Los Angeles herald., 1909-08-30


Ruth Jordan, his sister. ....... Blanche Hall
winthrop Newbury ........ Harry Mestayer
DIR. Newburry. his father William Nerance
stephen Ghent. t...,..,.... A. ByrOn beasiey
Lon Anderson ................H II. :. Dutfield
Burt Williams. ......'.....'..N norman Heap
Dutch .....-...'sss 900 'NaNlh l"uuS
Pedro ..,........'...'.'. .. wins MARKS
Contractor .,...,..,..... .Nayland Ifask
An Architect. ............ Henry StOckrldge
BY w. HERBERT BLAKE.
TT is my firm conviction that every
good citizen who attends a play
u on an afternoon like yesterday
should be paid for his heroism. For
tunately for my contention, we all
were yesterday at the Burbank. Paid
in good coin of the realm of the drama
with a noble play, brilliantly and
beautifully interpreted, perhaps the
greatest play of American creation
which the last quarter of century
has given us, certainly the two finest
and most compelling impersonations of
the summer by the goodly company of
Burbankers.
[ have labeled 1.-THE Great Divide" a
romantic melOdfama Of real life. 1t is
more. 1t is the poetry of American
ism, penned by poet who could be
true to the best and finest and most
perverse things in New England ira
dition, and yet could be the spokesman
for the simple and dogged ethics of the
prairie. William Vaughn Moody is
poet and d college prOfessor-the latter
in his leisure moments, l am told. He
has written a play that has Wrung
tears from honest. homely men and
women of the great west, a play that
kindles the fire of human appreciation
and sober pride of race in us all, a play
that battles Valiantly for the sanctity
of marriage and the rights of love. A
poem-as the ragged rocks of the en-
circling mountains are poetic, as home
and heartache are poetic, as the ele-
mental struggle of sex is of the eS-
sence' of poetry. And he has done it so
simply that any child can understand,
and wonder too.
1t was my great good luck to see this
play for the first time yesterday. Not
to avoid an inevitable contrast in the
acting, for the work of Mr.. Beasley
and Miss Hall together could fairly
stand comparison with the best l sin
cerely believe. But the impression was
novel. we'll known as the story is to all
readers of the literature of the drama.
and the illusion was very keen-so
keen as to be heartrending again and
again. This little tale of a woman
for whom two men-dirt of the dirt and
lowest of the low, to all appearance
fought and for whom one afterWard
lived, is a strangely compelling one.
There is something elemental, primi-
tive, ceanly earthly about it in its
darkest and most despairing moments.
Yet it is not all what is often mis-
takenly called the eternal sanity of
Mother Earth Rather is it the di-
vine madness of the human Will-that
will of stephen Client which con-
quered his brute and bestial nature
and conquered the tender and shrink
~, h.
day, in presence and in absence, in
strife and in submission. A woman of
New England ancestry, she, who sold
her body TO her rude suitOr as the price
of her life, and then in bitterness
toiled until she could repay each cent
the husband had lavshed on her IN
that mountain girt fastness of the
desert
We saw her soul, stripped pitilessly
before Us, and we dimly felt that in
this torture there was something cura-
tive, that out of her suffering for the
soul Of this man, beginning now to
love her would come health and JOY
TO both Of them. And at length, when
hope seemed to burn least brightly, We
saw them meet across tine great divide,
hand in hand, and we heard her last
words to the man who had conquered
her and mastered himself:
II am coming to you because / can't
help myself
a curious choking echo of the old
Puritan tenet of prcdestination, at
tuned by love to a holier harmony, but
not lost.
How long had you known your hus-
band when YOU married him?" asks her
sister-in-law. and Ruth Jordan Ghent
replies, in aWed sincerity: For all my
life. and aeons before"
This same inner subtlcty Of the
dramatists thought we note again, in
a tender comedy guise, when Rutn's
mother chides stephen for buying up
their old home and presenting it TO
them, as another link i'm his iron chain
of TepaTation.
Il cannot accept" she says. 1T is
too quiXOtic.'
"Quix-what?" he asks, fumbling
over the word.
And We see i'm "A flash of luminous
reality the elemental romance and poe
try of this rude miner, who does the
brave and the fine thing so simply and
SO gracefully as to shake from out the
limbo of this good matrons dusty
memory that verbal image of the bold
knight Of the Windmills. QuiXotie2
Yes, and all the good, great things Of
life like stephen Ghent, are that and
ever will be.
OF the Joint work of Mr.. Beasley and
Miss Hall it is hard to speak otherwise
than with Uu2ONeGudDIe enthusiasm.
Indeed, il is hard to separate the two
in memory. so ineXtriCably has the
playwright intertWined them in action
Perhaps the best compliment to pay to
what deserves the best one has to
offer is merely to note the interplay of
nature upon nature--the crucial test Of
any dramatic embodiment of true mar
Tiage. We saw Stephen Ghent grow
gentler, kinder act by act, from the
moment he reeled, drunken rutfian, |
into the cabin of The Woman. And we
saw that woman grow strangely ir-
ritable and passionate with d great
anger, which after a time she was to
discover with astonishment was only1
the mask to a great love And we Won |
dered, some of us, if this, and not
Robert Herrick's "Together' after all. /
might be the accurate representation Of |
American Marriage-at its truest and |
fairest because at its WOrst-and best! |
We saw, too, the simple and homely |
idea of Duty become a stark spectcr |
that warred against love and happiness !
because too sheerly intellectual. We |
heard the rights of the physical eX- |
istence asserted as boldly as ever did !
Walt whitman, and as delicately and |
purely as in the simple language of |
scripture. And we felt the soul of a |
man awaken into life, and win its right /
10 live.
There was infinite detail in Mr.. Beas-