New Plays
Leah Kleschna. The daddy of all crook melodramas, first presented by Mrs. Fiske 20 years ago, has been revived by William A. Brady with a stellar cast which proves that all actors are ham under the skin when allowed to run rampant. In this case the director seems to have allowed them to roam at will. The air is thick with gestures and forbidding faces.
William Faversham pronounces even the simplest line as either a benediction or a curse. Arnold Daly is a living exhibit of all the tricks of the trade, flourished one after the other. Arnold Korff, who made a distinct impression in The Living Mask (TIME, Jan. 28), here sounds at times like Eddie Foy. Lowell Sherman, save for one or two humorous moments, is hysterical and seems to be constantly limbering up his fingers for typewriter work. Even the extremely honest, intuitive Helen Gahagan gets a little off key from the general falsetto.
Hence it is hard to tell whether there is any real flesh left on the old bones of this melodrama. Its psychology seems real and substantial as it carries Leah, daughter of the Viennese master thief, through her efforts to rob a French statesman and philanthropist, to her regeneration, achieved with due self-consciousness. In the final act, when Leah leaves her father and his pals, Miss Gahagan, with Jose Ruben, does some of the best acting of the play, and flames out in a final skyrocket burst that makes a good one-act thriller.
The one improvement of the revival over the original seems to be the elimination of the epilogue, showing Leah finding her salvation by grubbing in the earth.*
Cobra. One of those plays in which sex is held up to reproach. It is a natural, unfaltering study of sex as a cobra--a snake which fascinates and then devours the great white bull, in this case a strapping athlete. All the energy which he develops swinging an oar as a champion Yale rower seems to turn to passion at the swing of a skirt. A woman's eye can wilt him more easily than a burning sun.
So he falls a prey to the viperous, beguiling wife of a friend, who makes rendezvous with him in a questionable hotel, then entwines him in snake-like arms. But he wrenches himself loose before the lights go out. After he flees, shaken in everything but his honor, the hotel burns down and the incandescent lady with it, perhaps from spontaneous combustion. The athlete then faces the problem of either enlightening his friend, driven frantic by his wife's inexplicable disappearance, or of leaving him ignorant, anguished but resting comfortably in his illusions about his wife.
In the end the oarsman decides to keep silent, despite the strident urgings of his sweetheart, whose stagnant purity is the one false note in the play--everyone else is as humanly frank as the law will allow. Louis Calhern gives a redoubtable performance as the Yale oarsman, achieving the feat of looking like a 'reluctant caveman. Judith Anderson is exceptionally facile as the insidious cobra. Ralph Morgan as the betrayed husband and Clara Moores as the insistently good sweetheart add to the absorbtion of a drama that leaves one flushed.
Flame of Love. Since this Chinese spectacle of ancient silk weaving has been backed by a silk firm (Cheney Bros.), it might be expected that as drygoods it would be very beautiful. But the story has as much place in it as a bull in a china shop. It has less action than the bull. It saunters deliberately through the legendary romance of the silk-weaving championship of Canfu, when a youth who could spin the magic flame silk was nearly consumed in the 'blandishments of a temptress instigated by a wily rival. Save for some provocative muscle dances and a breathless moment when the Delilah seems about to spurn mere clothing, it is picturesque but dull, a pretty ribbon on the notion counter of art.
The Dust Heap. A Canadian-Northwest melodrama in which the very scenery gets up and acts. In a brothel on the Yukon, the roof pulsates while two men struggle on it, the chimney disgorges a handcuffed hero, a thunderbolt comes right into the room and wrecks everything but the heroine's marcel waves, glass crashes, beams fall, audiences quake. On the opening night, the people sitting in the first row dodged.
There is also an upheaval of lurid language which tends to confirm the belief that men are men in the Northwest and do not mince words even in talking about God.
To a cut-throat lair known (because of the scum that frequents it), as the Dust Heap, a stealer of women brings a supposedly half-breed female ward of a priest, under the transparent pretence that her guardian wants her. He turns her over to his French Canuck pal, who starts dragging her significantly up the stairs.
A Hebrew pack peddler tries to interfere and gets sat down hard. Virtue seems in for a terrible licking. But the girl's lover enters--a red-shirted sergeant of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. He gets his man, after several cinemaesque scenes wherein everybody is tangled up with the furniture.
The Admiral. Charles Rann Kennedy presents Christopher Columbus as a painless paranoiac. There is even a very modern allusion to rabbits, though nothing is said of Harry K. Thaw. In this playlet for three, destined for road usage, Columbus and Queen Isabella (Edith Wynne Matthison) have a good long talk, with occasional footnotes from murmurous Margaret Gage. And though they talk about imperious man and pacific woman, Columbus does not get very far toward discovering anything.
Whitewashed. A puerile play, relating the didoes in an Adirondack hunting lodge, when a gentleman crook poses to a house party as its owner and the real owner is arrested. The high point of humor occurs when a guest puts his foot in a pail of whitewash. For some reason one of the authors is not ashamed to act in it.
The Best Plays
These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:
Drama
OUTWARD BOUND--An eerie, soul-searching drama of the hereafter, acted with the skill of a mystery melodrama.
RAIN--A remarkably vital play that is a preachment--to preachers.
SUN-UP--The last week of the hardy Carolina mountaineers as they fumble grimly across ihe line.
TARNISH--A stinging study of the bourgeois temperament out for a night of wallowing in its private amours.
THE OUTSIDER--Luminous performances by Lionel At will and Katherine Cornell keep this medical play from being a drug on the market.
SAINT JOAN--Bernard Shaw does his best for Joan of Arc--and it's very good indeed.
Comedy
BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK--A delightful, variegated fantasy, cracking the shell of the babbitt business man.
THE NERVOUS WRECK--Turbulently amusing revelation of how a Harold Lloyd (who, nevertheless, is not in the cast) might behave in the Wild West.
THE SWAN--Deliciously presented comedy which gently rubs the gloss off a royalty that views a morganatic marriage in the light of miscegenation.
CYRANO DE BERGERAC--Superb production of a deathless comedy of gallantry. Walter Hampden has fulfilled his threat to become a fine actor.
MEET THE WIFE--The fairly entertaining process of making two husbands grow where only one was before.
THE POTTERS--An understanding delineation of the gold hearts and ivory heads in the average U. S. family.
THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH--Gives the younger generation a very good reference, for future authors.
HELL-BENT FER HEAVEN--Sulking religion sent skidding down (the Kentucky mountains, without too much hokum.
THE SHOW-OFF--A comedy which makes an archangel of bluff one of the sights of the town.
FATA MORGANA--A roguish comedy, exhibiting one decolletee night in Hungary, without consequences.
Musical
Amid the considerable variety of strictly frivolous entertainment currently displayed, these stand well to the fore: Stepping Stones, Ziegfeld Follies, Mary Jane Me Kane, Poppy, Music Box Revue, Runnin' Wild, Kid Boots, Charlot's Revue.
* In the cinema version (A Moral Sinner-- TIME, April 14), Leah winds up in the arms of the statesman.