The Daily Missoulian. [volume] (Missoula, Mont.) 1904-1961, 1909-04-23
THE RIGHT Of WAY"
IS FINE PLAY
UNUSUALLY LARGE AUDIENCE
WITNESSES SPLENDID PRO-
DUCTION AT HARNOlS.

The Right of Way" powerful
play embodying strong moral I'M
folded in an intensely interesting man
ner-so that the evil is all shown, but
robbed of offensiveness, and the good
magnified in corresponding proper
tions, as a theatrical production that
causes one to stop and think then
think again-providing one ever stops
to ponder over the perplexities and
mysteries of life and human nature
1t tells story that is worthy of the
telling, teaches lesson worthy of the
learning, and any one who sees it and
does not get something out of it has
but one person to blame-himself.
The theme of the play is built up
around and upon those four impor-
tant questions that man has been ask
ing since the time of the birth of a
thirst for knowledge, and has never
yet been able to secure completely
satisfactory answers-"What is life?
What is death? What is love?- What
is right?" There is scene devoted
to each question in which it's perplex-
ing query is propounded in words and
acts. Then there is a concluding
scene. It is "The answer" and the
answer is good.
The action of the play begins in
Montreal, Canada. The story is that
of a lawyer, endowed with brains and
brilliancy, education and wealth, but
an atheist, eternally doubling every
thing and miserable in his doubt yet
unable to shake off that haunting
"Why?" Cursed with an appetite for
drink that Is uncomfortable, he per-
mits himself unlimited indulgence, not
because, as he aptly explains, it an
swers the questions, but it temper
arily stops their asking. This man,
Charlie Steele, makes a loveless, a
conventional marriage, just to take
the prize from a rival who loved and
who was loved in turn. Steele real
ICES that there is no love in his life,
that his influence has brought all
with whom he has come into contact
into misery and shame and, being
warned of danger that threatens him,
recklessly courts that which would
end it all and give him that for which
his active mind is ever craving but
never finds-rest, eternal rest.
But fate is against him. Instead of
death, he receives a blow that robs
him of all memory of the past, of all
knowledge Of his identity, and when
he RECEIVERS consciousness, he finds
himself in a Catholic parish in the
mountains far from the scenes of his
brilliant but drunken and miserable
career. where he had been carried by
a murderer whose life he had saved
from the hangman. This friend. Joe
Portugais, who holds in his bosom the
secret of the past, guards it carefully
until love and subsequent compiled
tons result in bringing to Steele a
knowledge that there is a past which
he cannot remember. Then when he
is faced by those whom he has
dragged to the depths of shame, he
demands that the past be recalled. A
surgical operation does this miracle
and he sees himself as he was. He
realizes the wrongs that have beer
done, others about to be committed
and decides to right them as far as
possible. When he learns that he has
secured the heart of an innocent CIR
and was about to marry her, though
his own wife, believing him dead, was
still alive and married to another, he
decides to lose himself in the great
in "The Answer he learns of his
wife's death, he is brought to a real
izing sense of a divine power, and, as
a transformed man, claims her whom
he has found in the mountains anG
has learned to love.
Guy Standing as Charlie Steele is &