But there is art in this play—not mere observation—and I am afraid none of the Pampinellis who are to be concerned with its future will ever quite equal the person that the author and Alison Skipworth, the actress, created between them. I do not look for any moment so extraordinary as when Mrs. Pampinelli, discussing the fatalities invariably connected with these amateur performances, reaches her peroration: “We are not dismayed; we have the lessons of history to fortify us: for whenever the torch of essential culture has been raised, (she raises the lead-pencil as though it were a torch) there has unfailingly been the concomitant exactment of a human life.” For one cannot expect to find a cuckoo-clock always present with its sapient comment at such a moment.
The reader will find the cuckoo-clock, the satire, and the hokum for himself. He will also detect, I think, a strain of divine and devilish madness in Kelly which promises something of genius for the American drama. The reader may note, too, in Kelly’s script the kind of practical qualification for the theatre of which Mr. Ritter speaks feelingly on page 56. This qualification has produced extraordinarily effective humor and something else. This is a sense for stage management. It makes Kelly a rare and precious figure in our theatre, and gives you a script to read—or to produce—that is liberally supplied with every bit of business and direction necessary for putting on the play—either in the Cohoes Little Theatre or your own imagination.
Kenneth Macgowan.
Pelham Manor, N. Y., February 25, 1923.
NOTE: The drawing-room at Ritter’s, in which the first and last acts are laid, is a comfortable-looking room, suggestive of good circumstance. Toward the back there is a fancy wooden partition separating the hallway from the room proper. This partition begins rather high up on the side walls and curves deeply down to two ornamental columns, five feet high and set about five feet apart, forming the entrance from the hallway to the room. Straight out through this entrance, and paralleling the partition, is the staircase, running up to the left and through an arched doorway. The foot of the staircase is just to the right of the center-door; and then the hallway continues on out to the front door. On the left, there is a passageway between the staircase and the partition, running through an arched doorway to the body of the house. In the room proper, breaking the angle of the right wall and the partition, is a door, opening out, and below this door, a casement-window. On the left, breaking the angle of the left wall and the partition, is the mantelpiece, and below it a door, opening out. Just inside the partition, on either side of the center-door, is a built-in seat.
The entire room and hallway is done in a scheme of silver and the lighter shades of green. All the woodwork and furniture, including the piano and mantelpiece, is finished in silver-green, and the walls and ceiling are in blended tones of orchid, gray and green, decorated with tapestried panel-effects. The carpet is gray-green, and the vases and clock on the mantelpiece, as well as the little cuckoo-clock over the door at the left, are green. The drapes on the casement-window and the doorways, at the head of the stairs and in the left hallway, are in rose-colored brocaded satin; and the pads on the partition-seats are covered with the same material. The piano-throw is a garishly subdued blend of old-rose, Nile green and canary-colored silk.
Right out between the little wooden columns of the center-door, set flat against the staircase, is a small console-table, holding a most beautiful rose-colored vase filled with wisteria; and on the piano there is a similar vase filled with white and yellow blossoms. On either side of the console-table there is a tall torchiere with a rose-colored shade; and the shades on the wall-lights, and the one on the lovely rose-colored vase-lamp on the table down at the right below the casement-window, are all rose-colored.