} PAGE TWELVE THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 152 MISTER H-ENDERSON GOES TO THE PLAY The Daily's Critic Visits New Yo: Spring Vacation To View TI By Robert B. Henderson It is all as certain as the proverbial hand-writing: America, New York with her surfeit of wealth is to be- come in the next decade the artistic center of the world. To-day, Broad- way through its theatre must be, un- questionably, the equal of any of the continental capitals The playhouses themselves are spacious and luxuri- ous-superior paragons of decorative taste-the technical problems of light- ing and modern stagecraft are handled freshly, with infinite patience, and the acting, individually at least, is flaw- less and adroit. The blistering defect in the cur- rent productions-now that Copeau, Reinhardt and Stanislavsky have re- turned to Europe-is the ensemble playing of the mobs. The crowds in "Caesar and Cleopatre," for example, or "Desire Under the Elms" are al- most unbelievably amateurish, path- etically in need of a traditioned tech- nique. The reason and the remedy, of course, lies in the European reper- tory system, the constant association through dozens of years with the same players. The idea is growing-the Theatre Guild is headed pell-mell to- ward it- and at the end of this ren- aissance of the decade, it will come... .. "Love For Love" One has heard a great deal through the scandal press of the shocking, daring vulgarity of the current suc- cesses, a bubble that even grew to the proportions of a play-jury. But it is little more than a thin illusion to be pricked. Congreve's "Love For Love" at the Greenwich Village theatre, for instance, is reported as the worst of these- and turns to be nothing more than a delightfully frank and artificial Restoration comedy, played in a charming, experi- mental manner. The costumes and settings by Rob- ert Edmond Jones are a glittering maze of glass and crystal chandeliers, gorgeous velvet brocades and stiff crinkling satins. The play itself is a swashbuckling meringue, a Ronald Firbank grown virile and manly. Its characters have no morals, only man- ners to extinction, The gentleman of the company must fall in and about and out of love with every lady in the cast; there is Sir Sampson-forty, and protesting the years; there is the beautiful Mistress Foresight, comfort- ably married to a wizard of eighty; there is the Beau Tattle and the bump- kin Miss Prue, the hero Valentine and his blustering brother Ben-all busy with their vital round of liaisons. The production by the Province- town Players is keyed in exactly the artificial, roistering spirit the farce calls for. There are songs of "Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May," "If the Heart of a Man ....." and a sailor's horn-pipe that brinfs the house down; above all, the tempo is paced at a tumbling speed that never slackens a moment. Adrienne Morrison, the wife of Richard Bennett, is the scan- dalous Misress Frail, Helen Freeman the faithful heroine, and the person- able Rosalind Fuller romps away with the honors as Miss Prue. Of them all, however, Edgar Stehli-so long with Stuart Walker's Portmanteau Theatre-gives the most adroit characterization as Tattle. He is a little man, a perversion of a man, with a patch above an eye and on the chin. He flicks a lace handkerchief and rolls his bovine eyes; gently, with but a trace of a bored smile he shatters a dear lady's sophisticated reputation, and returns to the diver- sion of his snuff and brocade buckles. "Peleas and Meisande" l As the climax to its most satisfy- ing season since the death of Caruso and the loss of the Farrar, the Met- ropolitan has revived Debussy's "Peleas and Melisande" with Edward Johnston, Lucrezia Bori, and Clarence Whitehall in th eleading roles. It isI a beautiful production, massive and1 impressive. Of the music there is no! question; in all literature there has probably never been a more sympa- thetic fusion of the poet's intent withi the composer's imagination. The score was written in a seventh heaven and cannot be for ordinary ears. It is tender and lyric and of the gods: very'"mere mortals must be content to sense its vague beauty that is so much more than sheer music, that is soI strangely an encompassing, prevad- ing atmosphere. Of the play, however, there are as many opinions as critics. Personally,j I have always thought it one of the most elusive, compelling, erotic trag- edies I have ever seen. It is odd, rhythmic and repetitious. One must be sentimental to enjoy its pathos,. the helpless pity of the lovers andj their triangle: it is either profound- ly moving or profoundly boring. The man next to me-fat and from Iowa- frankly sank into a trance, longing for the brisk pertness of "The Mika- do" .... The settings by Joseph Urban-ex- cepting the shallow prettiness of the Fountain scene-show the Metropoli-I tan in all its golden glory, and doI much to counteract the vastness of the auditorium which often contra- dicts the intimate atmosphere the libretto demands. He brings to the play the overwhelming shadows, the stars and the sea, the grey musk of the walls and the vibrant blue of the tapestries; he brings its crumbling saints and its fierce yellow sun beat- ing into the dark vaults; he brings the tall pillars and the tall trees againstI which the groping lovers re-live their mysterious relentless destiny. For Shaw, the season has been something of a processional grandly headed by the Actor's Theatre produc- tion of "Candida," his mellowest com- edy. The performance is much of a triumph for its producers and not a little for the author himself. Staged in the period of the eighteen-nineties with all its preposterous flounces and bustles the piece