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In coming to the work of individual playwrights, I am afraid the method of conscientious enumeration must to a great extent go on. Granville Barker’s work is almost too well-known to require special comment. His plays, some one of which is almost certain to be found in any comprehensive anthology, are published in seven volumes, each a single drama except the Three Short Plays. Anatol, to be sure, is simply Mr. Barker’s splendid version of Arthur Schnitzler’s gay satire on a gilded youth of Vienna. Probably Waste, at once intimate in its discussions and intensely serious, is the best-known drama by Barker; but The Madras House, with its humors of feminine psychology, and The Voysey Inheritance, that fine study of middle-class English family life, are both popular. The others are The Marrying of Ann Leete, at once a comedy and a satire, and the three-act play called The Secret Life, a play of present-day England touched with philosophy and mysticism and occasional cynicism, but of the same distinctive quality as Barker’s other work.
Three plays by Lewis Beach have been published. A Square Peg presents the tragic results of a mother’s unflinching rule of her family. The Goose Hangs High is a comedy of family loyalty and affection which brings the younger generation face to face with its elders; it has been a success of the last New York season. But the one to which I want to direct attention especially is Ann Vroome, a play in seven scenes giving the story of a girl’s long wait for happiness when she postpones marriage to care for her parents. This play has a very fine acceleration of dramatic interest, of emotional intensity; and its literary quality is of a high order. It is evident that Mr. Beach does nothing badly.
The history of Owen Davis has been told many times, but I do not suppose its impression of the extraordinary is ever lessened. He wrote, for years, melodramas of the “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model” order; I am by no means sure he did not write “Nellie.” In those days he supplied the theaters of the Bowery and other avenues no better as to art if less notorious. It should be said that however cheap were these works, they were infinitely more respectable and of a better moral character than some pretentious affairs playing uptown. Mr. Davis had two reasonable purposes—to learn play writing and to make necessary money. When he had accomplished both, being still a young man, he turned to work of a different description. His play, The Detour (1921), the story of a woman’s never-dying aspiration and hope, was one of the finest things of its season. Clear-cut, dramatic, with comedy and pathos interwoven, it depicted mental and spiritual force pitted against solely material ambition in a way that those who saw or read it did not forget. The evidence was clear that a new American dramatist of the first rank had been born. Icebound (1922), had immediate attention and very marked critical praise, crowned by the award to it of the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as the best American play of the year.
The most successful American playwright of his day, Clyde Fitch was also one of the ablest. The Memorial Edition of the Plays of Clyde Fitch, edited, with introductions, by Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, and published in four volumes is a gallant and important affair. The edition is definitive and contains three plays that were never before in print, “The Woman in the Case,” “Lovers’ Lane,” and that most important of the Fitch plays, “The City.” The fourth volume of this edition contains Mr. Fitch’s address on “The Play and the Public.”[78]
The four volumes of Representative Plays by Henry Arthur Jones, edited, with historical, biographical, and critical introductions, by Clayton Hamilton, assemble in a splendid library edition the most interesting work of the British dramatist. Henry Arthur Jones wrote some sixty or seventy plays, printed mainly in pamphlet form—“scrips”—for the use, primarily, of actors, professional and amateur. These Mr. Hamilton sifted, at the same time making an effort to indicate the range and variety of Jones’s work. As a consequence, Representative Plays opens with a celebrated old-time melodrama, “The Silver King,” and illustrates the stages in the author’s progress until he arrived, in the composition of “The Liars,” at a really great accomplishment as a master of modern English comedy. Mr. Hamilton’s introductions carry the reader’s attention from play to play along a continuous current of historical, biographical and critical comment. Probably the best-known inclusions are the plays in the third volume: “Michael and His Lost Angel,” “The Liars,” “Mrs. Dane’s Defence,” and “The Hypocrites.”
Of Cosmo Hamilton’s Four Plays I have already made mention[79] and perhaps I should have spoken of Percival Wilde when dealing with one-act plays. Mr. Wilde’s work is itself an anthology of the one-act play. This New Yorker was for a while in the banking business; on the publication of his first story he received so many requests to allow its dramatization that he thought he would investigate the drama himself. That was not more than a dozen years ago; yet now Percival Wilde is commonly said to have had more plays produced—or rather, to have had a greater number of productions—in American Little Theaters than any other playwright.
His books to date (of this sort) are five. Eight Comedies for Little Theatres contains “The Previous Engagement,” “The Dyspeptic Ogre,” “Catesby,” “The Sequel,” “In the Net,” “His Return,” “The Embryo,” and “A Wonderful Woman.” Then there are his other collections—Dawn, and Other One-Act Plays of Life Today (six), A Question of Morality, and Other Plays (five), and The Unseen Host, and Other War Plays (five), and The Inn of Discontent and Other Fantastic Plays (five).
