mary Ellis, and Jessica by Julia Adler, of the family that has given Jacob Adler, Francine Larrimore, and Cecelia Adler to the American stage.

Embattled Juliets

SAKESPEARE is to take his place this season beside Hopwood, Shipman, and O'Neill in the ranks of those rare playwrights who have two or more of their plays produced in New York at the same time. Before December is out it may be that, besides Ilamlct and The Merchant of Venice, Broadway will see noted stars in two other productions from his works. In fact it may see two productions of a single Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet. The Theatre Guild announced earlier in the season that it purposed reviving the play for Joseph Schildkraut; while Belasco let it be guessed that Lenore lUric would some time give up Kiki for Juliet. Now, however, come definite announcements from Arthur Hopkins and the Selwyns that Ethel Barrymore and Jane Cowl will both be seen in the tragedy. Romeo and Juliet will be the second production in Miss Barrymore's season of repertory. McKay Morris will play Romeo, and Robert Edmond Jones will design the settings and costumes. Miss Cowl will have Rollo Peters both as actor and as designer. This should provide a most interesting competition between two exceptional performances and productions.

The winning of the Nobel Prize by Bcnavente and the production of a new play of his centers attention again on the Spanish playwright. The new play, Fields of Ermine, comes from the hand of the same actress who gave us his The Passion Flower—Nance O'Neill. Following also upon The Bonds of Interest, with which the Theatre Guild began its work, Fields of Ermine makes the third play by Bcnavente to receive professional production in New York. It is only one, however, out of more than a hundred plays which the Spaniard has written in his twenty-eight years of theatrical experience. What a pitifully slight output compared with the more than three hundred dramas of the contemporary of Cervantes, Lopa da Vega!

The advent of another play by Benavente close at the heels of Malvaloca serves to remind us of the fine, abundant talent which Spain has given the theater in the last forty years, a talent not generally recognized. ICven America has had splendid samples of it. Besides Bcnavente and The Passion Flower and the Quinetcro Brothers and Malvaloca, one can recall Kchcgeray and The World and Ills Wife, in which William Faversham appeared, and Guimera and Maria Rosa, Lou Tellegen's best vehicle.

"The Hairy Ape" in Paris

WHILE the Nobel Prize goes to, Bcnavente, Eugene O'Neill adds to his record as the winner on two occasions of the Pulitzer Prize, the distinction of having his expressionist drama, The Hairy Ape, chosen under most interesting circumstances for production at the second theater of the Republic of France, the Odeon. Some time last winter, after Fermen Gemier had been given the directorship of the State theater where the innovating Antonie of the nineties had become the routineer of pre-war days, he took steps to widen its repertory by the inclusion of an American play among its productions. Through the cooperation of Hiram Kelly Moderwell, who before he took to reporting European affairs for the Chicago Daily News was the author of that excellent volume, The Theatre of Today, Gemier referred his problem to the Drama League of America. While he could not commit himself to the production of a first choice by critics unfamiliar with the particular taste of the public of Paris, he agreed to choose a production from a group of outstanding plays. The Drama League appointed a committee including among others Walter Prichard Eaton, Prof. Richard Burton, and Margaret Anglin. In the verdict ultimately arrived at, the five plays heading a list of ten were .1 nna Christie, The Hairy Ape, The New York Idea, The First Year, and The Emperor Jones. Since three of the plays were by a single author, O'Neill, the Drama League took it upon itself—most unwisely, I think—to substitute an "also ran," Kindling, for The Emperor Jones. The group of critics involved—I can speak for at least one of them—must have been considerably astonished at the choice of The Hairy Ape over Anna Christie as a work likely to appeal to the French. It is a most healthy sign for the future of the Odeon under Gfimier's management.

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Fashions for Men

CONSIDER this plot: A paragon of kindly self-effacing incompetences is hopelessly engaged in running a store. His wife elopes with his head-clerk, bearing away his money and his blessing. He falls in love with a shop girl, who is passionately pursued by a rich man. The shop girl induces the millionaire to pay the fellow's debts and get him out of the way. And finally, the transparent virtue of the storekeeper so works upon everyone that the girl gives up her millionaire to manage the store, and all is happiness.

Here obviously is a perfectly good John Golden-Winchell Smith comedy-drama. It just happens, however, that the scene is Budapest instead of Bangor, Me., and the author is the creator of The Devil and Liliom—Franz Molnar. Also, the millionaire is a baron, and there are the usual frisky furbelow's of a Continental comedy.

The choice of an actor for the shopkeeper of Fashions for Men was inevitable—that most innocent and kindly of comedians, O. P. Heggie, the delectable tailor-martyr of Androcles and the Lion, the obfuscated bailiff of Ilappy-GoLucky. For the girl, there is Helen Gahagan, another of the W under kinder in of our stage; and for the baron, who also makes cheese, Edward Nicander.

