Book Discussion
Plays for Small Stages, by Mary Aldis. New York: Duffield and Company.
Theseplays are among those acted by the Lake Forest Players, and, written especially for them, they exemplify certain qualities of drama and stage-craft which are of special value in amateur production. First of all they are real in situation. Two of the five,Mrs. Pat and the LawandExtreme Unction, deal with slum life, but with phases of it which the amateur can study at first hand, and is, indeed, the better for studying. The juxtaposition in both types of the submerged tenth and the reachers of helping hands suggests that the plays have in fact, grown out of such study. The former sketch is done with a brilliancy of Irish humor and fancy that reminds the reader of Lady Gregory’s best. The latter is the grim tragedy of a dying prostitute—a situation relieved first by the mordant irony of the conventional religious pouncet-box of the well-meaning lady visitor, and later by the sympathetic imagination of the physician. A third play,The Drama Class, presents with broad humor an occasion familiar to all uplifters of the drama in regions which on the “culture map” are lightly shaded—the discussion of a modern European play by a woman’s club.The LetterandTemperamentrepresent the maladjustments of monogamy—the one with tragic emphasis, the other in pure farce. The point should be noted, however, that all five are plays of situation, static rather than dynamic, expository and revealing rather than developing—the type most suited to the dimensions of the one-act play, and made familiar by the playwrights of the Abbey and Manchester Theatres. As Mrs. Aldis says in her preface,speaking of the general policy of the Lake Forest Players: “In selecting plays we have departed radically from the amateur tradition of resuscitating ‘plays with a punch,’ which have fared well in the hands of professionals. In the established tricks of the trade, of course the amateur cannot compete with the professional.” In writing as well as in selecting plays for amateur performance Mrs. Aldis has wisely preferred truth of situation to the “punch.”
In the second place Mrs. Aldis has made her characters speak the language of life rather than that of the stage. This trait again fits her plays for amateur production, especially in a small theatre where effects can be gained without the emphasis of stage talk. Working as she says for a small stage Mrs. Aldis has been able to reproduce with striking fidelity not only the vocabulary but the movement, the rhythm, even the intonations of human speech. This kind of naturalism is of great importance in the drama of situation. The words in which Mrs. Aldis calls attention to this connection, and to the possibilities of artistic success in amateur acting depending thereon might have occurred in Maeterlinck’s essayThe Drama in Daily Life. “We seek,” she says, “plays in which the mental attitude and the interplay of character are more important than the physical action. Here, if anywhere, lies the amateur’s opportunity. So we are not afraid of plays with little action and much talk.... It is in talk, low and intense, gay and railing, bitter and despairing as the case may be, that we moderns carry on the drama of life, the foundation of the drama of the stage.”
—Robert M. Lovett.
The State Forbids: A Play in One Act, by Sada Cowan. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
The mother speaks: “The State won’t let us women help ourselves. Wemusthave children whether we want them or not, and then the State comes and takes them from us. It doesn’t ask. It commands. We’ve got to give them up. [Shrilly] I’ve got to give my boy. [Again shrilly] What are we, we women? Just cattle. Breeding animals ... without a voice! Dumb—powerless! Oh, the State! The State commands! and the State forbids! Damn the State!”
It is to appear in vaudeville. LikeWar-Bridesit is woman propaganda; but here the emphasis is on Birth Control. LikeWar-Bridesit is negative as literature, but the woman speeches make smashing vaudeville. We wonder whether it is the importance of its idea or its evident value as a thriller and shocker which prompts its production.