The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1903-10-25
BY Franklin FyIes.

NEW YORK. oct. Pa am % years
IN DID, says Ethel Barrymore once
or twice a day. but it is in a play.
and well she knows that the audience
doesn't believe her. We have so many
actresses trying TO look as young as
their heroines that Miss Barrymore's
assertion of five or six years more than
the truth about her age is one of the
piquant things in Cousin Kate" the
new comedy OF the week i'm New York.
Her role is that of a not quite old maid
Fhd not nearly sOured maid. but a
honey sweet one. whose heart is not
DEAD enough TO break, but alive enough
L. ache, while she thinks she must
give up her lover for duty's sake. The
character was not fitted 20 Miss Bar
ignore per order, and she has, i'm her
short time on the stage. acquired the
skin 90 fit herself to the character. Yet
there rs her personality, individuality.
or whatever we choose to term that
elusive but potent quality which makes
one woman i'm a thousand irresistible
on the stage. Maude Adams has il
wonderfully and 7 name her here, as
] do Mary Anderson. to illustrate by
contrast what ] mean. Miss Auder-
sons cold beauty and mellihuously
powerful voice forced admiration. but
Cinates us. and makes us admire her
GmeCtiOnately-bu h0w2 We know
that she is an accomplished artist, If
we stop to think Of that. bur usually
we don't. She never seems to be doing
anything by rule or rOte; her stage
ways and means are all her own: and
Miss Barrymore is another young wo-
man whom we esteem as an artist
when we remind ourselves of the fact
but whom we enjoy without effort be-
cause she is what she really is. Crea-
lures lucky as well as lovely are Maude
and Ethel.
A featherweight among plays in the
light for New York attention is this
cousin Kate It's London author
Hubert Henry Davies, hardly more
than a boy, strikes no hard emotional
blows. but spars lightly and deftly with
sentimental humOr. Kate encounters
en- audaciOus but polite Irishman in an
English railway carriage. gives him
impulsively half her luncheon and all
her heart, learns that he is engaged to
marry her young cousin. is wretChed
while making up her mind that il is
per duty 20 give him up. and equally
happy when it turns out that the girl
would rather wed another fellow any
way. That is all the plot there is to
81. but the composition is comedy so
close to tTaVeSty, vet at an the danger
POINTS saved from dbSur0itE by good
writing and good acting. that il piQued
and pleased its first New York audi
enCe. In the middle one Of three acts
Kate and her wOOer are by themselves
IN an unused house during a rain
storm, and he lkeus her to Little Sill
yer Locks i'm the nursery tale of that
Childs experience with a bear i'm a
lonesome forest den. while he declares
bis love and is accepted after only a
Few hours acquaintance. So expedf-
fous are they i'm Courtship that they
are as SoOd as married and settled that
same evening. Tt has all the speed of
Romeo and JUliets affair. but doesp e
run beyond the altar to the tomb. And
Ethel Barrymore. heiress through he,.
mother and grandmother TO the Drew
genius of easy expression and through
her father to personal beauty. sends
This modern romance pTepOsterOus and
even ludicrOus as it is. across the foot
lights with the convincing manner OF
G. transcript from ordinary life How
Goes she do it2 Well I have already
come as near as I can to telling you.
ct IL is not wholly explainable.
one play dramatized from fourteen