It is the chief distinction of the Provincetown Players that they have remained an experimental group. Of all the laboratory theatres in this city that have survived their infancy, this is the only one that has consistently produced plays that seemed worth doing, regardless of their commercial appeal. It is for this reason that no matter what play they offer, I consider it a pleasant duty to attend a production of it, to suffer sitting on a hard bench and to breathe an atmosphere that is nearly as hard on the lungs as that of a well-regulated French play-house.

The latest offering of the Provincetowners was a "Legend of Life With More Miracles Than One," called Adam Solitaire, written by Em Jo Basshe. I wish I had thought of the mot that was spoken by one person who saw the show. She said, "All I can say is that it was awfully nice of them to have produced the play." That's what I feel, only I am not at all sure that it did any good to the author. Certainly the choice of this inchoate and youthful experiment did more credit to the hearts than to the good judgment of the management. The play was not simply bad, it was quite without a point. I am not one of those who pose as low brow and pretend, as several New York reviewers pretended, not to understand a simple play like Hasenclever's Beyond or Rostand's The Last Night of Don Juan. I know something about the young Germans who served Mr. (or Miss?) Basshe as models, but I must admit that Adam Solitaire is in my opinion, a stupid concoction of potentially dramatic elements. It was evidently the author's aim to show the injustice of fate. He postulates a young clerk who is wrongfully accused of fraud. The boy then suffers a long series of knocks; he makes no struggle, he is a passive instrument in the hands of a very arbitrary fate, only too evidently manipulated by the hands of the playwright. This thing has been done superbly well by Rolf Lauckner in his Wahnschaffe, but the German has shown a character with something to him; the weakling who is a victim and no more does, of course, exist in life. There are millions of his kind, but they make rather poor leading characters. They are hardly as interesting as white mice. Adam Solitaire, which shows no struggle, but simply a spineless boy tossed about by hard luck is neither interesting nor significant.

The Greenwich Village Theatre has had the commendable

temerity to try its hand at Rostand's The Last Night of Don Juan. The play was directed by Robert Milton. I saw the first Paris performance of it, and at the time I wrote that despite all that was done to ruin it in the way of acting and production, the play emerged as a lovely dramatic poem. The beauty of Rostand's work lies largely in the author's conceptions. I have never been able to see in the man's lines any more than a diabolically clever patchwork of imitations. He is a precious author, an inspired trifler, an artist in pastiche, and a very able craftsman of the Victor Hugo school. Even Cyrano is to me little besides a clever combination of sentimental and semi-heroic episodes. But The Last Night of Don Juan shows what he could do when he was not permitted to finish his work: he died before he could expand the piece, and I have no doubt that if he had lived to subtilize his speeches, the play would have been as affected as Chantecler. The twoact sketch produced at the Greenwich Village is concerned with the Don's last night on earth, when a small group of women, symbolizing the Thousand and Three, are brought before him. The Devil explains that the great lover has still a chance to escape eternal damnation, if he can prove, by remembering a single one of his mistresses, that he has loved once with sincerity. But he cannot, and is at last condemned not to the conventional hell he has expected, but to the ridiculous hell of the puppet show. The superficial sensualist who failed to be wholly himself must suffer the consequences not of his "sin," but of his failure to make a glorious virtue of it.

Don Juan, one feels as the leisurely play unfolds, is a readymade character: the dice are loaded from the very first, and the expiation of his misspent life is interesting rather as a statement of fact than an active and moving dramatic spectacle. I do not know whether a superb cast of European players could make something of Don Juan; certainly the American cast made little of it. Besides, I missed the charming rhetoric of Rostand, and was able to make out that Sidney Howard's translation was in blank verse only by counting out the syllables. This was not Mr. Howard's fault: his work was charming. But perhaps I am hypercritical? I somehow like verse to be spoken rhythmically.

