New York Letter

ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL

A New Playhouse and a New Play

I have always felt that the hope of a new spirit in the theatre will come not so much from amateurs and their talking organizations as from the rebels within the theatre and the work they can accomplish. I agree with Gordon Craig when he says that no one has any right to meddle with, and potter about, the theatre who does not know it from the inside. In no other field is there such a gang of busy bodies—old women of both sexes, who have the ignorant reformers talking sense developed to such a pernicious degree. The air is dark with the empty words they belch forth, but from their deeds the world remains light and free. If the regeneration of the theatre from the base influences that now possess it, is to take place it will not, I am sure, be by the work of the drama leagues and so-called “art” theatres. The work of such managers as J. D. Williams and producers like Granville Barker and B. Iden Payne does more for the theatre by the working out of certain ideals than all the talk about those ideals and the jumbling with them by the old ladies’ leagues and the “arty” amateurs. A plague on them all!

In New York this season a new theatre is to be opened. Helen Freeman, who for a time was a Belasco star and later the leading woman with William Gillette, is to own and direct this latest attempt to establish a new spirit in the theatre. With Miss Freeman will be associated a group of six professional actors. All of them, like their director, have ideals which they plan to work for. For the first few months they are to produce one-act things. Among them will be plays by Evreinov, a young Russian not yet “discovered” by this rapacious country; two plays by the Spanish dramatist, Jacinto Benveneto, of whose seventy-five excellent plays not one has yet been given here; plays by other unknown European dramatists; new plays by Zoë Akins, Witter Bynner, Rollo Peters, and other American writers.

Miss Freeman has chosen as a name for this interesting theatre the hour of the curtain rise. It will therefore be known as “The Nine o’Clock Theatre.” Much is expected from Miss Freeman and much from her theatre. Success to it, and to her!

A New Play

When I heard that a new fantastic play was to be produced by Arthur Hopkins, and that the scenes and costumes were to be designed by Robert Edmond Jones, I booked seats as early as I could. I remembered the work of Jones in Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife and his work on the inner scenes and costumes of the Shakespeare Masque. Both were the works of a new decorative genius who had much to give to our theatre that is barren of the work of artists. I expected much of the new play, and lo! what was disappointment was waiting there.

The play first. It is the story of a princess of a mythical land, whose lover has been killed in war and who in the last act joins him. (The play is named The Happy Ending). The curtain rises on a dark forest, through which the princess is wandering and posing, and mumbling and moaning to herself. Comes then three Maeterlincian maidens also mumbling and playing chorus to themselves. Exit the mumbling maidens and enter the King and Queen of this mythical land. Mumbleth then these two for a while, till, without any warning, the King bluntly asks the Queen for a child! Yes! Right there in the forest he does it. It’s the last thing one expects in a fantasy, this realistic demand for a son and heir. But that’s a minor point. Like many another thing that happened, it had nothing to do with the drama.

After a dreary scene, in which the wandering princess seats herself on some potato sacks and mumbles to the accompaniment of “yes, princess,” “no, princess,” spoken at half minute intervals by a dull-witted woodsman, the curtain rises on a scene, entitled in the programme “The Hereafter.” What a Hereafter! A bank of sunburnt stage grass: a bilious yellow tree: much amber light. Crowds of children with squeaky voices lolled and pranced about the place. The authors seem to have taken their cue from the old hymn:

I can assure you that it was anything but joyful. A sort of stagey joy was evident but not a sight of the real spontaneous feeling. There was a sort of Queen-hostess, who welcomed everyone. I have an idea she was Mrs. God or maybe assistant to St. Peter. She wore an elaborate shiny yellow evening gown; and a set smile after the fashion of the ladies in charge of Y. W. C. A. hostels on earth. A nice, well-spoken motherly sort of person this Queen was, who did her best to make everybody feel at home.

When there was a wreck at sea or a railway accident, many male and female supers waddled their bodies in joyous movement across the stage and laughed and made mouthy noises. Oh, so glad they were to be in Heaven after the shocks they had gone through on earth. It was curious to note that they all entered Heaven with whole bodies and unmessed clothes, these merry wreck and collision victims.

When the curtain rings down on the scene of the Hereafter it does so to the sound of cheering. And why? A whole army has just been annihilated, and to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” their spirits are marching toward Heaven. And so the happy inhabitants of the Hereafter must cheer to think of this influx to their land. After the tawdry Heaven one is refreshed by the beauty of the unnecessary scene, “On the way to the islands of sleep.” They still use rowboats in that land it seems, but as they are rowboats with beautifully lighted innards one doesn’t object very much. One does object, however, to the next scene. It is called “Space.” Imagine Space as a back-drop sprinkled with stars like an old-fashioned frosted Christmas Card. In the middle of this a scarlet circle with the continents of North and South America painted in a muddy brown color. A sorry picture of space to come from an imaginative artist.

The last scene, and the best from the scenic and dramatic standpoint, takes place in the palace of the King. Here comes the princess after having wandered through the forest awake and the Hereafter in a dream, and after falling in some queer kind of fit dies and so joins her dead lover and the rest of the cosmopolitan group in Heaven.

A mess by masters! A very messy mess. A sloppy play to start with. Bad acting to carry it along. Mediocre music and stage setting that seem to have been influenced by the play instead of rising above it. I await with interest to see the work that Jones is to do for the Russian Ballet. He will have his chance to re-establish himself. I’m sure he is artist enough to grasp it.