becomes a living picture of a household that can never be antedated. It is the Divina Com- edia of the constantly flowering G. B. S. r Du ng a really very few. A more accurate brought into the parlor; the father t estimation, of course, is to say that it nervously insists that, she is only B is the first great American play, rank- wounded . . . but suddenly the truth Iing with such epics as "The Power of appears to the mother: her body be-P ie Season's Plays Darkness" and "The Playboy of the comes rigid with fear, she gives ac Western World." terrible, piercing scream and rushest Its theme alone shows a power that convulsively to the child. O'Neil has never reached before, and It is of such stuff that tremendous The cast has been repeatedly prais- the rugged dialogue with its primi- moments in the theatre are made; itn ed by every New York critic. Richard tive earthiness grows almost lyric at is such scenes that grip one's very n Bird as Marchbanks has had the good times. The story deals with the Am- innermost consciousness, twist and fortune to present the most vehement- erican peasant and his ingrain love tear it to pieces. Blancho Yurka ins ly discussed characterization of the of the ungrateful soil he tills; it tells the role of the mother presents as season. His interpretation is tingling, i of his passions and his lusts, the rock- I monumental portrait-crude, heavyt almost hysterical, and save for the bound cruelty of the New England and primitive, unspeaking save in this few moments in the third act when type, one supreme moment. Similarly, the he carries it just over the line of sin- The characters are three-again the other actors are all but as expert: cerity to a half-burlesque it is con- triangle: the aging Ephriam Caot, they seem almost inspired, as though, vincing and thrilling. "full-blown on the bough," his young- ,aced with this unmaleable, ungrateful Of Peggy Wood as Candida, how- est son Eben, and the young Abbie masterpiece, they were determined to ever, there are a thousand prejudices. Putnam he takes as his third wife. i wrest the subtlest nuances from its According to all I have heard, she Once again the "Pelleas and Melis- characterizations with the certaintys practically imitates Katherine Cor- ande" theme is re-developed in this of skilled artists. nell's technique:Pshe is motherly and uritan setting of the eighteen-fifties, "The iGuardsman" beautiful, a symbol of perfect woman- but there is added to it all the fury, The Theatre Guild's production of I hood filled with all the maternal sym- the blasting reality of America's "The Guardsman" by Ferena Molnar[ pathy and wisdom of the eternal first great dramatic genius, all the is a sophisticated, plangent comedyt feminine. Her interest in the young pithy irony of the soil on which the !of temperamental manners, now in its( poet is of the purest, most abstract play is built, charged and re-charged ninth month of capacity houses and n nature-after all, she adores and re- with its fiery pristine vigor.. deserving every dollar of the fortune' veres her husband with sweet Victor- The audience, however, was the it is making for the organization.g ian constancy. most provincial I have ever seen: Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne takes Obviously, this is a gross and blat- large masses of giggling, doughy the leading roles of the actor and hisa ant misinterpretation of Shaw's subtl- women, fat, ugly women marring and inconstant wife; the one plays in his3 est most complex creation. Shaw distorting with their sensual appetites usual fleshly, nervous manner with a himself classified her in a letter to the content of this tremendous work striking interpretation as the guards- Huneker; ". . . that immoral female of art. But even their stupid lack man by proxy, while the other brings4 Candida," he says, "is as unscrupul- of appreciaton could not discolor the all the hoarse, worldly atmosphere oft ous as Siegfried: Morell even sees deep pity and terror of this very sin- the continental artiste to her odd1 that; that 'no law will bind her.' She cere drama; after seeing "Desire Und- portrait.t seduces Marchbanks just exactly as: er the Elms" one can understand what The story fashioned after the first of1 far as it is worth her while to seduce I is meant by the blasting, purging ef- "The Affairs of Anatol," tells of the1 him. She is a woman without 'char- feet of great tragedy. constant Viennese amour, the eternalt actor' in the conventional sense. With- "The Wild )uck" rou'nd between th lovers far too out brains and strength of mind she I Of all the plays now running in New susceptible in their own right not toI would be a wretched slattern and York, the Actor's Theatre producton sisect each other's constancy. Again, voluptuary. She is straight for natur- of "The Wild Duck" is the most con- Ithe climax centers about the husband al means, not for conventional ethical sistently, skilfully interpreted. Thei who prefers, just as he reaches the ones. Nothing can be more cold- actors take this play, always con- bi'ink of final proof, to fall back n bloodedly reasonable than her fare- sidered among Ibsen's more difficult, the old sentimental faith in his wife. well to Marchbanks: 'All very well, bewildering tragedies, and re-mould itty my lad; but I don't quite see myself1 into a vital, living thing-veined with merely a light, brittle artificality of at 50 with a husband of 35.' It's just pathetic humor, irony, and reality, inconsequential incidents; yet in real- ity there is beneath its+ delicate sur- this freedom from emotional slop, this, satire and unerring imagination.y ace vs snto e teicae drI- unerring wisdom on the domestic All of the maddening symbolism, ness s No one