well enough to picture it in a manner wholly convincing but who,
perhaps because of that imperfect knowledge, was able to ex¬
press his passionate conviction that the bitterest of all thoughts
is the thought that one may be deprived of the opportunity of
knowing it. The sentence, uttered by one in the grip of such a
fear, which gives the key to the emotion of the piece is this:
*Only those who have much to remember lie quietly in their
graves'; and it is piainly the utterance of a man who possessed
the two qualities which make life seem most precious. He was
young and he was an artist.
The first act of the play is by far the best because it is the
simplest and rhe most clear cut. With a sense of reality never
recaptured during the succeeding two acts it presents the pie¬
ture of a young girl chained to the bedside of a slowly dying
father and struggling between the artificial sense of duty to her
parent and the natural sense of her right to life. Without, the
noise of the passing throng summons her to a participation in
the experiences which seem in imagination so unutterably im¬
portant; within, the old man, intuitively conscious of her strug¬
gle, suggests with the logic of age that many years will remain
after he is dead; but to her it seems that if this one night
and the lover who awaits her is missed all l'fe will be missed,
and the author who understands the father with his head but
understands her with hir heart sends her to her adventure and
her lover. From then on, it must be confessed, the play grows
steadily less convincing as a picture of real life; the theme
pursued through various intricacies and reintroduced in new
surroundings becomes less and less sharply defined, and the
ineidents grow more and more thoatrical. Vet, withnlthe
theatricalism is of a not wholly unpleasant kind, for it is not
the result of insincerity and trickery but of a genuine feeling
which cannot quite adequately express itself; and thus, though
verisimilitude sometimes fails, the genuineness of the emotion is
always clearly and interestingly evident.
The author has nowhe.e actually thought his way through,
and his sincerity is not of a predominantly intellectual sort.
Because his conviction that the call of life is higher than the
call of duty is not the reasoned conclusion of a Nietzschean
philosopher but the instinctive protest of ardent youth against
all that stands between him and his imperious need for experi¬
ence, he is capable even of a relenting conclusion which pays
the tribute of a perfunctory bow to conventional ideals of re¬
morse and atonement; but for the same reason even its theatri¬
calities are touched with poetic passion. Dudley Digges, who
directed the production for the Actors Theater, has, so it seems
to me, caught perfectly the spirit of the piece and wisely re¬
frained from any attempt to pitch it in too realistic a key. He
has permitted the actors, among whom Eva Le Gallienne, Egon
Brecher, and Rosalind Fuller deserve especial praise, the slightly
romantic and the slightly theatrical gestures with which the
eager imagination of the author certainly endowed them, and
he has correctly assumed that in the play so presented the sin¬
cerity of feeling would be evident behind the artificialities of
expression.“ The Call of Life“ remains one of those works,
rarer in the drama than in any other literary genre, whose very
imperfections constitute an interesting revelation of the mind
of the author. Certainly it is one of the plays of the season
most worth seeing.
The enterprising group at the Cherry Lane Theater has
undertaken a revival of the ballad-opera“ Polly'’ which John
Gay wrote as a sequel to his Beggar’s Opera.' Rowdy and in¬
consequential like its predecessor, it has no song quite so famous
as“ could be happy with either were t’other dear charmer
away'' and no divertissement so excruciating as“ The Happy
Hen,? but it is made of the same stuff and inspired with the
same resistless flow of animal spirits. Its old tunes, now vehe¬
ment with the boisterous merriment of the tavern and now
wistful with the far-away pathos of the folk ballad, recall in its
full vigor the life of a vanished age, and the rank flavor of its
cynical humor is as pungent as ever it was.
At the Schildkraut Theater in the Bronx Rudolph Schild¬
kraut is acting in the original Viddish the fantastic comedy,
The Bronx Express,'' which once appeared briefly on Broad¬
way. Its racily local humor can often be appreciated even by
those who, like myself, do not understand the language; the
dream scenes which require that the suggestion of a subway
car shall be always present are set with great ingenuity. Mr.
Schildkraut, as always, gives an excellent performance.
Stolen Fruit' (Eltinge Theater) is a highly emotional
play taken from the Italian and acted by Ann Harding and
Rollo Peters. In spite of an excellent performance it seemed
to me curiously unreal.“ The Crooked Friday' (Bijon Theater),
offered as a vehicle for the English actor Dennis Nielson-Terry,
put a yet severer and, indeed, insupportable strain upon credulity.
Josern Woon Kauren