A Drama of the Two Generations
Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in Nowadays. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life—and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations—the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.
Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family—a father, mother, son, and daughter—and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter’s idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.
Diana’s father refuses to think about woman suffrage. “I don’t have to think about something I feel. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage, women would all vote like their husbands.”
“They say it would double the ignorant vote,” answers Diana’s friend, Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.
“He’s a good-natured old fossil,” Peter says later to Diana. And when the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, “I love radishes, but they don’t agree with me. If he had a new idea he’d die of dropsy.”
The result of Diana’s visit is to produce certain rebellions in her mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter. Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good “comedy”; also it’s tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so bravely through traditions and inheritances.
But Nowadays has another value besides that of its story. It is made of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall talk more about this in another issue.