SEVEN SAMPLES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM
In the best and most highly approved Metropolitan manner
Editor’s Note: When Vanity Fair suggested to Mr. E. E. Cummings that he give us his impressions anent the current American drama, the author of “&” replied—with a startling absence of subterfuge—that he would be happy to accept our invitation on one condition: viz., that he should not be expected to go to see any of the seven plays we wished reviewed, adding that he had never attended the theatre in his life and could not find any particular reason for doing so now, particularly as he studiously read all the New York dramatic critics and knew the métier thoroughly. Incredible as such a purely medieval statement may appear in the renaissance of this ultra-enlightened epoch, its veracity is irrevocably substantiated by the infra-mendacious tidbits which follow.
I. BOOM BOOMED
How Much Assassination is a play which is surely worth going to see. My throat specialist was particularly moved, and spent half the last appointment describing to me exactly why the production is a human document. As nearly as I can make out, I agree with him; although it seems he was in the air forces. No one who ever went over the top, which neither of us did, can fail to be amused by the dialogue between Rinehart and Belasco, or is it between Buffalo Bill and General Pershing? We forget which, unfortunately. Anyhow, the idea is there; and that man who did the ape in All God’s Chillun Got Wings is a remarkable actor in every way, and some of the slang just makes you want to stand up and say, “Let there be no more war!”
II. CLAPTRAP BEARNAISE
Pink Thunder from start to finish is a gripping melodrama in which frankly tropical lust is forcefully contrasted with intrinsic spiritual affection. The action—which reaches a heart-rending climax on the summit of Popocatepetl—is essentially a struggle between two women, one of whom is certainly no worse than she should be, for the possession of Peter Thomson, a missionary who is torn by conflicting emotions. Thrill-ridden scenes succeed each other with an agonizing rapidity, until Lucille Stingray (played to almost unendurable perfection by Mischa Elman) bribes a bloodthirsty tribe of Peruvian headhunters to abduct the sleeping heroine, for whom, until this dreadful moment, Peter—absorbed in the excruciating convolutions of his own ubiquitous conscience—had cherished merely a vague, unrecognizable emotion. The crisis, however, precipitates love; and the apostle is supplanted by the man. In a delirium of perspicuity, scarce knowing what he does, Michael Arlen as Peter rescues Isabel who faints with pleasure in his arms: whereupon, overcome—in what would appear to be the supreme moment of his life—by mingled inhibitions, the young man turns his back on temptation, gives himself (in an agony of remorse) to Lucille, and promptly jumps into the infernal fires of the volcano, which go out, causing the superstitious aborigines to hail him as a god. This sacrilege brings the devotee to his true senses—a fascinating psychological twist, for which the author (Miss Marianne Moore) is to be unstintingly congratulated—and he immediately, to everyone’s relief, inherits sixteen million dollars, kisses June Walker, embraces the American flag, and lives happily ever after as innumerable spectators swarmingly exeunt from New York’s best ventilated theatre.
Strut Your Stuff is a typical revue with Ethel Barrymore and the costumes—consisting of paper napkins, accurately and painstakingly designed by Claude Bragdon, beautifully photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and capably produced by Edward Royce.
IV. LOVE’S COMING OF AGE
Hairy Jones’ Desire under the Elms is a play in the manner of Greek tragedy about a monkey who is also a Negro in which little is left to the imagination. Hairy Jones (not to be confused with Robert Edmond Jones who did his level best with the somewhat slanting elms) after being born (in New England) becomes “dif’rent.” During all the rather long next, or third, act, the heroine alternately dabbles in incest and hides peanuts under a rug to amuse her doting grandfather who, we are given to understand, hangs himself in a shop window on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street to the dulcet thuddings of a tom-tom, as the curtain falls and subscribers exchange looks all over the Provincetown Theatre. But this is not the point of the production by any means, for the author is far from being one whom mere mute inglorious melodrama satisfies. Rather are we presented with a continuous cross section of the Oedipus complex as it occurs in a mixture of the African galley slave with the gorilla who has become a typical citizen of New Bedford, Massachusetts, during those old whaling days when might made wrong. The cast is excellent, Mary Garden excelling in the difficult part of Liz, while Sir Al Forbes-Robertson Jolson’s portrayal of the ambigeneric hero is a triumph of tact, vigour, and nuance; and profusely illustrated brochures, entitled “Anthony Comstock’s Reminiscences, or Tramping on Life” are distributed (gratis) to members of the audience, at each and every performance which I myself enjoyed very much.
