A critic talks to himself

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Splenetic asides on the American theatre, what it needs, what's wrong with its critics and other people

1 There never lived a so-called destructive critic who, if his destructive criticism had not been eminently sound, wouldn't have passed into oblivion in very short order. A critic, whatever the label attached to him, lives by the grace, interest and intelligence of his readers. To argue, therefore, that this or that critic is purely destructive is to say that all his reading adherents are also of purely destructive tendencies. And nothing could be sillier.

2 I often wonder about this thing called the art of acting. During the present season alone I, together with every other critic of the theatre, have seen a dance band leader named Rosenthal who had never been on the stage before give a performance that became the talk of the town, a Follies dancer named Luce steal a play from the long-experienced Elsie Ferguson, an ex-policeman named McNamara go on and play the role of a policeman as such a role had never been played by actors of twenty times his stage training, an obscure understudy named Kirkland give one of the best performances of an ingénue role that the New York theatre has seen in my time, and a number of other such possible testimonials to a puzzled doubt.

3 There is no such thing as a dirty theme. There are only dirty playwrights.

4 The healthiest development in American theatrical and dramatic criticism is the increasing criticism of criticism, observable in many quarters. Twenty years ago, critics seldom, if ever, criticized one another and the result was largely an enthronement of critical nonsense and a general critical stagnation. I myself, criticizing the prevailing critics of that day, was considered a very impolite fellow and was regarded in the light of a violator of the punctilio. Today, all that is changed—and for the better. Every critic is open to attack by all other critics. The bricks fly back and forth and the soft-heads are knocked out to the improvement of the critical art, the theatre, drama and acting. If our theatre has advanced, it has been these bricks that have been responsible.

5 What the American theatre in the aggregate needs is not so much better plays, a higher standard of internal criticism or honest box-office prices, as a coat of bright paint on its walls and fewer seats mottled with grease-spots.

6 It is unreasonable to ask of me that I approach each and every play with an open and unprejudiced mind. That is to be expected only of the critical amateur and dilettante. Behind every play there is a playwright and behind the playwright there is, in many instances, a record of previous performance. Where a complete lack of merit has been observable in such antecedent performances, I find myself unable to approach the new work without a certain prejudice against it. This prejudice has not turned out to be ill-founded, I have discovered, for in a quarter of a century of theatrical reviewing, I have never known a case where a playwright already put down as talentless has suddenly and miraculously turned into a genius overnight. The possibility that he may produce something worth-while is an argument of critical commentators who, were they race-track followers, would be of the kind who, fondly hoping against hope, would regularly and to their ultimate woe play 200 to I shots. If, as might by a wild flight of fancy happen, one such playwriting incompetent were actually one day to write a really good play, I should be only too glad to change my point of view and confess to my prejudicial error. But until that day comes, I shall continue to go to the theatre with my advance conviction that this or that certain playwright will show me nothing that is worth my serious consideration and thought.

7 The theatre critics, myself included, are to a considerable degree responsible for much of the dramatic trash that the American stage has lately been disgorging. For years, we have been demanding that the producers let up on foreign plays and give American playwrights a hearing. Well, the producers have given American playwrights not only a hearing but a wholesale hearing—and look at the consequences!

8 A playwright often achieves a Kudos at the hands of critics that he does not deserve and that should be shared, if the critics had a way or knowing the facts, by others. William Vaughn Moody was hailed for his The Great Divide, but Henry Miller, who turned Moody's manuscript hind end foremost and so injected into it the drama that Moody could not manage, got not a word for his superior dramaturgic sagacity. There are many other such cases, it seems to me. I wonder, after seeing Preston Sturges' Recapture, just who is responsible for the manuscript of Strictly Dishonorable as we now engage it? And I also wonder what Sturges' original manuscript looked like.

9 Like many another critic, 1 have occasionally erred in overestimating a play. My cerebral quotient being at the moment not all it should be, I have been tricked by the suavity of the general production, together with the persuasiveness of a scene or two, into seeing virtues in the play as a whole that were not there. This happened in the case of the play called Coquette, presented a couple of years ago. I wrote of it in terms much more commendatory than I should have. For weeks after my reviews appeared, I received letters deploring my lack of acuteness. And then, to top matters, I happened to meet Jed Harris, who had produced the play and achieved a big popular success with it. "Your review disgusted me!" he exclaimed. "You certainly were fooled. It's a bad play and I've hist a lot of respect for you!"

Which goes to show that a critic's readers, to say nothing of the man whose work lie criticizes, are sometimes much the better critics.

10 The touchiness and acerbity of certain theatrical producers and managers, resulting in the periodic exclusion of critics from their productions, are simply evidences of their own grave personal doubts and misgivings. No man who is sure of himself and of his talents takes umbrage at critical derogation of himself, whether just or not just, for in his heart he stubbornly and bravely believes that he is right, that his critics are wrong and that time will prove it. The man who cannot stand hostile criticism, be it soundly or ill founded, is not and never will be an artist—and criticism should simply drop him on the ash-heap, leave him there and shut up about him forevermore.

