Monday, Mar. 10, 1924
New Plays
The Strong. This turgid but powerfully analytical play adapted from the Danish of Karen Bramson stresses the point that Virtue, besides being its own reward, is its own weakness. An old, hunchbacked, club-footed professor, who in addition to going blind has about every other deformity of mind and body, saves a lovely girl from a brutal father, and then clutches at the girl. He forces her to marry him, through weakness and pity, and when she tries to elope with the sculptor she loves, the professor chains her to himself with the intangible but unbreakable bonds of gratitude. The strength of the frail proves so crushing that suicide alone can free the girl. Henry Herbert as the professor gave an insinuating study of the iron hand in the velvet glove. Helen Weir almost had the girl's role at her finger tips.
Alexander Woollcott: "Miss Weir gallantly stormed a role that required at least a Duse . . . She needs voice training and experience. Time will inform her how to pronounce 'courage,' for instance, and will gently suggest that an actress making her debut in an emotional role would do well to wash her hands."
E. W. Osborn: "A story morbid and repellent beyond degree. . . . The only satisfaction which its presentation involves--a purely and coldly artistic one--is in the acting of Mr. Herbert."
The Moon-Flower. Here romance rivals roulette at Monte Carlo as a game of chance. The speculative plunger is a penniless law clerk from Hungary who comes with his little hoard for a fling; his prize is the official sweetheart of a wealthy Duke. The starveling dreamer dares to aspire to her love, and the great courtesan yields to him. She hopes to spite the Duke, who has ordered her to Paris to avoid a marital collision with his wife. Love awakens in her frostily brilliant eyes at the youth's touch, but she realizes her arms will be a millstone around his neck.
She returns to the Duke, who, finding her humanized by love, forgives the upstart and does not kill him. Her royal keeper does not mind whom she loves so long as her tenderness for somebody makes her forget she has a fiery temperament to uphold. Thus, on a cynical note, ends an uneven revelation that a too passionate wooer can play right into his rival's hands. Despite its occasional irony, the play seems to be smitten with awe at moving among elegant folks in grand surroundings. With a first act that sparkles and others that go diminuendo, Miss Zoe Akins remains the broad-jumping playwright. She leaps off with a great rush, then loses momentum. Elsie Ferguson recovers in the courtesan role the warm, stirring undercurrent of her earlier acting. Throwing off the cataleptic spell of the cinema, she no longer seems to be waiting for a closeup. Except for a farewell scene, Sidney Blackmer has the cold, damp passion of a clay statue. He seems hardly to have the resolution to kill himself--as he threatens to do at regular intervals but never does. A moonflower is a bloom that lives only between dusk and dawn. In this play of love on a one-night stand, at times its fragrance fades.
Alexander Woollcott: "Elsie Ferguson never seemed lovelier . . . She never played better in her life Mr. Blackmer's solemn and largely inert performance gave only infrequent evidence that he had caught the sense of this fine comedy or, if he had, that he could express it."
Percy Hammond: "MoonFlower is a bit languid and discursive. It prefers loquacity to action . . . Mr. Blackmer's passions are . . . less dumb than dumbbell . . ."
John Corbin: "In the way of frankly artificial romance, few situations could promise better. It was a promise that overlooked Sidney Blackmer . . . All his motions are deliberate to exasperation. . . ."
Heywood Broun: "Elsie Ferguson gives an exquisite, thrilling performance. .