Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

SUADQWLAND Instead oi presenting these stories in alternating scenes, as Shakespeare wrote them, Belasco lias to lump together all the scenes in Venice and all the scenes in Belmont. The dexterous, lyric swiftness of Shakespeare's narrative is sacrificed, as it always has been l>v our conservative producers, for the sake of realistic scenic display. T O x the other hand — just as had a hand — take this Johannes Kreisler. It is written in forty-two scenes against the Merchant's twenty. The scenes of this tragedy of the artistic temperament, drawn from the same sources as The Tales of Hoffman, are given almost as rapidly as in any movie. Indeed, the entertainment is practically a movie in .stage terms. The tiling is accomplished by all manner of mechanical devices and an endless profusion of lights. A little stage containing just room enough for the composer Kreisler and his crony-confidant rolls out of one corner and the old man begins his tale: "It was on the hillside of Bamberg. . . ." Black-out. The little stage rolls back. The lights come up, upon a deep setting of the hillside and the young Kreisler of many years before. Back to the study again, and another "spoken title," as the movies call it. Then out of the blackness a glimpse of a little stage high in the air, which rolls forward from the back. And so on for two hours and half. Machinery, machinery, machinery. Beauty also now and then, when Svend Gade, the artist from Berlin, is at his best. But not much drama. The business of this production is novelty and display, not the depths of human emotion. It touches the significant only when the fantasy of the German stage directors, who put it together, ventures off into fantastic visions of the artistic temperament, and these are accomplished with only light, a very few properties, or at most the ordinary fullstage innocent of machines. In this squirrel cage is Jacob BenAmi, a fine artist, racing madly to keep up with the whirling wheel. He achieves a surprising amount of characterization even while he dodges scenery, rips off a grey wig and smooths out the wrinkles of age as he Courtesy of the Selwyns slides Clow n the ^ scene from Johannes Kreisler, years to youth. performance hen there is the Theatre Guild's production of The idings Broughl to Mary. Claudel's play is a turbid and mystical drama of the Middle Ages, built Up, like the Merchant and Kreisler from more than the usual three or four scenes of our dramas. Instead of spending time, energy, and illusion over trying to turn roadsides into cottages and cottages into mystical hills, the Guild's director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and the Guild's artist, Lee Simonson, have boldly kicked scenery clear out the stage door. They have thrown the curtain after it. When you first enter the theater and during the only intermission, you see the steps which fill the stage, the gold hanging at the back, the forestage where the orchestra pit used to be, and a flight of stairs leading to small doors in the walls of the theater close to the proscenium. Add a rude table-cloth, two stools, a couple of ceremonial candles, and some flowering branches, and you have the whole scenic equipment. Gloriously garbed nuns enter from the side doors at the beginning of each scene to add some little definitive detail. Here is nothing but a permanent, formal stage, plainer than Shakespeare's own playhouse; but a little thought and the patterned loveliness of costumes and lights make it into a magic spot where anything may take form. The spirit of the past lives here — the past of Claudel's play and the past of the theater. The spirit of the future may live here as well. Perhaps it will some day. So much for the disappointments of Belasco's Merchant, the mechanical tricks of Johannes Kreisler and the beauty of The Tidings Brought to Mary. Br o a d w a y dashes afar off from all this when it goes to see Franz Molnar, creator of the sublime roughneck, Liliom, now busy competing with The Passing of the Third-Floor Back and Winched Smith in a comedy of the terrible meek called Passions for Men. Here is an innocent and mildly amusing play written round the kind of angelic incompetent which O. P. Heggie plays so perfectly. He plays him just as perfectly in this piece. For a contrast consider The God of Vengeance, a drama of the drawn by John Held. Jr., during a ( Continued on of the play page 69) Page Forty-Five