All God's Chillun

Mr. O'Neill Writes a "Revolting" Play

"Is you a nigger, Nigger? Nigger, is you a nigger?"

One adolescent Negro, in a play by Eugene O'Neill, takes another adolesscent Negro by the throat, asks those questions, and is answered in the affirmative. There is drama in the affirmation.

It is a drama of miscegenation, called All God's Chillun Got Wings. A black man marries a white woman. The marriage fails.

The dramatic miscegenation will shortly be enacted in the Provincetown Playhouse, Manhattan, by a brilliant Negro named Paul Robeson and a brilliant white named Mary Blair. The producers are the Provincetown Players, headed by Eugene O'Neill, dramatist; Robert Edmund Jones, artist, and Kenneth Macgowan, author. Many white people do not like the idea. Neither do many black.

The play will carry the fated pair through their early days in Manhattan slums. After a short time spent happily in Europe where "soul is soul regardless of skin," the pair will return to enact the second and final act in an apartment owned by the Negro's wealthy parents. Ella, the white wife, will love her husband but hate his race. Her nerves will run out to insanity as he struggles in vain to pass his examinations at the Law School. She will prowl about with a carving knife and interfere with his study. She will go quite mad. He, finally despairing, but still adoring her, will play games with her as he did when they both were little tots. Neither of them will have been able to stand the gaff. So, curtain.

Paul Leroy Robeson, of the 1918 Rutgers football eleven, was on Walter Camp's all-American eleven. Incidentally, he was Phi Beta Kappa, with one of the highest scholastic records ever made at his Alma Mater. He is also a graduate of Columbia Law School, but theatrical interests have so far kept him from the practice of Law. As an amateur, he has played the title role in Simon the Cyrenian, by Ridgely Torrence, and the leading male role in Taboo, opposite Margaret Wycherly in Manhattan and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in England. For some weeks he was a professional in the big black musical success, Shuffle Along. Two years ago, he married Miss Eslanda Cardozo Goode, colored, Assistant Pathological Chemist at the Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan.

Robeson is generally spoken of as "a good fellow." Of the play he says: "It is not sensational. It is a beautiful and moving play."

Mary Blair is playing in the current Provincetown production Fashion. She was at one time associated with the Washington Square Players. She played in the insect comedy The World We Live In, and has appeared in others of Mr. O'Neill's plays, notably Diff'rent and The Hairy Ape. When Mr. O'Neill was writing All God's Chillun, so the story goes, he had her definitely in mind for the part. Unfounded press reports to the effect that other actresses had been offered and had refused the part were denied by the actresses themselves, but their denials have been swallowed up amid all the other publicity and controversy the play has occasioned.

Eugene O'Neill was born in Manhattan in 1888, attended Princeton and Harvard Universities. He spent two years at sea, has been in business in Central and South America, has been a vaudeville actor, a reporter for a Connecticut paper. He was married in 1918 to Miss Agnes B. Burton of London, England. His plays include: Thirst, Beyond the Horizon (Pulitzer Prize play 1920), Diff'rent, The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize play 1922), The Hairy Ape.

The public, being the public, is divided. Said Jay E. House, colyumist for the Philadelphia Public Ledger: "It was inevitable, of course, that Mr. O'Neill finally would write a play about marriage between the whites and blacks. He has already written plays about nearly all the other revolting topics . . .

"We write frankly of Mr. O'Neill for the reason that the spectacle of soiled fingers searching a dead man's chest for fleas does not intrigue us. But it is perfectly all right for those who like that sort of thing."

But many folks, notably down East, do not think it is perfectly all right for anybody whether they like it or not. A committee of influential Negroes and others in Boston say that the local censor has agreed to suppress it. The Legislative League of New York has protested. The New York World raised the question as to whether it is legal to enact upon the stage something which is "illegal and punishable as a crime ... in all Southern and border States."

Finally, there are the Art-for-Art people headed by Heywood Broun of The World.

Fata Morgana. Here is The Moon Flower, in which Elsie Ferguson opened the preceding week (TIME, March 10), shifted back to the Hungary whence its hero came to stake his heart at Monte Carlo. In this case, the one night of love is turned on by the woman, who turns off the light. She takes the lead all through this erotic game of tag. She is a sophisticated city woman, temporarily blacklisting her husband. In her pique at him, she flies to a relative's farm and finds a young cousin alone for the night, ripe for her plucking. She decides to make the most of isolation. She enmeshes him; then walks into his bedroom while he stands on one leg.

The homely. Hungarian soul of the young cousin accepts everything, including her offhand promise to divorce her husband and make a respectable man out of her lover. But in the morning, when the impossible but wealthy husband arrives, she forces her night-owl to hoot some efficient lies that restore her to her spouse. The game of tag is over--and the youth is it. He finds he has been spending the night with a Fata Morgana--a will o' the wisp beauty, who dissolves with the morning mists. In its sense of the immense calamity of adolescent rebuff in love, this play by Ernest Vajda borders on tragedy, saved by a youthful sense that tomorrow is another day. It is shot through with sardonic, Continental gleams, and a tingling realization that an amorous adventure can be masked by a stuffy, comatose countryside. Emily Stevens brings out admirably the incisive spirit of the careering city woman. But it is Morgan Farley who outgrows his juvenile skin in youth's encounter with matronly magic. He gives a deft and sensitive picture of the lad who discovers that love has its morning-after taste also. William Ingersoll and Josephine Hull (as his parents) and Orlando Daly and Helen Westley give veracious performances in an engaging production that shows the Theatre Guild on a picnic.

E. W. Osborn: "A dramatic Hungarian goulash, greatly underdone."

James Whittaker: "The play is our good old friend 'One Night' with Cleopatras served up in costume from distant dressmakers. It adds notably to our knowledge of how the Puszta peasant gets into his Sunday clothes and as scandalously to our knowledge of how he gets out of them."