A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or maybe it is a
sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. Death seems certain. And if there
is a heroine, something worse than death awaits her--that is, from the
Indians. Sawmills draw no sex distinctions. At any rate, things look
very black for hero and heroine, but curiously enough, even at the
darkest moment, I have never been able to get a bet down on the outcome.
Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just in time, on foot,
or horseback, or even through the air. The worst of it is that
everybody, except the hero and the heroine and the villain, knows that
the unexpected is certain to happen. It is not a betting proposition and
yet it remains one of the most thrilling of all theatrical plots.
William Archer proves in _The Green Goddess_ that he is what Broadway
calls a showman, as well as being the most famous technician of his day.
He has taken the oldest plot in the world and developed it into the most
exciting melodrama of the season.
Curiously enough, Mr. Archer has said that when he first thought of the
idea for _The Green Goddess_ he wanted to induce Shaw to collaborate
with him on the play. It would have been an interesting combination.
Shaw might have fooled everybody by following the probabilities and
killing the heroine and hero coldly and completely.
Mr. Archer, however, as the author of _Play Making_, knows that it is
wrong to fool an audience, and so he kills only one of the beleaguered
party, which is hardly a misfortune, since it enables the heroine, after
a decent period of mourning, to marry the man she loves. As the
Scriptures have it, joy cometh in the mourning.
Archer probably did not set out to show just how much better he could do
with a thriller than Theodore Kroner or Owen Davis. His scheme was
broader than that. Satire was in his mind as well as melodrama. He began
his play with much deft foolery at the expense of the imperially minded
English, by making his villainous rajah far more wise in life and
literature than his English captives. When the rajah asks the brave
English captain which play of Shaw he prefers, the gallant officer
replies acidly: "I never read a line of the fellow." At this point in
the play Mr. Archer and Mr. Arliss between them have succeeded in making
the rajah such an altogether attractive person that a majority of the
people in the audience are eager to have him obtain his revenge and
quite reconciled to the heroine's accepting his marked attentions and
becoming the chief wife in the royal harem of Rukh.
But melodrama is stronger stuff than satire. In the beginning, the
playwright was melodramatic with an amused sort of tolerance, but then
the sheer excitement and rush of action seized him by the coattails and
dragged him along helter-skelter. Satire was forgotten and the hero and
heroine, confronted by death, began to speak with the round and eloquent
mouth, as folk in danger always do in plays. The rajah became more
villainous scene by scene and the little group of English captives
braver and braver. They even developed a trace of intelligence.
None of this is cited as cause for grave complaint against William
Archer. Greater men than he have tried to play with melodrama and have
been bitten by it. Shakespeare began _Hamlet_ as a searching and serious
study of the soul of man, but before he was done the characters were
fighting duels all over the place and going mad and participating in all
the varied experiences which come to men in melodrama. After all, George
Arliss succeeds in holding the rajah up as an admirable and interesting
person, despite all the circumstances of the plot, which are leagued
against him, and the author has been kind enough to permit him a cynical
and cutting line at the end, even though he is deprived of the privilege
of slaying his captives.
But for the fact that the hero and heroine are rescued by aeroplanes
rather than a troop of cavalry or a camel corps, it can hardly be said
that there is any new twist or turn in _The Green Goddess_. The
surprising and undoubted success of the play reveals the fact that the
so-called popular dramatists and the theorists are not so many miles
apart as one might believe at first thought. When Mr. Archer brings in
the relief party of aviators just at the crucial moment, as hero and
heroine are about to be slain, he has peripety in mind. But Theodore
Kremer, who very possibly never heard of peripety, would do exactly the
same thing. In other words, the technician is the man who invents or
preserves labels to be pasted on the intuitive practices of his art.
_The Green Goddess_ is sound and shipshape in structure, for all the
fact that it is hardly a searching study of any form of life save that
found within the theater. It is doubly welcome, not only as a rousing
melodrama but, also, as an apt and pertinent reply to the question so
frequently voiced by actors and playwrights: "Why doesn't one of these
critics that's always talking about how plays should be written sit down
and do one himself?"
If Archer is a little overcautious in taking human life in _The Green
Goddess_, the law of averages still prevails, for Eugene O'Neill has
made up the deficit in _Diff'rent_ by rounding off his little play with
a double hanging. This tragedy, described on the hoardings as "a daring
study of a sex-starved woman," has much of O'Neill's characteristic
skill in stage idiom, but it is much less convincing than the same
author's _The Emperor Jones_. Indeed _Diff'rent_ is essentially a
reflection of the other play, in which O'Neill states again in other
terms his theory that man is invariably overthrown by the very factor in
life which he seeks to escape. Emma of _Diff'rent_, like the Emperor
Jones, completes a great circle in her frantic efforts to escape and,
after refusing a young man, because of a single fall from grace, comes
thirty years after to be an eager and unhappy spinster who throws
herself at the head of a young rascal. With the growth of realism in the
drama, criticism has become increasingly difficult, since the
playwright's apt answer to disbelief on the part of the critics is to
give dates, names, addresses and telephone numbers. "Let the captious be
sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she
would act," says O'Neill menacingly to all who would question the
profound truth of his "daring study of a sex-starved woman." Of course,
the question is just how well does O'Neill know his Emmas, but this is
to take dramatic criticism into a realm too personal for comfort.
Seemingly, O'Neill and the other daring students of sex-starvation are
well informed. Into the mind of the woman of forty-five they enter as
easily as if it were guarded by nothing more than swinging doors. Or
perhaps it would be better to describe it as a lodge room, for not all
may enter, but only those who know the ritual. This is annoying to the
uninitiated, but we can only bide our time and our protest until some
one of the young men takes the next step and gives us a complete and
inside story of the psychology of maternity.
It might be possible to make a stand against the assurance of some of
the younger realists by saying that truth does not lie merely in the
fact of being. Every day the most palpable falsehoods are seeking the
dignity of truth by the simple expedient of occurring. Nature can be
among the most fearsome of liars. Still the fundamental flaw of the
younger realists does not lie here so much as in the fact that, as far
as art goes, truth depends entirely on interpretation rather than
existence. No man can set down a story fact for fact with the utmost
fidelity and then step back and say: "This is a work of art because it
is true." Art lies in the expression of his reaction to the facts.
O'Neill's method in _Diff'rent_ is quite the reverse of the artistic. He
is, for the moment, merely a scientist. Pity, compassion and all kindred
emotions are rigorously excluded. Rather, he says: "What is all this to
me?" There is no spark of fire in neutrality. The artist must care.
Though a creator, he is one of the smaller Gods to whom there is no
sanction for a lofty gesture of finality with the last pat upon the
clay. He cannot say, "Let there be light," and then take a Sabbath. His
place is at the switchboard. In his world he is creator, property man
and prompter, too. The show can go on only most imperfectly without
him.