11 The humorous and rather pathetic striving of certain Broadway managers to work themselves into a semblance of smart social position by filling their houses on opening nights with men and women of the fashionable world is one of the idiotic phenomena of the present-day theatre. Such didos, of course, are none of the critics' business but, critics being human at the core of them even as other men, they cannot help but regard such managers with just a shade of smiling cynicism. It was Charles Frohman who, upon being told by a friend that one of his first night audiences looked very tony and upon giving ear to the latter's perfunctory applause and empty verbal praise, observed bitingly that plays should always be opened on the second night. There are two classes of persons whose applause is meaningless: those who get in on passes and those who pay twenty dollars for a seat.

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12. Honesty of opinion is a commonplace in the bulk of American critical writing on the theatre and drama. The weakness of that waiting lies in its failure to combine the aforesaid honesty of opinion with basically sound judgment.

13. Contemporary literary criticism in America has advanced out of all proportion to contemporary dramatic criticism for the simple reason that the materials being provided to the former are infinitely more inspiring and provocative than those being provided to the latter. Accurate, intelligent and even shrewdly humorous criticism of negligible drama remains, after a while, static; there is no soil in which it may develop and grow. This, I appreciate, is a platitude but this, it seems to me, is the time to repeat it. It is easy to interest and amuse readers with criticism of contemptible drama, provided one be sufficiently skilful with the pen, but contemptible drama is the greatest foe of criticism itself. Behind every great critic you will find one or more great dramatists.

14. I have always wondered why it has never occurred to a producer to present Schnitzler's "Anatol" with a single actress playing each of the successive and various women's roles. Each of Anatol's sweethearts is simply a different phase of the other, much as Leonora in Barrie's "The Legend of Leonora" is to her man seven or more women in one—an idea Barrie cabbaged from Arsfene Houssaye. True enough, this was not Schnitzler's idea when he wrote the play, but it would, with very little editing, improve the play and, more, give it the valuable continuity it now lacks. Furthermore, it would certainly improve its box-office value.

15. The outstanding defect of the little theatre movement generally in America is its self-imitativeness. When the movement first got under way, there was evident a fine impulse toward individuality, adventurous enterprise and dramatic originality, and this impulse is still discernible in a few isolated little theatres today. But what we see for the most part is simply repetition, cuckooing: the little theatres have apparently resolved themselves into a chain of houses reproducing much the same plays, much the same scenic ideas and much the same tricks of lighting. One patterns itself close! after the other; there is a minimum of individuality and a maximum ⅜ copying. Once fresh soil whence originated some of the fine things I present-day American drama, seen! equipment and lighting, there is no» in the aggregate simply a somewhat snobbish and superficially cultivated little back-yard garden, full of papier-mâché blooms.

16. The standards of New York daily newspaper dramatic criticism have become altogether too high. The daily newspaper is no place for a consistent consideration of drama as art. To a daily newspaper, drama should be what it is to the paper's casual readers: a means for an evening's pleasure and light diversion and from that point of view it should properly and profitably be criticized. The Sunday editions may reconsider the particular drama in question as art. although I doubt that newspaper readers are concerned with it as such, even on Sunday, but the daily reviews should treat the drama much in the way fires are covered. It is journalistically sufficient to the reader merely to tell him how hot the fire was, what damage it caused and how the inmates came out of it. There are plenty of periodicals, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies— and there are also plenty of book covers —in which the highest standards of dramatic criticism may be properly maintained and in which those interested may be instructed and edified.

17. A half dozen years ago, I wrote that the moving pictures would not last, that it was ridiculous to use the word art in connection with them, and that they would sooner or later pass into limbo. The statement was jeered and I was set down a fool. Where is the old moving picture today? It is as dead as a door-nail; it has disappeared from the scene almost completely. Emboldened, therefore, I make another prediction that will doubtless meet with the same jeers and with the same derogation of my clairvoyant gifts. It is this: that the talkies will sooner or later go the way of the silent movies. The talkies, even at their best—though what that is, I haven't from personal experience of them discovered—are merely second-hand theatre drama and musical comedy. They will not long satisfy audiences, for all their relatively cheap admission prices, for audiences, low or high, have a way of disliking any substitutes for any real thing. The road was partly killed by second companies in place of the original companies. And the best talkie is inevitably, by its intrinsic nature, a road version of theatre drama. The old movie audiences, at the height of the silent movies' success, never failed to go out of their way for so much as a glimpse of one of the movie actors or actresses. The present talkie audiences have got a step nearer to intimacy with their favorites through the added medium of speech. But they still want to see them in the flesh. And one of these days they will all have to go back to the theatre to see them thus.