Molnar is to be one of our most popular playwrights this season. Besides Liliom on tour and Lashions for Men the year will see The Swan produced by Charles Frohnmn, Inc., The Guardsman, botchily and unsuccessfully acted ten years ago as ⅝ here Ignorance Is Bliss, and now furnished forth by the Theatre Guild as a vehicle for Joseph Schildkraut; and two one-act plays, Dinner,' which the EastWest Players will act, and Lies, from the Stuyvesant Players.

A new producer Maurice S Revnes, who comes forward with Fashions for Men, will also give us other plays by Molnar—a trilogy of one-acters individually called A Prelude to King Lear, The Held Marshal, and Little Violet, and grouped under the title '1 heat re. Benjamin Glazer, translator of Liliom and many other Continental plays, and stage director of I ashions for Men, will also be assodated with Revnes in the production of the following: The Yellow Nightingale, a comedy by Hermann Bahr, who wrote The Concert, North Wind, a fantastic play by E. Connthy, a Hungarian, and The Missmg Man, a mystery play by John Posner, a Warsaw journalist who spent eight years in Chicago.

Another change in the line-up of New York producers brings into a single firm Winchell Smith and F. Ray Comstock, as sponsors for Polly Preferred, a comedy by Guy Bolton in which Patricia Collingeappears. Comstock continues his association with Morris Gest in the Chauve Souris and the impending tour of the Moscow Art Iheatre company. Smith dissolved a productive partnership with John Golden during the actors' strike.

"Lyrics by Louis Untermeyer"

AN access of prodigality overcame William A. Brady 1 when he imported the Czecho-Slovak satire, "The World We Live In." Aspiring to the perch precariously divided between Arthur Hopkins, David Belasco, and the Theatre Guild, he summoned a galaxy of distinguished talent to his aid. Among these, jostling M. Hilar, the Czech designer and producer, Robert Edeson, Lee Simonson, Owen Davis, Kenneth MacKenna, et al, is an American poet introduccd for the mere business of translating and renovating four lyrics. They arc verses which the butterfly icsthete, Felix, exudes for the pleasure of his lady-loves, Naturally they are not good verses, and Untcrmeyer has made their frailty all the more amusing by making them a gallery of the progress of English poetry. He begins with a perfectly innocuous MidVictorian lyric. Next comes Swinburne:

O fragile and fluttering Iris, You sip at the sweets of my soul,

A dream that is dark as desire is, My glory, my grandeur, my goal!

O pain that is priceless as passion, A passion as perfect as pain,

Let us burn in the blaze till we're ashen

Again—and again—and again!

After Swinburne comes a crash of free verse, passionate, almost unspeakable, Audicnces are a little uncertain about Swinburne and even such lines as:

.

Your hair pours into my blood

Like a flood of yellow thunder.

But when they get to Untermeyer's last little journey into verseland, they know that it is all a joke, and they laugh just as heartily as they please. It happens that they don't know just how good a joke it really is. The thirteen lines of this "dada" poem arc drawn from the works of five "dada" poets, with some supplementary foolishness by Untcrmeyer. The verse, with notes, follows:

Geometry of souls1

Disputes the roundness of your gesturing flesh

Blind and green and organized and resumed,2

A sudden slice changes decaying weeds.3

Tomatoes are uncouth but honest.4

Dining is west and extra leaves are sullen.2

A green acre is so selfish and so pure,2

Spread out for pink and purple platitudes.5

The moon is bitter diamonds in a ditch* While stars jump up and down like angry gnats.6

A virgin caterpillar.7

Shrieks for the embraces of the moon.7

1 am that caterpillar.7

1 Maxwell Bodenheim. 2 Gertrude Stein., Louis Dragon, Matthew Josephson. 5 Allan Horton + L. U. 6 Anon. 7L. U.

December is likely to see the return to Broadway of three stars whose orbits have carried them into motion picture studios and far corners of the country in the past season or two. Alla Nazimova, after much meritorious labor for the betterment of the screen, is to appear under the management of her husband, Charles Bryant, in Tilla, a drama translated from the Hungarian of Ferenc Hervig by Louis K. Anspachcr. Billie Burke comes forward ⅛ unother comedy by Booth Tarkington, who wrote her last vehicle, The. Intimate Strangers. The new play is called Rose Briar. Florenz Ziegfeld has put Allan Dinehart, Julia Hoyt and Florence Denishawn in the cast. Mrs. Fiske, stiU more than likely to try a little Ibsen now and then, will appear under the management of IL. H. Frazee in Paddy, an American drama by Lillian Barrett, in which she plays a Virginia gentlewoman gone to pieces physically and morally as well as financially.

The Selwyns' novel importation from Germany, Jokannes Kreisler, which was described in the last issue of Vanity Fair, is now scheduled to reach Broadway some time in mid-December with Ben-Ami in the leading part, and with an amazing equipment of patent stages and special lights. Thompson Buchanan, after a long service in the movies, is down as the author of a forthcoming play, The Sporting Thing to Do. Philip Bartholomae comes forth with Barnum Was Right, a comedy to be produced by L. F. Werba, who with Mark Luescher sponsored The Spring Maid of delicious memory. Peggy Wood has a new vehicle in The Clinging Vine.