EW YORK after the New Year

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becomes something very close to an artistic madhouse. New plays, new music, new picture exhibitions, new movies, break forth in such profusion that, if one is interested in such things, there is nothing to do but go wearily from one thing to another looking forward wistfully to the months of spring when one can have an evening or two at home. It is impossible to see and hear everything; the only policy is a selective one.

Probably no single play approaches so closely the mood of midseason New York as "Processional", the new piece by John Howard Lawson which the Theatre Guild has staged and presented so admirably. Mr. Lawson is one of our experimenters in the world of the theatre. Two years ago he was represented by "Roger Bloomer", a play which astonished and puzzled hosts of people; it might even be said that it puzzled the actors and the director, and perhaps even the author himself, for he was at that moment struggling with an idea which had not entirely freed itself from a movement in the German theatre known by the loose term of "Expressionism". In "Processional", young Mr. Lawson is free, although still a bit shaky from the struggle. He has created something new in our theatre, a thing not altogether definable because there are as yet no technical terms to define it a thing beyond a thing beyond

judgment because there are no standards by which to judge it.

On the day following the dress rehearsal the New Yorker encountered people who had been present on this occasion. Their comment on the piece seemed to be the same. "It's grand", they said; and when the New Yorker endeavored to find out what was meant by this, the answer was always the same, "I can't describe it, but it's grand!" And so it is. In the author's own words, he has made "an interpretation of American life in terms of jazz rhythm in which just as a jazz orchestra makes use of every instrument, so the playwright employs the various techniques of the theatre, ranging all the way from vaudeville to tragedy".

All this is true; there are bits out of the burlesque stage, bits out of such "draymas" as "Shore Acres", and pieces of high tragedy which, emerging out of a strange confusion of sense and nonsense, suddenly grip the audience and hold it breathlessly. The plot? There is no such thing. The best idea of the plot might be obtained by reading the headlines of any sensational American newspaper from cover to cover. These, strung together, comprise the play. It is laid in the West Virginia mountains where a war between labor and capital is under way. In the play are all the national idiocies except the cross word puzzle. There is the Ku Klux Klan, the American

Security League, a real jazz band composed of striking miners, Mother's Day, and a thousand other things. It is, truly, an American play.

The cast is admirable. For the rôle of Sadie Cohen, who is jazz mad, the Guild has secured June Walker, hitherto known only in the realms of farce. In this there was a stroke of genius, for Miss Walker has a complete sense of what she is about and plays always in perfect rhythm and tempo. The part of Mrs. Flimmins, mother of the young miner who runs amuck, is a more difficult one, because out of the wild, careening stream of nonsense it calls for moments of real tragedy and passion. Blanche Frederici accomplishes this in brilliant fashion. George Abbott, a rising star, is excellent as the son, and Philip Loeb as the Jewish clothing dealer out of a Weber and Fields comedy hits exactly the proper mood. But most credit is perhaps due to Philip Moeller who took this strange piece and directed it in a fashion which gives it a real coherence and unity. "Processional" may not be the best play in New York, but at the moment it is the most interesting.

A thousand miles in the opposite direction from "Processional" lies the revival of "Patience" which the Provincetown Players have arranged on the tiny stage of their stable-theatre. There are only a dozen love sick maidens instead of twenty, because there is no room for more, and in the orchestra there are but seven pieces where there ought to be forty; but none of this makes the least difference. Crowds fight for places on the hard stiff benches of the tiny playhouse and cheer the piece as it moves on its way.

The Bunthorne of the revival is Edgar Stehli, and Grosvenor is played by Stanley Howlett. It is a long jump for these two actors from the grim stuff

of O'Neill's "S. S. Glencairn" to the swooning nonsense of Gilbert and Sullivan, but overnight they have turned from the roughest of seamen into the most delicate of Pre-Raphaelites. Flavia Arcaro is superb as Lady Jane to whom fall perhaps the funniest moment and the funniest song of any play ever written the moment when the curtain parts and reveals her clasping a bass viol, prepared to sing, “There will be too much of me in the coming by-and-by."

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"God Bless the Provincetown Players is a prayer offered up by more than one New Yorker in a season notable for its dulness.

