The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-12-12
At fheGheotrea

of drunkenness. So he decides to sign a prohibitory bill which he Is expected to veto That enrages his cousin, the owner of a disti1lely and precipitates the plays disaster: for this cousin knows that Phil,s grandmother was a quadroon. He has no reason to sus- pect the secret. The taint of negro blood does not show In his high bred, keenly intellectual personality. The blow paralyzes him for time. He can parry 1t by vetoing the anti-whis- key bill; in which case the only keep CT of the truth will deliver to him all proof of it. The struggle within him is terrible. It ends in his making the measure law and declaring his own negroism in a public speech Hereaf- ter, as he is a nigger, to be despised by the race whose blood Is in his will devote his life to the welfare of other niggers.
 What about his affianced bride. Geor- giana? Therein lies an ethnologfcaf and ultra dramatic factor of this play. Before the disaster befell Phil he de- clared that "a gill of black blood in a
 
 that "a nigger is an animal. but not human being:" and now he says to the appalled, girl that. of ceurse. they cannot marry. When she assents to their parting as inevitable, though. and recoils from him with instinctive aver sion and disgust, an ethnological ques-. tion explodes itself with rending force. If 1t is true that a mulatto's child by an all-white other parent may revive arf n "a arIn oF ha despised race. then why may not this Phil. even with his ratio of fifteen drops of Circassian blood to one of Af- rican-with lis family and social ties all proudly white--with his education from nursery through college to polit- ical leadership all nstilling in him a loathing of the negro--why may not the small strain of black blood break out in him wildly. ferociously. under the stress of excitement7
 Do you take my meaning? or, ratn- CT. that of Author Sheldon when he makes Phil cry out that he won't give Teorgiana up, seize her in his arms, hold her to his breast and kiss her face passionately over and over again? The girl comprehends 1t. She knows that the same brutish passion that made black Joe assault and kill a white girl--the negro animalism that many Southerners seek to abolish by burnings at the stake---has turned her hitherto polite lover into beast. She writhes and screams as though. in the grasp of gorilla. She strikes his face with her soft hands doubled into fists. To her he is suddenly a dread ful monster.
 Mind you. am not writing with a partisan pen. am merely telling you of the most remarkable passage in The Niger" Nor am I construing the audiences trem. ndous applause as either approval or disapprobation of Southern Iynchings. believe that its demonstration on the opening night was due altogether to the fine quality of the acting. Guy Bates Post per sonated Phil. and Annie Russell em- bodied Georgiana. as though the future of the New Theatre and the drama in America, not to mention the fame of themselves. deperdel on that one scene. They had taken in the cast the roles first assigned to the seeding E, H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe. The occupants of the two tiers of boxes stayed fashionably calm when sand- bag weight fell with a big thud, and sparks from a broken electric wire showered down on the stage; but when the curtain was lowered on Armies
 
 modish people led in such hullabal- loo as the Nv Theatre hadn't heard before.
 Fashion in the drama Is like fashion in everything else. very largely a mat ter of somebody saying to somebody that somebody else Is doing or wear round that the farce of Seven Days" is the success of the season--so farces are in fashion. All this being so, we may as well take the pleasanter. cas- fer and perhaps safer side, and predict success for ''The Lottery Man" Some years ago. when The Prisoner of Zenda" and Under the Red Robe" set | the style in romanticism, we might not have; nor in four or five ago, when l The Lion and the Mouse," ''The Man of the Hour and Thomas W. Lawson. in the background, convinced us we had to expose something to be listen ed to; nors1ast season when "The Eas. fest Way made it the correct thing to l,1ok at and discuss a phase of life the nicer of US had heretofore ignored.
 But this season .thought-like rats and "puffs"-is no longer fashionable: | and We must laugh. If we must we may as well laugh at "The Lottery | Man" as at anything else. It is by | Rida Johnson YounS, who gauged pop | ular taste pretty accurately with Brown of Harvard" Like that. Mrs | Young's new play Is the triumph of memory over invention. If 1t fails of | success the reason will be simply that other people remember the same things that Mrs. Young does The idea Of an young man putting him. self up as prize in lottery Is s good one. But it was as good ten years ago when Paul Biihand and Michel Carre used 1t as the theme of a farce called "The Surprises of Love and they handled it far more cleverly < Mrs. Young makes her man journal ist. She pauses for none of the incl dental touches that would make such m idea really funny. She wouldn't nave time without sacrificing some IT, relevant joke. When she recalls .wheeze" she drops it in. The young nan in Brown of Harvard" called out;
 -