The Rostand play was preceded by Charles Vildrac's oneact character comedy Pilgrimage. The author of S. S. Tenacity

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What I said just now about the speaking of verse is applied with more force to the so-called "modern dress" Hamlet, temporarily playing at the Greenwich Village Theatre. felicitate Mr. Liveright the producer for his initiative in undertaking his experiment: it was worth trying. But while I dislike taking sides against the youngsters and putting myself in the ranks of the old fogies, I must record that the "modern" Hamlet proves little about the modernity of Shakespeare. Did we need to be told that Shakespeare knew his business as a playwright? Now I cannot imagine any Hamlet on the stage as effective as that performed in the mind's eye, and perhaps for that reason I am unwarrantly prejudiced against any Hamlet on the stage. However, it does seem to me that to delete the poetry from poetic verse is very much like taking melody and harmony from music. It is claimed by the adherents of the Basil Sydney-Horace Liveright Hamlet that to dress the Prince in a tuxedo or a business suit, and to make Ophelia a flapper is to make the play more easily understood. Well, it does, but then I maintain that to make Achilles look like Pershing and to dress Penelope in the latest Jenny gown would make the Iliad clear even to readers of the illustrated dailies. To translate the sonnets of Keats into walt masonese might render those trifles acceptable to Snappy Stories, and to re-write Mozart's E Flat Symphony in terms of Vincent Lopez' orchestra would render that masterpiece one of the most popular radio favorites. Mind you, I am not pleading for the sanctity of the classics because they are classics, but because to do them such violence, renders them practically valueless. To take from any work of art its chief virtue is necessarily to ruin it. The reason why the "modern" Hamlet is popular with the majority of theatregoers is that the majority don't care for the best in Shakespeare. If you don't think the poetry matters then you will like the "modern" Hamlet. honestly enjoy it, by all means do so, only I reserve the right to tell you, you don't "get" Shakespeare. The point here is not, as nearly everyone claims, that Shakespeare himself was farther from historical accuracy than we are, but that Hamlet and Julius Caesar were, when they were written, Elizabethan; they are the reflections of a mind and heart of the early 17th Century. Shakespeare was not writing about a 9th Century Dane or a Roman of the 1st Century B. C., he was writing about men as he knew them. The background and costumes

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are purely incidental. The language in which these characters spoke their thoughts and emotions was a particular kind of poetry, belonging of necessity to the epoch in which they were written. When, therefore, 20th century actors speak lines as though they were American and English prose, when they carefully break up every cadence and do violence to the rhythm, they are ruining the chief glory of the poet-dramatist. The plot of Hamlet without the language is inconceivable, and it is only the plot that remains in the modern production. That is why the play is so popular: eliminate all the hard passages; make them tolerably clear so far as the surface meaning is concerned; jazz up the comic characters; and you have a fairly effective movie story.

Noel Coward's Vortex comes to us from a long and successful run in London. It is an honest piece of work, limited in its subject-matter, and highly moral in tone. It is a picture of an idle set of modern English wasters, making love, dancing, playing mah-jong and getting all mixed up in the vortex of life. A word or two about two more plays, one of which has aroused so much discussion that I thought it my duty to pay a whole dollar and buy my way into the theatre to see it. This play is called The Green Hat. It was written by a young Armenian whose books have achieved a certain success in this country. His name is Michael Arlen. It occurred to me too late that the play had already been seen in Chicago; I might have saved my money. I need, therefore, as a matter of record, only say that The Green Hat is an incredible and unmotivated drama about a woman whose actions may. possibly be explained in the novel, but not in the play. The "big scene" is an adaptation of the last act of Camille, in which the heroine appears in an expensive nightgown and long black curls, draws tears from the audience and retires into her cell.

The other play, far more honest in its writing, is Barry Conners' Applesauce, which also ran in Chicago. It is one of those obvious comedies in which the pretty little leading girl becomes engaged to the wrong man and after two and a half acts gets the right one. But there are bits of genuine comedy here and there, and several bright lines.

I suggest to some enterprising manager that he produce Applesauce in the Periclean manner, casting the breezy lines into the pentameters of Sophocles and introducing choruses of old men and women who shall chant hymns to the gods. The antiquisation will possess the inestimable virtue of making the play clear to the Athenians.

Rhythm In Acting

BY COLIN CAMPBELL CLEMENTS

The actors of, our modern theatre have abandoned the "classical manner" and gone over to realism, repression; representations on the stage have become photographic, cross-sections of life itself. Sometimes these pictures have been vividly alive and moving, but often, very often, there is something missing. Efforts to recapture and bring back to the boards that illusive something have been made by the use of expressionism and symbolism; often the scene designer has been called in to furnish a substitute upon which the action of the play might be interwoven and so bring the whole compositionmovement, sound and color into a more harmonious and complete whole. But as yet no one of these experiments has been entirely successful.

