The Theatre

George Jean Nathan

Another season is now under way. While marking time until next month for the official appraisal of its first string of products—these presses close somewhat prematurely—it may he well to toss off an inkling of what, in certain critical commentaries, we are again doomed to be in for. Let us begin with No. 1.

No. 1 is and doubtless will continue to be the critical legend that everything that Mr. George S. Kaufman writes or touches promptly turns into box-office gold. That Mr. Kaufman is one of the real talents of our American theatre, no one, 1 hope, will deny: but that, like us lesser talents, he has never known failure is believed only by those commentators who keep their records on their cuffs and who are given to the fashionable habit of changing their shirts once a week. Mr. Kaufman has had his numerous successes, but he has also, alas, had his various blue moments. Here Today, which he carpentered, staged and personally invested in, was anything but prosperous. The Dark Tower, upon which he collaborated and in the production of which he assisted, got a very short distance either in New York, or, subsequently, in London. Let 'Em Eat Cake, another collaboration, was far from being a shining gold tooth, and Eldorado, another man's manuscript on which he volunteered to work for a while, never got beyond the rewriting. Someone in the House and Jacques Duval. his earliest efforts, were only too quickly forgotten, even, and graciously,by himself. The musical show Helen of Troy and the collaborative Deep Tangled Wildwood, ditto. Neither Minick nor The Good Fellow, also collaborations, proved any too profitable. And The Channel Road, still another collaboration, was a boxoffice dud. ... No criticism of the merit or lack thereof in these plays and shows is intended; our interest is simply in what is legend and what is fact.

No. 2 is the so-called Wunderkind, in other words, Mr. Jed Harris. As in the case of Mr. Kaufman, it is a more or less popular critical superstition that the acumen of Mr. Harris is so rich and rare that all he has to do to rule the roost is to take almost any kind of manuscript, promptly get the author to re-write it (or do the job himself), and then put it on a stage under his own directorial supervision. Also as in the case of Mr. Kaufman, there is no denying the fact that this Mr. Harris is an exceptionally shrewd and very skilful theatrical personage; but, once again, facts are facts. Cast your eye over the If underkind's lesser record and look upon the other side of his successful picture. I he Wiser They Are got absolutely nowhere, nor did The Fatal Alibi. Mr. Gilhooley was a failure, and The Lake was a sorry botch. Wonder Boy fell far short of success, as did the production of The Inspector General. Serena Blandish was a box-office disappointment and Spread Eagle followed suit. As for some of Mr. Harris' greatest successes, they were staged not by himself, if we are to believe the playbills, but by other hands. The Royal Family bore the staging name of Mr. David Burton; Front Page gave credit for direction to Mr. George S. Kaufman; Coquette gave credit to Mr. George Abbott; and Broadway gave credit to the same Mr. Abbott, plus Philip Dunning. As with all of us mortals, there would seem to be two sides to the eminent Mr. Harris' handsome oil painting.

But a temporary halt to such "success stories and a veering to somewhat more lofty considerations. So to No. 3. This is the critical insistence upon Miss Katharine Cornell as "the first lady of the theatre." That Miss Cornell is a lady, 1 am only too willing to proclaim, if necessary, from tin' housetops, but that Miss Cornell is, in socio-political terminology, the first one of the theatre I fear I must gainsay. Is it possible that our young critical eulogists of Miss Cornell have forgotten Miss Margaret Anglin, an actress whose accomplishments over a very long span of years reduce those of Miss Cornell, in comparison, to what remains still almost an amateur level? To anyone who knows our theatre in its last thirty and more years, Miss Anglin's record, which ranges all the histrionic way from Sophocles to Shakespeare and from Monte Cristo through Bronson Howard to The Great Divide and which embraces a career as leading woman to celebrated actors all the way from James O'Neill and Richard Mansfield to E. H. So then and Henry Miller, must seem to take at least a measure of precedence over the considerably younger Miss Cornell's. While the latter's is a nice enough record in its small way, one can yet hardly see wherein has lain the particularly supereminent kudos of performances in things like 7he Green Hat, Nice People, Dishonored Lady and other such Broadway one-finger exercises. This season we shall get a line on Miss Cornell's true talents when she appears as Shakespeare's Juliet. But up until now, for her claim to the title of first lady of our theatre, she has offered us, aside from such histrionic one-finger exercises, only a serviceable and attractive ingenue performance in A Bill of' Divorcement; admittedly deficient performances of the name roles in both Clemence Dane's Will Shakespeare and Andre Obey's Lucrece; pleasant enough hut wholly unimportant performances of unimportant roles in such unimportant plays as The Enchanted Cottage (that dish of mush by Pinero out of Barrie), The Outsider (that geyser of hokum), Casanova (that couturière's parade), The Way Things Happen (that Owen Davis exhibit written by an Englishwoman), and The Age of Innocence (that box-office pat on grandma's hack); a rousing, old-time melodrama performance in The Letter; an intelligent and quite lovely performance in Candida; and an even more intelligent and lovelier performance in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. If, on that record, Miss Cornell is the First Lady of the theatre, all I can say is that, on hers, Miss Anglin must he the President.

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No. 4, a critical conviction of more recent birth, is the apparently unanimous belief that, because in Days Without and he wrote a pro-Catholic play, Eugene O'Neill, himself born a Catholic, has therefore, after years of wobbling, unquestionably now gone back to Holy Church, hook, line and sinker, If Mr. O'Neill has been inside a Catholic or any other kind of church in the last thirty years, or thirty days, save perhaps on the occasion of a close relative's funeral, no one in his confidence has been apprised of it—but that is not the point. The point is rather the common critical presumption that the moment a writer writes eloquently about anything, he must necessarily believe in it heart and soul. Ibis, of course, is pure nonsense. It is possible that Mr. O'Neill may in the future come to spend twenty four hours of every day in the year in a Catholic church, but simply because he wrote Days Without End no more soundly predicts any such commendable act than The Hairy Ape predicts his fistic espousal of Communism, Dynamo his intention of going to his Maker in the turbine room of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, or Different his immediate decision to hang himself.

No. 5 will bring with it the general blind, ecstatic, critical endorsement, upon its return engagement here this season, of the same Abbey Theatre troupe that sent the reviewers' hats kiting high in the air last season. That this troupe, what ever its virtues, no more represents the Abbey Theatre at its acting best than the current Berlin ex-Reinhardt theatre companies represent the former theatres at theirs, is news one feels one must immodestly impart to the deluded reviewers. This company, in the histrionic chronological line, is the third of the Abbey acting groups. The first, a really remarkable organization, contained, it will be recalled, such excellent artists as Arthur Sinclair, Fred 0 Donovan, Dudley Digges, the inimitable Fay, Sara Allgood, Maire O'Neill, et al. The second, for all the withdrawal of Digges, Fay, and a few minor others, was still made up of most of the original members. Then came, along with Sean O'Casey's disgusted severance of his relations with the Abbey, the complete disruption. Digges came to America; Sinclair, O'Donovan and the Misses Allgood and O'Neill decided to go it on their own in England; and others, too, went their independent ways. And what was left, to put it in the most liberal and politest of terms, was merely a gathering—almost indiscriminate—of a third-hand troupe of assiduous understudies and feeble echoes. This is the troupe that comes to us under the proud original Abbey Theatre label.