In Pasadena

More a pageant than a play, Lazarus Laughed, by famed Eugene O'Neill, received its first performance last week in Pasadena, Calif. Briefly, the play sets forth the adventures of Lazarus who was raised from the dead, taken to Rome, and there, after he has failed to provide Emperor Tiberius with renewed youth, burned at the stake. Lazarus is convinced that death is a misconception; men, he suggests, should forget sorrow and they should laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. The actors in the play give a large part of their time to an illustration of this precept; at one point, in the Pasadena performance, laughter, concerted and solo, continues on the stage for four successive minutes.

There are those who contend that Playwright O'Neill has more to say when he is concerned with intimate and human drama than when he is setting forth some tremendous generalization upon Life. The first audience at Lazarus Laughed was properly impressed with the repetitive and imposing spectacle which the Pasadena Players (amateur) made of their production. The play was given in the Pasadena Community Playhouse, a theatre endowed by local patrons for the highly able efforts of the Pasadena Players. The mechanics of the production were gigantic; there were vast numbers of actors, 400 costumes and 300 masks of all kinds. Irving Pichel, deep-voiced and deliberate, made a splendid Lazarus. Gilmor Brown, who organized the Pasadena Players some ten years ago, played Tiberius and acted as director. His handling of mob scenes, much after the methods of Max Reinhardt, was always effective.