Workers in the theatre, men who have spent their lives producing plays, agree that realism (what Mr. Brock aptly calls photographic and phonographic records of action and conversation) is not complete in itself. After all, life on the stage is but a representation and something of art is needed if this representation is to have form. Nor is that something any one of the separate arts or the theatre; speech, characterization, stage setting, make-up, costume, or the written word. It is something else, something which the "classical manner" in spite of its many faults, did contribute. The wide-sweeping gesture, the flow of words, the dramatic pause and quick intake of breath of this old school was purely of and by the actor. As he is the instrument through which dramatic effect is attained it is only natural that we look to the player rather than the play for what is lacking in our theatre of today. Our modern acting of realism and represssion has no definite style of its own and this is exactly what the acting of the old school, before it degenerated into meaningless rant, did have. It made an actor an artist rather than a copyist.

But the acting of the old school, this "classical manner," has had its day; even if it were revived it would be inadequate for our modern apronless, wingless and electric lighted stage. What we need is a new form of acting, a form with a distinct style of its own, a form which will suit our theatre as well as the "classical manner" fitted the theatres of Racine and Corneille, of Shakespeare and Sheridan.

Whatever the form, it must, of course, be based upon a perfect command of its instrument: the actor's body; it must emanate from a body so perfectly coordinated that it responds instantly to the actor's brain. For the training that will produce such a body the student-actor must turn to the foundation of all the arts, the very foundation of life itself-rhythm; it is by rhythm that the body, merely the instrument of the brain, will become subservient to the imagination.

For several years I have watched and studied a number of classes in Dalcroze Eurythmics. I have seen bodies, wooden and uncontrolled, come out of those classes completely in accord with and obedience of the minds which commanded them. To the lay onlooker these classes resemble a group of well proportioned and beautifully set-up young men and women, with limbs uncovered and torsos free, doing gymnastic exercises. He soon realizes, however, that the students are doing more than mere gymnastic stunts and that the teacher is more than a mere instructor. The teacher is inspired. His students are making poetry and drama. They are putting light and shade, line and color into their physical exercises. The rhythmic movements of their bodies become the plastic expression of thought. It is the business of the teacher to train each student-actor's body until it answers instantly every command of that body's brain and becomes the utter slave of that brain's imagination. teacher's imagination, in turn, will make of each body in his class what it wills-a prowling beast, a flower opening to the sun, a tree tossed and broken in a raging storm, a peasant at prayer, or a lady serving tea to a number of guests in a drawng-room.

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When the actor of today has finally learned, through rhythm, to make his body the perfect instrument of his imagination, and when that imagination in turn is so directed that it becomes one with the imagination of the playwright, the actor's body becomes the willing insturment of the play he is interpreting. A new school of acting will be the result, a school of acting which

will have a style quite as well defined as was that of the "classical manner"; acting which will interpret plays as they are written today for today's theatre.

A New British Art Theatre

The Gate Theatre Salon, a newly formed British theatrical group, which is to produce for the most part works of wellknown contemporary playwrights, has inaugurated its first theatrical season. Its headquarters is the Gate Theatre, which is an annex of Covent Garden and has for several years housed some of the more artistic London dramatic ventures. The directors of the Salon are Molly Veness and Peter Godfrey, with several other prominent English stage people reported interested.

The group, which is somewhat similar in its aims and methods to the New York Theatre Guild, has announced that its plays for the current season will be selected from the works of twenty dramatists. Of these, strangely enough, only two, Masefield and Alan Monkhouse are English, while three are Americans. The others range from Moliere through the great writers of the late nineteenth century such as Ibsen, Dostoievski, Strindberg, Hauptmann and others, to the more prominent present-day European playwrights, Molnar, Pirandello, Capek and Benavente.

