The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays Part 71

[Footnote 1: Appendix to _The Poetical Works of William B.

Yeats_, volume II, (Macmillan, 1912).]

_Winthrop Parkhurst_: THE BEGGAR AND THE KING

_The Beggar and the King_ looks at first like a pleasant absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority. And yet, just as of old, not only kings, but all others who attempt dictators.h.i.+p and the playing of providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to rebellion. Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of the curtain.

Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a family tradition is a descendant on his mother's side of John Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father's of the executioner of Charles I of England. His writings include _Maracca_, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical sketches.

_George Middleton_: TIDES

Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems which are not easy to solve. And he does not try to give ready-made solutions. He merely shows us how various people have tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed.

Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these plays appear in the lists following. _Tides_ is about a man who has supported an unpopular theory. Nothing is said about whether his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal.

The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's _The League of Youth_, but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means: a failure within oneself?" she comments wisely. An effective contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly abandoned his father's theories in the face of new realities as he sees them.

_Eugene O'Neill_: ILE

Eugene O'Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and dramatist, has been a.s.sociated for several years with the Provincetown Players. This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once tethered! In 1919 Mr. O'Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the most important American play of the year.

Mr. O'Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad. He knows the interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville's _Moby_ _d.i.c.k_ and the first chapter of _Typee_--best of all in Bullen's _Cruise of the Cachalot_. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas--perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail to turn him home "with a measly four hundred barrel of ile" is the problem of the play.

_J.A. Ferguson_: CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR

This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688. "The Young Pretender's" vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England, might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection of the Highland chiefs who supported him. His failure was completed at the b.l.o.o.d.y battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in 1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation.

Scott's hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in _Kidnapped_, had numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts. The hatred of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.

The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of course, the heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superst.i.tion, his remorseless cruelty. We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous and b.l.o.o.d.y deeds!

This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1914. The author has written no others which have been published, though he is credited with a good story or two. It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent as this one. He has put into very brief and effective form here the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless conflict.

A _kebbuck_ is a cheese; _keek_ means peek; _toom_, empty; a _besom_, a broom; and _soop_, sweep.

_John Galsworthy_: THE SUN

According to Professor Lewisohn and other critics Mr. Galsworthy is without question the foremost English dramatist to-day.

Without arguing or attempting to offer solutions, he gives the most searching presentation of problems which we have to face and somehow settle. In _Strife_, after a furious contest and bitter hards.h.i.+ps, the strike is settled by a compromise which the leaders of both sides count as failure. Things are much as they were at the start; the difficulty is no nearer solution. In _Justice_, "society stamps out a human life not without its fair possibilities--for eighty-one pounds," because obviously clear and guilty infraction of law cannot go unavenged. Justice is not condemned by the facts shown in this play, nor is its working extolled. In _The Mob_, the patrioteering element destroys a man who proclaims the injustice of a small and greedy war of conquest. In _The Pigeon_, brilliant debate is held, but no conclusion reached, as to what we should do with derelict and wasted lives, with men who do not fit into the scheme of success and society.

In his sketches and stories Mr. Galsworthy presents these same problems, and again without attempted conclusions. _The Freelands_ particularly is a most dramatic novel of conditions and results similar to those in some of the dramas mentioned above. Many of his sketches and essays also--for example, "My Distant Relative" in _The Inn of Tranquillity_ and "Comfort" in _A Commentary_--are of biting and almost cynical irony in viewing proposed and present solutions of problems; but none suggest panaceas. They merely make us think soberly of the size of our problems and their immense complexity, move us to go out to look for more information and to examine carefully our most solid inst.i.tutions as well as suggested alterations in them.

A large part of Mr. Galsworthy's time and thought, both during the war and since, has been given to the problem of some measure of justice to soldiers, and particularly to wounded and broken soldiers. In _A Sheaf_ and _Another Sheaf_ appear various papers presenting sharply the conditions of suffering and neglect that actually exist. _The Sun_ is a brief sketch of after-war days,--this time of a wounded man who has gained an advantage over one who escaped injury,--and of joy in deliverance from the h.e.l.l of war--a joy so profound and luminous that the released soldier cannot let a sharp mischance and disappointment mar his happiness. The whole piece is in the key of Captain Ba.s.soon's verses after the Armistice:--

"Every one suddenly burst out singing."

The other two think the happy soldier mad. We are left wondering what the reaction will be from this height of joyful release to the harsh and sombre conditions of workingmen's life after the peace.

The _silver badge_ represents a discharge for wounds. _Crumps_ are, of course, sh.e.l.ls.

_Louise Sounders_: THE KNAVE OF HEARTS

_The Knave of Hearts_ is one of the happy tradition of puppet-plays, which come down in unbroken line from the most ancient history, through the ill.u.s.trious Dr. Faustus and Mr.

Punch, to new and even greater favor and fame to-day. For just as the ancient puppet-shows of Italy and England seemed to be losing ground before the moving-picture invasion, they have been heroically rescued by Mr. Tony Sarg,--whose performance of Thackeray's _The Rose and the Ring_ is perfectly absurd and captivating,--and by other excellent artists.

Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and quite convincing. Very good ones have been improvised even by tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a slit at the top to let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to talk for all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths and otherwise act most realistically; these are, of course, more difficult, but quite possible to make. In such simple theatres, Goethe and Robert Louis Stevenson and many other famous people played themselves endless stories. If you want to pursue this idea further, a list of references below gives you opportunity for all the information you like about marionettes and puppets.

_The Knave of Hearts_ is charming, either as a puppet-play or, as a cla.s.s in junior high school gave it recently, a "legitimate drama." The remarks of the manager are all the funnier when applied to real characters. The play explains clearly the reasons for the strange behavior of a respectable nursery character. It is to be published soon in a book of its own with ill.u.s.trations by Mr. Maxfield Parrish (Scribner's). The author has written other plays and stories, some of which you may have seen in _St.

Nicholas_, and also a pleasant operetta, with music by Alice Terhune--_The Woodland_ _Princess_, listed in the bibliography following. She is also an actress with the New York Comedy Club, an excellent amateur organization.

Pompdebile's coat of arms, with a heart rampant (i.e., standing on its hind legs, however that may be accomplished), reminds one of the arms suggested for the old clergyman-scholar, Mr.

Casaubon, in George Eliot's _Middlemarch_--"three cuttlefish sable and a commentator rampant."

_Lord Dunsany_: FAME AND THE POET

Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique in their type of clever imaginativeness. Besides the inimitable Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best writings are to be found in _Fifty-One Tales_, which includes "The Hen," "Death and Odysseus," "The True Story of the Hare and the Tortoise," and other highly entertaining matters. _Fame and the Poet_, originally published in the _Atlantic_, has been recently produced with good effect by the Harvard Dramatic Club. Fame's startling revelation to her faithful wors.h.i.+per of her real nature and attributes is naturally most distressing--even more so, perhaps, than the rendezvous which this same G.o.ddess appointed another poet, in the _Fifty-One Tales_: "In the cemetery back of the workhouse, after a hundred years."

Lord Dunsany was a captain in the First Royal Iniskilling Fusileers--a regiment mentioned in Sheridan's _Saint Patrick's Day_--and saw service in Syria and the Near East as well as on the western front. He was wounded on April 25, 1916, in Flanders.

Since the war he has visited the United States and seen a performance of his _Tents of the Arabs_ at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York City.

_Beulah Marie Dix_: THE CAPTAIN OF THE GATE

Miss Dix is author of several plays--in addition to those from _Allison's Lad_ included in the play-list, of _Across the Border_, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the frequently acted _Rose of Plymouth Town_. She has also written several favorite historical stories, including _Merrylips. The Captain of the Gate_ is a tragedy of Cromwell's ruthless devastation of Ireland. The determined and heroic captain surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men to like heroism. This is an effective piece of dramatic presentation.

_Percy Mackaye_: GETTYSBURG

Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a community theatre in the United States and for the revival of pageantry. He contends rightly that this development might be one of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre.

Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play _The Scarecrow_, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne's _Feathertop_; his opera _Rip van Winkle_, for which Reginald De Koven composed music; and _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, in which the Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures. Mr.

Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the _Modern Reader's Chaucer_. The little sketch presented here is taken from a volume of _Yankee Fantasies_, in which various observations of past and present New England life are recorded.

Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_, a powerful story of the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy Lige really endured in those days of battle.

Mr. Mackaye has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines --perhaps to typify the simple homeliness of the talk.

_Harold Brighouse_: LONESOME-LIKE

Mr. Brighouse has been best represented in this country by an excellent comedy, _Hobson's Choice_, which was widely played and was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other best-known work here is the present play, and _The Price of Coal_ (1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has produced and published a number of other plays, among them those listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this volume the work of the English Repertory theatres, which parallel the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, and various European stage-societies. That at Manchester, with which he has been a.s.sociated, is directed by Miss Isabel Horniman, has seen beautiful stage-settings designed by Mr. Robert Burne-Jones, and counts among its dramatists such well-known men as Messrs.

Allan Monkhouse, author of _Mary Broome_, a sombre and powerful tragedy; Stanley Houghton, and Gilbert Cannan. The Liverpool Theatre has become even more famous through the dramatic work of Mr. John Drinkwater. The Little Theatre movement in this country, our Drama League, and the various dramatic societies in our colleges and cities are our nearest parallel to these repertory theatres.

_Lonesome-Like_, Mr. Brighouse's most effective short play, is written in a modified Lancas.h.i.+re dialect, the speech of the village weavers and spinners. Many of the words are English of Elizabethan days and earlier, derived mostly from Anglo-Saxon.

_Gradely_ (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; _clem_ means starve; _sithee_ is see you or look you; _clogs_ are shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and _dungarees_, garments of coa.r.s.e cotton cloth rather like overalls. _A_ is used throughout for _I_.