And when I find one that has done with lies,
I send a word ...
“Change” at the Fine Arts Theatre
DeWitt C. Wing
Your enthusiastic welcome of Change, published in the April number of The Little Review, compelled me to see the play, and I hasten to report a memorable evening. Have you ever heard the hard, sharp, battering, hammering of an electric riveter used on a steel bridge? Change has a punch like that, and every punch is a puncture. No kind of orthodoxy can resist it.
I have never spent a dozy moment in the Fine Arts Theatre. I shall never forget Candida, Hindle Wakes, Miles Dixon, Prunella, Change, and other dramas and tragedies that I have witnessed there. I shall not even forget Cowards. Chicago some day will reproduce and expand the truth which a dozen plays have driven into the souls of people who have sat in that beautiful little room. Whatever the commercial outcome of an attempt to present beauty and truth as expressions of life, the management has already achieved a noble success. Hundreds of men and women will always remember the Fine Arts Theatre as an inner shrine of authentic art, where the furthermost reaches of the human spirit in the fiction of plays have touched and quickened the heart of reality.
Change represents an ever-new voice rising above the rattle of inevitable dogma and decay. It rings true to life. Even its name is profoundly appropriate as a label for an inexorable law. If a play reveals splendid thinking I am almost indifferent to what in that case becomes largely the incident of acting, for to be engrossed in enforced thought is to lose that narrow vision of the outward eye which merely looks on a performance. One is not then an onlooker but a discoverer. Change was hard, subtle thinking plus admirable interpretative acting. Like the Irish and English players who have appeared in the Fine Arts Theatre, the Welsh company who recently gave us this trenchant criticism of life endowed the word “acting” with a fresh significance. One does not think of them as players; they impress one as re-livers of the life that they portray. That is art of a high order. If we Americans are proud of our wealth and wonders, we must bow in humility when we consider that the biggest plays that we have seen and the best acting that we have witnessed are not of domestic authorship. They are imported, and we have enjoyed them at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago.
Change is in four acts, written by J. O. Francis. It was awarded the prize offered by the Incorporated Stage Society of London for the best play of the season. The scene is in a cottage on the Twmp, Aberpandy, in South Wales. The time is the present. A tragic change occurs in a family, whose head was a collier. It is a kind of drama that might inspire the private regret that the tragic martyrdom of Christian fanatics is no longer in vogue, and offers a species of justification of summarily removing human obstacles. Who among real men wouldn’t have an impulse to take an active hand in ridding life of a suppressive old barnacle like John Price? He and his conscience and his God stood against the primal law of change, with blind passion and colossal selfishness. If his sons John Henry and Lewis had mangled him I should have admired their passion. Gwen Price, the wife and mother, suffered more than all because she was capable of suffering; I did not wish a change on her account; she was a woman. Her suffering and weakness were her triumph and strength. Besides, she was not at war with life as she saw it in her sons. Her love was great and wise enough to confer tragic beauty and adorn a soul; that kind of love is the supreme religion.
What John Price felt and expressed as religion was a contemptible mental narrowness and spiritual poverty; a counterfeit religion based upon fear and hardened by ceremonial practice. Its one virtue was that it offered the most formidable opposition to the unfolding of manhood in two young men. Youth is ever pushing its entangled feet down against the hard substrata of anterior generations. Too often it is stuck and gradually smothered in the upper mud, which solidifies as insidiously as it forms. A man who can be held by dying or dead impedimenta is himself dead. A man who struggles out and stands triumphant upon it, with the antennae of his being reaching up and out for the widest and finest contacts, fulfills destiny by adding a golden grain of solid value on which a succeeding aspirant for a larger life may stand that much higher on the old foundation. The man who conforms, remains in and a part of the common level, plastically flattens out like dough under a rolling pin, merely fulfills the law of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of mass. Whereas youth’s great dream is symbolized by the over-topping king of the forest, standing stiff-spined and straight upon the old earth, its head in rare aloofness, the ease-lover functions as a lowly parasite.
With wild winged thoughts of which these remarks are vague memories I took Change in my consciousness from the theatre. No thoughtful person could have returned unchanged from the playhouse. The transitoriness of religions, institutions, customs, and all other so-called fixtures which constitute modern civilization is the tremendous fact that makes Change a powerful supplement to social forces. Of course to the modern mind the idea is already old, but to the primitive majority it is a prophecy.