Quite the pleasantest, if not the most thrilling or uproarious evening of the winter, came to the New Yorker at the Empire, where Frank Reicher has staged on one bill a play called "Isabel", adapted beautifully from the German by Arthur Richman, and "Shall We Join the Ladies?", a one act play by Barrie which everyone has awaited for a long time. "Isabel" is what the New York critics have come to label a "gossamer comedy", and it is cast with just the proper people. It calls for only five players-Margaret Lawrence, Edna May Oliver, Lyonel Watts, A. P. Kaye, and Leslie Howard. It is utter nonsense, filled with absurdities which cause the audience to chuckle with great satisfaction, and it is just long enough. The last act, in which all save Isabel grow mildly tipsy over a champagne punch, is superbly funny . . . not in the boisterous sense but in a sense that warms the heart. After the alarums and excursions of "Desire Under the Elms", "What Price Glory?", "They Knew What They Wanted", and similar excellent plays, it comes as a gentle spring zephyr, cool and refreshing.

The Barrie play lasts less than a half

hour and is built about an idea that is intensely fascinating. It centres about a genial old man who invites to his house for a weekend twelve guests whom he has never seen before. On the last evening, at dinner, he tells them they have been asked because there is among them one person who has murdered his brother and he is set upon discovering the criminal. From then on the piece reaches out and brings the audience into chairs at the very table. It has a trick ending which may be fatal to it; for an audience likes to go home satisfied, and it leaves the play as interesting and as uncertain as it was in the beginning.

Three other plays opened under auspices that were excellent. One was "Mrs. Partridge Presents" by Mary Kennedy, who (as the paragraphers always say) is a charming actress and the wife of Deems Taylor, and Ruth Hawthorne. It is an American comedy, humorous and skilfully done. The surprise of the piece is that a young actress named Ruth Gordon runs away with the laurels intended for the veteran Blanche Bates.

Philip Barry, "author of the Harvard prize play 'You and I"", of which he must be sick of hearing, is the author of "The Youngest", a fresh air sort of comedy with some excellent moments in which Henry Hull becomes miraculously a boy of eighteen. There is nothing remarkable about the piece save that you like every moment of it.

After some time on the road, Walter Hampden at last brought his production of "Othello" into New York, where it should be good for a run almost as long as his "Cyrano", not because there is anything excellent about it - except perhaps Baliol Holloway's Iago - but because it is done in the way that people who like Shake

speare feel it ought to be done. The scenery is good. The costumes are good. The acting is good. The direction is good. Well? There is still something lacking. It is perhaps that fire which makes the vast difference between an inspired work of art and a capable one. It has no rough edges. It is capable. If Mr. Hampden is too conscientious he will become simply another Sothern and Marlowe.

The tradition of the starving author or artist or musician is pretty well defunct. Much water has passed under the bridge since the day that Mrs. Astor (as Thomas Beer relates in "Stephen Crane"), on hearing that Alice Duer (Miller) was writing verse, said, "Too bad! I thought she was such an attractive girl." If Mrs. Astor, in tiara and stomacher, returned today, she would find herself rather out of it, for artists and musicians and writers have become the thing. No really good party is given without the presence of one great lion and several cubs. Igor Stravinsky certainly visited America this winter without having to buy himself a single meal. Indeed, he went about so much and graced so many parties that when the time came for him to do the thing he had come for, namely to conduct his music, he was too exhausted to do his music justice. In any case, something went wrong, for his conducting was sour. It may have been that his hostesses made him roar too often.

His two concerts were beyond question the events of the season. The audience fairly oozed through the sickly yellow walls of Carnegie Hall. The corridors reverberated to the sound of Russian and the gasps of swooning women, overcome by the wonder of his music. Everything was there from the tiaras of Park Avenue to the art jewelry of Greenwich Village. And

altogether a good time was had by all.

Still there were a few haunted souls in the audience who found that the seats grew more and more hard. They applauded, perhaps because they feared that silence might result in mob violence, but they applauded languidly. Also there were a few who found the music spirited, brilliant, and interesting, but missed an undercurrent of substance which is a part of all great art, musical or otherwise. The New Yorker was among these useless people of the middle path. He found an entire program of Stravinsky little more than tiresome. It was too cold, too devoid of emotion, too clearly the work of a mind that was excellent in the business of arrangement and experiment but not so good on the side of creation. There were moments in "Petrouchka" and "L'Oiseau de Feu" that burned with beauty; but there were moments, like those in "Fireworks", that were simply brilliant pinwheels going round and round in emptiness. Clever but empty.