V. THE GREAT AMERICAN DRAMA AT LAST
Mickey’s Yiddisher Tulip: Several million dollars have already flowed into the ermine-lined pocketbook of her who is, to put it mildly, the authoress of Mickey’s Yiddisher Tulip, and small wonder! For sheer blitheness of sentiment, gaiety of situation, sublimity of pathos, and general inventiveness, no story, since Uncle Tom’s Cabin thrilled our immediate ancestors, has enshrined so many genuinely laughable and authentically weep-able moments, making of the human heart a sensitive and responsive instrument at the beck and call of alternate terror and joy. It were indeed difficult to imagine what could be more wholly touching, and at the same time funnier, than a juxtaposition of the Icelandic and Assyrian temperaments; yet precisely this feat has won for the inspired progenitor of Mickey’s Yiddisher Tulip an everlasting seat among the geniuses of all time. (Standing room only.)
VI. CORN BEEF AND CAVIAR
Once again, after its triumphant tour of Athens, Constantinople, and Pekin, The Bohemian Ballet is with us. The only fault which your reviewer can find with this invariably extraordinary ballet organization, whose ranks are this year enriched by two dancers of international renown—Gretchen Fahrenheit and Mike Frost—is that it somehow just misses being neither the Swedish nor yet the Russian Ballet. Nevertheless, there are some far from wholly unpleasant moments; as when, for example, the superb curtain by Wable Wicasse falls (after the third scene of La Princesse Enceinte is somewhat less than half over) on the by no means negligible occiput of Igor Ivanovich Vladimir Skipski; or when Lucy Goeblum (that most astute of Lithuanian terpsichoristes) executes the banana dance of the Fiji Islands to a witty, if slightly posthumous, nocturne by Chopin—or during those few utterly inspired, absolutely unforgettable instants, when, against the molecular meanderings of Strapfka Fooking, are agreeably silhouetted the cerebral somersaults of Serge Kapoot.
VII. POLLYANNA AESTHETICS
The Black Suspenders is, as its name frankly implies, an evanescent folk tale of corrupt peasant life done into verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay and translated from the Algerian by Mrs. John F. Hylan. George Smith, the hero, ably interpreted by Mr. John Howard Lawson, is put to sleep by a fairy named Sylvio, and remains in a state of coma during the entire performance, parts of which (especially the twelfth and twenty-sixth tableaux) might be omitted to advantage without violating the delicate spirit of Arthur Hopkins’ conception. Aside from this minor error, the plot deals with Smith’s subconscious reaction to three characters—Geraldine Glumb, a future mother; Dorothy Dumb, a telephone girl, and Creichton Crumb, a painter of marine animals—all of whom are obviously in search of the author, Yudenich Pilsudski Numb, who remains off-stage, however, occasionally singing Nearer My God To Thee to the accompaniment of an ancient African instrument shaped somewhat like a cross between beggar on horseback and the mandolute. An audience (composed, last Saturday night, of a sprinkling of Danish plumbers and a scattering of Norwegian bank messengers) loudly booed the far from discreditable work of Philip Widget Moeller in the role of Philip Moeller Widget, and expressed almost unjustified approval whenever—as not infrequently happens—Geraldine hits Creichton with a stuffed cat in the middle of Dorothy’s wedding. On the whole, we are reluctantly forced to admit, we can congratualte Miss Millay, Mr. Pilsudski Numb and Mayoress Hylan.
From Vanity Fair, May 1925.