The three Americans placed with the distinguished company are Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell and Ernest Howard Culbertson. The current program which opened Oct. 30 includes plays by the last named two; Bernice, a three-act comedy by Miss Glaspell, and The End of the Trail, a one-act drama by Culbertson. The latter is known in the United States for his one-act plays and his Goat Alley, one of a few significant American tragedies of recent years, and to readers of THE DRAMA for his article, The Dramatist and Craftsmanship (October, 1924). Miss Glaspell has long been a leader of the Provincetown theatrical colony.

Sublimity and Sustenance

"Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee."

We drain with her the friar's gift,-strange potion,
Forgetting Shakespeare wrote the lines as we
Forget all else save Juliet's devotion.

Over the rose-red scene the drapes are laid,
Then through the purple rift, a flowing light,
And she who was the tragic, swooning maid
Is now the actress giving kisses flight.
To hear her words, applauding hands subside—
This playing now the fated Juliet,
She says, is long, high hunger gratified:
And all ambitious souls whose climb as yet
Rests only in the foothills' average vast,
Throb achingly and tears start up as pressed
From joy that one has found her peak at last
As yearning each toward his own mountain crest.
Again the praise of palms-the curtain falls-
On bated hearts illusion's grip relents-
The lights flare up-a boy springs out and bawls,
"Get choc'late covered ice cream here-ten cents."
-Gladys Moon Jones.

The Vagabond Players of Baltimore, an eminently successful little theatre group, now publishes its own monthly, The Vagabond, which will include articles of general interest, pictures, verse, sometimes a play, an essay by a "guest of honor," notes on the New York situation, if any, and a “letter bag," into which subscribers may throw their complaints or their applause. As an indication of the high regard in which the Vagabonds are held, the following is quoted from the Baltimore American. Referring to a statement that the magazine will be devoted primarily to the Arts, the American continues: "As a well wisher and prospective subscriber, this department makes bold to suggest that in some issues the arts be left to chase themselves up an alley, and the paper, ink, and eloquence be used in the beginning of a vigorous campaign to build a larger playhouse, which the Players both need and deserve."

[Laurel Taylor is standing, gazing out of the window, as though waiting for some one. She is dressed in the smartest of afternoon costumes, and when she turns around, her beauty is seen to be as stunning as her style of dress. Judicious and artistic touches to her face, eyebrows and lashes, an instinctive knowledge of line and effect, and an unstinted pocketbook have all been invaluable to her. She is a "man's woman," detesting her own sex, easily jealous, more easily infatuated, at times impolite, but never uncontrolled. On this particular afternoon she is the woman who has long since ceased to worry about the security of her social leadership. After moment, Meadows, a correct butler, appears in the hallway, ushering in Robert Taylor.] Meadows: Mrs. Townsend will be down directly, sir.

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[He withdraws as Robert Taylor wearing afternoon clothes, stalks in, evidently expecting to find someone already in the room. Taylor, a man of forty and, although not of heroic stature, of pleasing appearance and disposition, has always allowed his wife unlimited liberties and never interfered with her flirtations, platonic or otherwise. As a result of this, and perhaps also of the afore-mentioned unheroic stature, he has been rewarded with Laurel's consideration of him as decided drag on her social proclivities.]

[Taylor Seeing Laurel at the window]: Oh, so you are here, Laurel.

[Laurel Scarcely turning her head]: Yes; yes, I believe I am, Robert.

[Taylor Looking around to make sure he's not being overheard]: Well, What's up?

Laurel [Wearily, turning from the window]: What do you mean "what's up?" Taylor: What are you doing here? Laurel: I expect to have a cup of tea. I might as well ask, what are you doing here?

Taylor: Have you come here to Nelly Townsend's house about . . about that matter we discussed at luncheon?

Laurel: That happens to be none of your business, Robert.

Taylor: Well I'm making it my business. You said you were going to divorce me.

Laurel: Oh! So you actually admit that that can have anything to do with Nelly Townsend?

Taylor: I admit nothing, except that you're talking damn nonsense, and you know it.

Laurel: I know that you and Nelly have been obliging enough to furnish me with conclusive evidence, and that I intend to act upon it.

Taylor: So you can have a go at this fellow Brayton, eh?

*Copyrighted. For permission to produce address THE DRAMA

Laurel: I don't recall mentioning him. Taylor: Great scott, Laurel, you know there isn't a purer woman alive than Nelly. Laurel: You ought to know.