As for the conducting, Vladimir Golschmann, who came into fame as the director of the Swedish Ballet (which America found simply dull), did a much better job with the composer's own "L'Oiseau de Feu" when he played it a week earlier with the New York Symphony.

Almost as spectacular as the Stravinsky concerts was the opening of the annual show of the New Society of American Artists, when the crowd was so great that it was impossible to see the pictures. But on varnishing day, no one cares about the pictures anyway. The crowd comes to see and be seen. "Everyone", as the saying goes, "was there." The New Yorker noticed at least two persons who were taking it calmly; they were Hendrik Willem Van Loon, smiling and enormous, and

THE DRAMA SHELF

"The Guardsman" by Franz Molnar (Boni, Liveright). This brilliant revival reads as well as it plays.

"Weber and Fields" by Felix Isman (Boni, Liveright). Here is much anecdotal and amusing material of the old theatrical days.

"The Firebrand" by Edwin Justus Mayer (Boni, Liveright). One of the most charming of current shockers.

"The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann Volume Eight: Poetic Dramas" (Huebsch). Great plays translated in mediocre English verse.

"The Bright Island" by Arnold Bennett (Doran). Another island sociological story, but in fantastic vein this time.

"The Valiant" by Holworthy Hall and Robert Middlemass (Swartout). This play, most effectively presented by amateurs, is already well known and deservedly so.

"There Came Two Women" by Herbert Quick (Bobbs-Merrill). Interesting; but it is a pity that the talented author did not write it in prose.

"Old English" by John Galsworthy (Scribner). A better part than play superbly acted currently by Mr. Arliss.

"Costuming a Play" by Elizabeth B. Grimball and Rhea Wells (Century). Interesting notes for the amateur with good line illustrations.

William Allen White, serene, sane and balanced, from the open spaces of Emporia, Kansas.

Once the crowd had thinned a bit, it was possible to see that the show, like the Stravinsky concerts, was not so good as it was expected to be. It has possessed in the past more variety, more individual pieces which stood out as striking. This year there were some fine water colors by Randall Davey, three studies in still life by Paul Dougherty, a landscape by George

Luks, and a picture by George Bellows which were impressive. On the second day, the show was saddened by the death of Mr. Bellows, one of the best of living artists. Now that he is dead, his pictures will, no doubt, command the same prices as those by bad foreign painters.

One missed from the show this year the grand, bleak pictures of Rockwell Kent. They would have helped it enormously.

At the same time the Reinhardt Galleries were showing pictures by Zuloaga who, rumor has it, will consider painting guileless Americans for a mere twenty thousand dollars a sitting. Any possible sitter should go at once and see what he has done to Julia Hoyt, Michael Strange (Mrs. John Barrymore), Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and William Fahnestock. They hang in a row, painted in his traditional manner against landscapes which, if not meant to be Spanish, still have a Spanish twist. The gallery was crowded to the doors, and before the portrait of Michael Strange there was unbroken congestion due, no doubt, to the fact that she was painted in the rôle of Hamlet, clad in black tights and

patent leather pumps with an Iberian version of Elsinore in the middle distance. The painting of the pumps is admirably realistic.

But in fairness to Zuloaga, it must be said that his Spanish subjects turn out better. There is a fine portrait of a Castillian shepherd and three fine studies of Belmonte, the Babe Ruth of the Spanish bull ring. The best picture is a portrait done in the traditional manner of the Duke of Alba. It possesses style, characterization, and a masterly sense of design and emphasis. The show has its ups and downs. It is a little bit of everything.

The New Yorker went to two movies during the month, rather in the mood to see what had been done to "So Big" and "Wife of the Centaur". There was nothing in either picture to set the pulses leaping. The books were better. Yes, there was one thing. In "Wife of the Centaur" there were several feet of magnificent film showing the hero skiing down the mountainside in full flight from Inez, who, through the magic of the celluloid, had been converted into the conventional desperate vamp.

LOUIS BROMFIELD