since Schnitzler has i 'plane, that makes her so completely which cloys and deadens the manu-ues o pe stred he eoi mistress of the situation." script, is suddenly, statlingly cleared quite so rfectly astered the exotic Thus Shaw on Shaw. The she-devil away in actual perfoilnance. All the careful, laborious framework; it is a that New York will not see mustabe odd references to "the illusion", the difficult craft, and Molnar, the Theatre made unerrngly clear in an exact; strange blindness of the child, "theI Guild perhaps, have succeeded: cun- production of the play. So far this dream of the ideal" become brilliant iningly, exactly in the continental has never been done, but some day the and obvious. You see a half-pitiable, mould. impressario who first makes Candida half-ridiculous household wrecked in "Caesar and Cleopatra" such a woman will wake to find him- the messes of an entangling mass of Critics, all critics, are a mongrel, self famous. circumstances; the spectacle of a mountebank breed, but the New York "Desires Lnder the Elms" grandfather, a husband and wife, critics! . . . Robert Bencbley dislikes E their child, the child's real father "Love for Love" because it is "arti- Elms" is the most profound Amer- brought from the bliss of ignorance ficial." Stark Young prates of nuance can drama ever written. After all, to the blistering harshness of un- and timbre. Heywood Broun refers this is not so broad a statement nor swerving reality, all through the ton- wittily to Eugene O'Nel' s "elums" S atured self-consciousness of a hope- and Alexander Woolcot convulses the so great a compliment, when you con-!lesybudrnieast sider the native plays called signifi- lessly blundering idealist, penny aesthetes by talking for nine- cant: "The Great Divide," "The The climax of the tragedy is reach- teen inches on the beauty of the New Guild theatre and not one word on against Lionel Atwell as heir twice beautiful production of against his poor diction Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleo- heavy theatricality Somi patra." Anything, evidently, for a course, must be wrong:,p clever m ot: it is so m uch easier, you his e pmust i ne emedn ma; see to be brilliant and lampooning his interpretation seemed ma than fair and praiseworthy! you could understand every As a matter of fact, the entire New said, and his entire personals York season-with exceptions-is power, a majesty that domi more consistently fine than it has been else while he was on the sta in a generation. Its plays are not only Helen Hayes, on the otlh splendidly acted, but are in them- while charming and kittenis selves so powerful and significant; ingenue Cleopatra, was ne, they form, in a sense, a complete pro- than a personable Americ cessional of dramatic literature-- there was completely lackin "Love For Love," "The Wild Duck," ! pagan spirit of the con 'Caesar andCleopatra," the prophetic Oriental. But the entire "Desire Under the Elms." And of of the cast-the collosal 1 Caesar, and his eone, of ersonally, gnificent; ything he ity' lent a mated all ge. her hand, sh as the ver more an girl; g all the aventional ensemble Ftatateeta them all, "Caesar and Cleopatra" is; of Helen Westley, the Britannusof the surest, the most brilliant the most Henry Travers, above all, the Apsollo- scintillating and the most thrilling. doruy of Schuyler Ladd and his pen- Any man who could in 1900 write feet legs-made te perfoancer- such a speech as Caesar's in the stantly fresh and interesting for its- fourth act, so pregnant and throbbing three and a quarter shours. with the startling insight into the out-I Of course,, any of Shaw's work, es- come of a war then fifteen years away, I pecially this play of plays, would be must be one of the profoundest in- fascinating even with an incompetent tellects of an age. "Do you hear,"i''oductin. When hav owever, Caesar says to Cleopatra after the clost .h you have, however, miurder, of Pohinus, "These knockers cloister auditorium settings that are mudrjfP~iu,"hs at fteShn n h desert and at your gate are also believers in ven- geance and in stabbing. You have its stars; when you have all but the slain their leader: it is right that they finest actors in America and th ar- shall slay you. If you doubt it, ask' tistic perception of Americas first your four counsellors here. And then theatre, you thien have-what they your fou cousetllrs re.t hAnd tnt call perfection, as near a perfection in the name of that right shall I not, as is ever' reached this side of Gordon slay them for murdering t'heiir Queen, ig and his sie parGdise n and be slain in turn by their coun- -____dhs _mps____ard trymen as the invader of their father- land? Can Rome do less than slay l , Church of Christ--DischpIes these slayers too, to show the world "Salvation a Ia Mode" will be. the how Rome avenges her sons and her pastor's subject for the mooning. honor? And so, to the end of his-j Student classes will meet at noon tory, murder shall breed murder, al- with Prof. A. L. Trout. The young ways in the name of right and honor people's social hour and lunch will be and peace, until the gods are tired of held at 6:00 o'clock wit Christian blood and create a new race that can endeavor at 6:30 o'clock. Reverend understand." A. J. McI cod, a missionary in Thibet In the reviews, much has been said will speak at the evening service. 1 (I)l The MICHIGAN CLUB ROYAL ORCHESTRA "MUSIC PLUS" "MIKE" FALK PHONE 3654 Say It With Flowers dIlIIIIIIIIIill tI 1111111II 11llI I 1lIl I U111111111111I I IIi 111til llill lllUI Il I I 11 --f 1= HOME COOKING! Drop in our place and have a steak that has - that home cooked flavor. -i o 1 BESSIMER'S Across from I). 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