Taylor [Apprehensively]: What the devil do you mean, talking about one of your best friends in this way?

[Laurel Almost amused at her husband]: What did you and this pure woman talk about in a private room at the Roadside Inn not so long ago? The weather?

Taylor: Yes, we did; about the wretched fog that was responsible for our being there.

Laurel: And pray tell what were you and Nelly doing in the fog?

Taylor [Still with an eye on the entrance hall]: We were out for a bit of air, because Nell hadn't been out of the house all day. I was over here seeing the children, while you.. ... were at the Opera, applauding your beloved Brayton. We blew two tires and as Nell had no wrap and was chilled through, we had to take refuge in that Roadside place for a while.

Laurel [Drily]: In a private room. Taylor: Good Lord, Laurel, you didn't expect her to sit in the middle of the dance floor, did you, soaked to the marrow?

Laurel [Rising, as though dismissing the hearing]: She'd have been much wiser if she had.

Taylor [hopefully]: I'd have told you all this at luncheon, if you hadn't stalked out of the room so majestically after your bombshell. Now you're not going to be cat enough to compromise poor Nelly because of a blow-out, are you?

Laurel [At the window again, over her shoulder]: It's you who've compromised her, old boy; don't lose sight of that.

Taylor [Fussing at his collar]: Laurel, if you're determined to bring up.

[Laurel Snapping a little]: I'm determined on a divorce. We needn't discuss the matter further; let's leave that to our lawyers.

Taylor: But you don't need to be so coldblooded about it. If only.

.....

Laurel: Oh, yes, and there's one other thing. As it will now be impossible for us to remain under the same roof, I have just engaged a suite of rooms for you at the Ambassador.

Taylor: Wha-t-t-t?

Laurel: You'll be quite comfortable; your bath has a cold shower.

Taylor [Staggered]: You don't mean to say that without a word to me you've already engaged rooms at that confounded hotel and I'm to be turned out of my own house?

Laurel: Robert dear, I shouldn't in the least mind your living at home if it didn't interfere with my divorce.

Taylor [Turning on her]: Your divorce? Do be intimate enough to call it our divorce. Laurel, I swear to you that Nelly is as true and good a woman as my own mother, and you know it. You must have some game of your own up your sleeve. Have you told her?

Laurel: No. I want to check up on one little point first. I'm sorry now I told you. Taylor [Bitterly]: Seeing that my cooperation might be helpful in removing me to the Ambassador, you needn't be.

Laurel: I see that if we prolong this discussion there will be vulgar recriminations.

Taylor: Oh, when you assume that high and mighty attitude of yours, I wonder how I manage to keep my hands off you. Laurel: Robert, I should much prefer to have you go before Nelly comes down. Taylor: Well, I will. But mark my words, Laurel, you'll rue this afternoon. Laurel: I think I hear Nelly now. Taylor: Don't worry. I'm going. But you'd better tell her the whole thing, or I will. Oh, and Laurel, I might suggest to you that you're taking a lot of unnecessary and expensive trouble. Brayton will never marry you... ... Never! [As she glares at him.] Think it over. [He goes out.]

Laurel [Almost under her breath]: Impudent puppy!

[Meadows enters, bearing a huge silver tea service which he sets on the table.] Meadows: Madam is coming right in, Mrs. Taylor.

Laurel: Thank you, Meadows. Mr. Taylor couldn't wait.

Meadows [Drawing a chair to the table]: Yes ma'am; but he said he'd return later. Laurel: Oh, he did, did he? Meadows [Crossing right again]: Here's Mrs. Townsend now.

[Nelly Townsend comes in. She is slightly younger than Laurel, more beautiful in a less conscious way, charming if not vital, and, because of too little on which to expend her energies, often bored without enjoying it. When she was seventeen she was the kind of girl who thrilled at matinees twice a week and devoured a half a pound of candy without a thought.]

Nelly [Kissing Laurel]: I'm frightfully sorry dear. I was just out of the dressmaker's grasp when you were announced or I'd have had you up. And I thought Meadows said Robert was here also.

Laurel: He was, dear, but he couldn't wait. Important engagement.

Nelly [Seating herself at the tea table]: Just as well maybe, because I've got something to tell you. Draw up close.

Laurel: I suppose you're going to scold me, Nell.