The play is certainly a moral hair-raiser, and the stuffing is knocked out of the decalogue at every turn.
Mrs. Alving, the leading lady, who keeps her chin high in the air, has married a moral monstrosity in the shape of a spavined rake, and hides it from the world. She wears a pleasant smile and gives society the glad hand, and finally lets go all holds when her husband gets gay with the hired girl, and gives an old tar three hundred plunks to marry her and stand the responsibility for the expected population.
Oswald, the mother's only boy, is sent to Paris to paint views for marines, and takes kindly to the gay life of the capital, where the joy of living is the rage and families are reared in a section where a printer running a job office solely on marriage certificates would hit the poor-house with a dull thud.
Regena, the result of Mr. Alving's attentions to the hired girl, also works in the family, and falls in love with the painter-boy on his return from Paris. They vote country life too slow, and plan to go to Paris and start a family. The doting mother gives her consent, and Pastor Menders, who is throwing fits all through the play, has a spasm.
The boy, on being informed that the girl of his choice is his half-sister, throws another, his mama having also thrown a few in the other act.
Engstrand, who runs a sort of sailors' and soldiers' canteen, sets fire to an orphanage, and the boy, who has inherited a sort of mayonnaise-dressing brain from his awful dad, tears about the stage a spell, breaks some furniture, and upsets the wine. He finally takes rough-on-rats, and dies a gibbering idiot, with his mother slobbering over him and trying to figure out in her own mind that he was merely drunk and disorderly.
As a sermon on the law of heredity the play is great, but after seeing it we are glad to announce that Haverly's Minstrels will relieve the Ibsen gloom on November 6—next Monday night.—Carson (Nevada) Appeal.
PROFESSIONAL OBITUARY.
When an editor dies in Kansas, this is the way they write the obituary: "The pen is silent; the scissors have been laid away to rust; the stillness of death pervades the very atmosphere where once the hoarse voice of the devil yelling 'copy' or 'what the hell's this word?' was wont to resound. The paste-pot has soured on the what-not; the cockroach is eating the composition off the roller, and the bluebottle fly is dying in the rich folds of the printer's towel."—Exchange.