George Kelly, a young American born in a suburb of Philadelphia, had the daring to satirize the Little Theater movement in America in “The Torch-Bearers,” which had a New York success. In this past season his play, The Show-Off, has not only been a memorable success but has perhaps had more unqualified praise than any drama in years. “I might as well begin boldly and say that The Show-Off is the best comedy which has yet been written by an American,” writes Heywood Broun in his preface to the published play; and this does not much exaggerate the note of the general chorus. The committee named to recommend a play for the award of the annual Pulitzer Prize selected The Show-Off; and the overruling of their choice by the Columbia University authorities was the subject of considerable controversy not entirely free from indignant feeling. What is this play? “A transcript of life, in three acts,” the titlepage truthfully calls it. The chief character, Aubrey Piper, liar, braggart, egoist, is almost dreadfully real. It is perhaps possible, however depressing, to regard him as a symbol of all mankind, bringing us to realize the toughness of human fiber, as Mr. Broun suggests. But it seems to me much more likely that the play’s great merit and supreme interest lies in another point that Mr. Broun makes: there is no development of character in Aubrey, but only in ourselves, the audience, who come to know him progressively better, and finally to know him to the last inescapable dreg. Most critics have tended, I think, to overlook the splendid characterization of Mrs. Fisher, Aubrey’s perspicacious and unrelenting mother-in-law. The play is too true for satire, too serious for comedy, too humanly diverting for tears. It is certainly not to be missed.
The Lilies of the Field, a comedy by John Hastings Turner, author of several novels, including that very engaging story, Simple Souls, is one of the British Drama League series and will probably have a New York production this season. The desire of twin daughters of an English village clergyman to become the wives of young men met in London—young men who toil not, neither do they spin except at dances—produces the complications, which are both entertaining and somewhat satirical. Of the other British Drama League plays, The Prince, by Gwen John, deals with Queen Elizabeth, and is “a study of character, based on contemporary evidence,” while Laurence Binyon’s Ayuli is drama in verse, telling a picturesque story of Eastern Asia. Mr. Binyon has made studies of Oriental art and his drama is of quite exceptional literary quality.
Of novel interest is The Sea Woman’s Cloak and November Eve, a volume containing two plays by the American writer, Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy), that are as Irish as work by Lady Gregory, Yeats, or J. M. Synge. “The Sea Woman’s Cloak” is based on an old legend of Ganore’s mating with a mortal; “November Eve” tells how Ilva, who is fairy-struck, saves a soul the godly folk won’t risk their own souls to save.
Dragon’s Glory, a play in four scenes by Gertrude Knevels, is based on an old Chinese legend, and makes very amusing reading and a most actable comedy. Yow Chow has purchased the finest coffin in China (“Dragon’s Glory”) and the action of the piece centers about this treasure, in which the estimable Yow Chow reposes until a crisis which is the climax of the play.
The two series known respectively as the Modern Series and the Little Theatre Series consist of plays published in pamphlet form at a low price for the convenience of amateur theatrical organizations. Included in these series are separate plays by such authors as Booth Tarkington, Christopher Morley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Stuart Walker, Floyd Dell, Rupert Brooke, and others, to a present total of thirty titles. The Modern Series, edited by Frank Shay, has two particularly striking new titles in Lord Byron and Autumn.
Lord Byron, a play in seven scenes by Maurice Ferber, is of the genre of Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Eaton’s and Mr. Carb’s Queen Victoria. Byron is one of the most dramatic of the possible subjects for a biographical play, and Mr. Ferber’s work will undoubtedly be frequently staged and very much read at this time of the Byron centenary.
Autumn, in four acts, by Ilya Surguchev, translated by David A. Modell, is the picture of jealousy between a young wife and an adopted daughter. “This is one of the strongest plays I have ever read,” says Frank Shay. It is our first introduction to the work of the Russian author and part of its novelty consists in the last act, which “achieves a monotony that is real and genuine. It does not bring husband and wife together in happiness, but shows that there is nothing else for them to do but to go on.”
But the other new titles in the Modern Series deserve brief mention. Words and Thoughts, by Don Marquis, presents John and Mary Speaker, who utter the usual banalities of the world, and John and Mary Thinker, who utter their true and less pleasant thoughts. John L. Balderston’s A Morality Play for the Leisure Class pictures a rich collector’s boredom in heaven when he finds that his treasures there have no monetary value. There is an O. Henry twist to the ending. Walter McClellan’s The Delta Wife is a genre play of the Mississippi River mouth, in type resembling Hell-Bent fer Heaven. The Lion’s Mouth, by George Madden Martin and Harriet L. Kennedy, deals with the relations of blacks and whites. A white doctor ignores a black child in his efforts to save a white baby. An old mammy has an invaluable herb cure; but finding that the doctor cares nothing for her grandson’s life, she refuses to save the white infant. Wilbur Daniel Steele’s The Giant’s Stair is a study in mood and atmosphere, like many of his short stories. Before the play opens a man has been murdered. A terrific storm is raging. The scene is between the widow and her demented sister and the sheriff. Action! by Holland Hudson is a swift-moving, melodramatic comedy. The son of a silk dealer returns from selling airplanes to protest that the life of a silk salesman is dull. His objections are interrupted by the entry of two silk loft burglars and two bootleggers—followed by Federal officers and policemen with drawn weapons.
The new titles in the Little Theatre Series, edited by Grace Adams, include Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo and her The Lamp and the Bell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work is known throughout America. The Lamp and the Bell, a Shakespearean play written for a Vassar College anniversary, has for its theme woman’s friendship, and is very nearly unique among compositions for an occasion in having solid literary and dramatic merit. Its fresh, vigorous, creative quality is enriched by some lovely lyrical inclusions. Aria da Capo, Miss Millay’s bitterly ironic, beautiful and interesting one-act fantasy, has been played, one is tempted to believe, everywhere; and will for years be played again and again. No contemporary Pierrot and Columbine composition excels it, if, indeed, any matches it.
Mary MacMillen’s Pan or Pierrot is a play for children, to be acted out of doors. And I must again call attention to John Farrar’s charming plays for children in The Magic Sea Shell.