The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1908-10-04

in our Temple of Fame, up there on the
Hudson in the neighborhood of Grants
tomb. Thus much of fanfare for the
entrance of Percy Mackaye. author of
Mater" Henry Miller, who for long
while was a coming actor, but never
came. is now a manager who has rung
the bullseye bell several times by pro-
ducing peculiar plays triumphantly;
yet he got the newspaper critics away
from the iron-jawed cynics of opening
nights in New York. and sat them
down of an afternoon among soft-lipped
people. to make their estimate of a
play so queer that mothe, at 40 is so
fresh in it, and daughter of 20 so
stale, that the parent is taken to be
the offspring. The whole scheme of the
fiction rests on a premise so preposter-
Gus as that. Mind you, too, neither the
time nor the place is far away but
right here and now in an American
city. Michael Dean and his sister,
Mary, are drab, dun. darkly brunette
and utterly dull-to-reason reformers in
society and politics. Their widowed
mother is bright, gay and blonde, with
the inconsequential joys of life. Mi
chael gets a nomination for the legis-
lature and expects TO purify, exalt and
ennoble the making of laws Arthur
Cullen is a political boss. who tells
Michael that the price of his candidacy
is $4,000 for the campaign fund Mi
chaePS soul reVOlts at the sordid idea:
so does his sister, Mary's: and, besides.
they haven't the money; but their ma
ter, aged 49, yet looking younger than
her daughter of 20. doesn't see the ques-
ton from their aesthetic point of view.
She is sure that she can befool and be-
devil Cullen to forego the assessment
and accept her Establishments instead.
Now, there, you'll say, is the making
of jolly farce.
Percy Mackaye has no such trivial
purpose. He writes POLITICALLY, with his
characters feet never fiat on the
ground, nor their speech colloquial, and
their heads are in the clouds-except-
ing the mother, and she has verbal
flights of fancy. Even the utilitarian
Cullen is melted by love of the mater
thinking her all the while to be the
filia-to discard his ordinary vocabu-
larry and soar into fantastic diction
along with the four other personages
Yes-only a quintette. Last week l
mentioned four plays that We're get
ting along with casts of six or less. and
here comes a fifth with five. and no
changes of scene. That means big
profits-if the people will take Mater
do d VI amy JOhe III stage literature. a
piece of pleasantly on a par with w.
S. Gilbert's whimsical comedies. and
let 1t sharpen their wits
4 *
Margaret Anglin was to have been
the mother, but she went away to get
Australian dollars, and Miller cabled
to Isabel Irving to come from Paris
His choice was lucky. for the actress
and the play. Isabel began to act at
Days so long ago that she may easily
have the 40 years ascribed to the moth
er, but she has held on to the blonde
beauty of her girlhood so remarkably
that she makes the merry widow look
younger than the darksome daughter
as personated rightly yet gloomily by
Hazel Mackaye, a sister of Percy. Visa
bel slSips and ambles through Mater"
Charles Stevenson. who de-
picts Boss Cullen as a heavyweight
politician so waited off his feet by the
woman that he takes a hope of
her in lieu OF her sons pay
ment of a campaign assessment: while
Frederick Lewis, hitherto a player of
old men, moons, mopes and declaims
oracularly as the son with socialistic
crouch. The dialogue of the mater and
the filius becomes so like Hamlet be-
rating his queen mother, as a matron
who flirts as a pretended maiden with
the politician, that the author deems it
well to put Shakespearean quotation