The Qualities of Moissi

In Manhattan last week there arrived a great actor, Alexander Moissi (Moy-see). The day after his arrival, he began to act in Max Reinhardt's production of Redemption, as produced by Morris Gest.

It was not his first visit to the U. S. nor his first performance in Redemption. Moissi was one of the troupe of German players who came here a year ago with Reinhardt to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in German, as well as other lovely and pretentious novelties. Now he is here with his German company to go touring* in Redemption, in which he has played at intervals for the past 15 years. Curiously enough, Moissi was not born back stage on a winter's night, while his mother was making a quick change in The Sunken Bell. His paternal progenitors, with their clanging names, were great men in Trieste; one of them, Moissi Golemi, was a general under the Albanian national hero Scanderbeg. His mother, extant at 86, is a descendant of one Carlo di Radis, a famed Italian physician. Moissi's father was a merchant in Trieste and it was there, in 1880, on the day after April Fool's, that Alexander Moissi was born.

He grew up in Trieste (Austrian then, Italian now) and learned to speak Italian perfectly and German with an Italian accent. There is no anecdote to account for his becoming an actor; he merely decided to be one and began to play in Prague, with Angelo Neumann's stock company. Later, he decided to go to Berlin and there he met Max Reinhardt.

Max Reinhardt, like all great theatrical impresarios, possesses the most subtle of all talents, that of recognizing genius. It was a question of time until Moissi should become famous; at first, his Italian accent made him unpopular; then, little and ugly and sad, he became a matinee idol; at last German critics, who are to other critics as the snail is to the turtle, awarded him their approval.

Moissi has played in Shaw and Hauptmann, Chekhov, Pirandello, Shakespeare and Euripides. He has played in Paris, Petrograd, London, Budapest and the littlest villages in Austria. In Moscow, he played in German while the rest of the cast spoke Russian. He lives on a hill near Vienna with his wife, Actress Johanna Terwin, who is also in the Redemption cast.

The opening night in Manhattan was attended by an enthusiastic audience.

New Plays in Manhattan

The Squealer. Among the more spirited of Manhattan's antiquarians is Mark Linder; he wrote a play from which lamed Mae West evolved the picturesque excitement of Diamond Lil; now he has scratched up further blood and thunder about San Francisco's underworld, 22 years ago. It is a candid melodrama, of vice rampant and virtue triumphant; yet its most bitter climaxes are meant to be accepted and enjoyed in a somewhat mocking spirit. The audience will gloat, not shiver, when a character says: "I'll get you for this, Logan, if it takes me twenty years"; or, "Wong, you'll pay for this."

Wong is a Chinese character but as crooked as the letter S. He tosses a Caucasian girl behind a secret panel and in the last act gives a party at which there is a fire-eating magician. Also, in the last act, there is the San Francisco earthquake and fire. The plot deals with dope-peddling; Slippery Jim (Robert Bentley) is the chief dope-peddler; he leaves the racket and marries a pure, sweet girl. Wong is killed in the earthquake.

Ruth Shepley plays the sweet girl whom Slippery marries; and theatre-goers with good memories recall The Boomerang wherein Ruth Shepley played another such, spraining her ankle nightly for the furtherance of romance.

Tonight at 12. Practice, it is apparently the conviction of Author Owen Davis, makes the playwright perfect. Nor is the conviction betrayed in this, the latest of more than 250 Davis dramas, wherein a comparatively improbable situation and an unlikely plot are made to seem funny and exciting by turns, owing to smart dialog and skillful construction.

At a supposedly polite dinner party, a Mrs. Keith turns savagely upon her female guests, stating that one of them is her husband's mistress. Someone, it is true, has been making amorous advances through the shrubbery about the house; but, with a sudden burst of self-sacrificial solemnity, Mr. Keith's heir falsely insists that the figures seen en route to furtive passions were those of himself and one of the suspected women's housemaids. This precipitates a semi-tragic interruption of the endearments which had hitherto been passing between the Keith scion and a nice young girl.

Just in time. Author Davis prevents his play from becoming a study of puppy love frustrated. Once more the problem of old Keith's circuit among suburban sirens is brought forward, to stay for a curtain which is as nearly satisfactory as possible. Of a sharp, clever cast, one of the pleasanter bits was done by Owen Davis Jr. as the younger Keith.

Macbeth is a play, not so much of men and women, as of the wind and the darkness, witches and their gloomy cries. It has been played a thousand ways, by actors, steeped in the colors of their trade, unmannerly breached with gore, who bellow and rant, who incarnadine its multitudinous sea of words with bloody sound and fury.

Now it is being played in Manhattan by Lyn Harding (Macbeth) and Florence Reed (Lady Macbeth) in settings by famed Gordon Craig. These settings are the most notable circumstance of George C. Tyler's production; stairs in the castle, rocks along the moor, a road, a cave, a banquet hall--all of them are shadowed by the moods of the play.

Florence Reed has never before played a Shakespearian role though she rehearsed in Hamlet with E. H. Sothern in 1907. She devoted her talents in 1917 to the long continued spectacularities of Chu Chin Chow, wherein Ali Baba and his robbers concealed themselves at the Manhattan Opera House ; hers also was the somewhat wanton Shanghai Gesture.

Best Plays in Manhattan

SERIOUS

STRANGE INTERLUDE--Nine acts of intellectual thunder by Eugene O'Neill and a Theatre Guild cast (TIME, Feb. 13).

MACHINAL--Zita Johann making herself famous in a sombre survey of justifiable homicide (TIME, Sept. 17).

EXCEEDING SMALL--A minor Saturday's Children dealing with the life and death of two tiny people whom happiness snubs (TIME, Nov. 5).

GODS OF THE LIGHTNING--Sacco and

Vanzetti, under assumed names, are

slaughtered on the stage for the cheers

of sympathetic auditors (TIME, Nov. 5).

FUNNY

GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS--A newspaper play which deals gently with the coldest profession (TIME, Sept. 10).

THE HIGH ROAD--British wit and Edna Best prettily enmeshed in a tragedy of love among the upper classes (TIME, 'Sept. 24).

THE LITTLE ACCIDENT--In which a journey to a maternity hospital and the birth of a bastard lead lightly to a kind conclusion; even the play is a natural (TIME, Oct. 22).

EXCITING

THE FRONT PAGE--A savagely melodramatic comedy of Chicago police-court reporters who stoop to scoop and who are masters of the retort curt (TIME, June 4; Aug. 27).

NIGHT HOSTESS--Phil Dunning has another look at Broadway and finds that it has not greatly changed (TIME, Sept. 24).

JARNEGAN--Jim Tully expends sound and fury on the silent drama racket--with a cast which includes Richard Bennett and his daughter Joan (TIME, Oct. 8).

*The itinerary: Manhattan, Nov. 19--Dec. 3; Boston, Dec. 3--Dec. 10; Philadelphia, Dec. 10--Dec. 17; Pittsburgh, Dec. 17--Dec. 24; Chicago, Dec. 24--Dec. 31; St. Louis, Dec. 31-- Jan. 7; and back to Manhattan via Detroit, Newark and Brooklyn.