Newark evening star and Newark advertiser. [volume] (Newark, N.J.) 1909-1916, 1910-12-13
Nance 0'NeilI Plays So Well
That Staid Folk Applaud
forbidden Theories.
AT PROCTOR'S 1.-THE THIRD
DEGREE" is WORKED WELL
Other Playhouses, Too, Present
Programs Which Win I'm
stinted Applause.
CONVENTION. of which Is fash

Toned the door that Keeps a good
ly-one might say the goodlier-
number Of the respectable inhabitants
of this world from knowing themselves,
and each other. was seized by its staid
ears and given a decided jouncing, in
the Newark Theatre last night, with
that accomplished woman, Nance
O'Neill, as the jouncer, and David Be-
lasco's~- adaptation of THE Lily" by
Pierre Wolff and CASTOR Leroux, as her
medium.
Staid folks found themselves sitting
up very straight and ~applauding
theories at which their bringing up"
must have stood aghast, and thought
less mes found themselves thinking
and wondering. For 1.-THE Lily" is
based on the idea that true love knows
no obstacles. and that a marriage of
love, whether with or without the on
ventional ties that bind, Is far more
worth while than the average marriage
of respecta bility. with its selfish aims
and unworthy motives.
And 1t is Nance O'Neill. in the role
of an old maid who has been deprived
by an egotistical. overbearing father of
her right to marry the man she loved,
and whose love she possessed, who
makes this theory not only plausible,
but convincing. Hers is a wonder
full artistry, nj were she to declare
with her resonant, vibrating voice and
bny< conserved. admirably placed ges-
~etures, that black was white, her au-
dience, whether In Manhattan or Osh-
kosh, would agree with her to a man.
In Nance O'Neill the stage of today
has one Of its chiefest
There is nothing pleasant about the
story of The Lily" though its telling
is SO marvelously interesting that to
miss a line Is to feel a hardship. The
Comte De Maigny is the impoverished
scion Of an old French family, aptly
described by his old friend HuZar as
an Outside angel and a home devil"
He has two daughters. Odette, the
elder, who Is 80 when the play begins,
gave up the man she loved when she
was 20, because her father had in
formed her CURLY that her duty lay
in filing her dead mothers place as
mistress Of the house. h n her
sister, Christine, have not proper
clothes to a nor are they per-
mitted to entertain. but their father
removes valuable pictures from the wall
that he might have plenty of money
TO spend in his loved Paris. where he
Is as gay a Lothario as he could pos
sfbly ~disapprove Of when in h shadow
Of his own home.
Defends Her Position.
Christine, who has reached twenty
five, and has begun to know the lone
someness and the darkness of spinster-
hood, meets and loves an artist who has
fitted I'D a studio IN an old castle ad-
- II N.Y-5 Hor anRrnf
is discovered when the father of her
brothers hancee breaks his daughters
engagement because of the scandal
Christmas affair with the artist has
caused. There Is a tempestuous
Scene. during which. after lis
tenina to her brothers. taunts
and her ather's ~reproaches, Chris
fine gathers herself together and
in stinging words denounces them both
and defends her position. She tells her
brother that her marriage" with the
artist Is far purer thar the one he con-
templates. for she "has given herself.
not sold herself" Her father, enraged,
rushes forward to strike her, n then
the long-patient, ever-enduring Odette,
turns and, in scathing terms, gives
vent to the rage regret and despair
1DdL QdV0 Ga -ASA 80
years since she resigned herself to the
lot of being the h~ousekeeper OF her
father, rather than the wife of the man
she loved. Bitterly she asks him what
right he has to try n keep the happl-
ness of love from his children; why ne
}dares to decide as to what is right
] what is wrong; and why he presumes TO
condemn, when all Of the despair she
has endured and her sister has fought
can be laid al his door. In this scene
Nance O'Neill causes h pale, quiet,
long-suffering Odette to break the smell
of reserve hat has grown about her
and display, with wonderful color, all
of the despairing age and contempt
her heart a held in its years of OPP
pression. Hers is the cry of starved
old-maidenhood, revealing in its inten-
sity all of a good woman's longing to
love and be loved; to have children and
feel their arms about her neck, and to
mother them in the thousand compre-
hensiye ways thai mothers know.
The father, astounded and bewildered,
takes himself off to his club in Paris,
and Odette and the family friend, HUI
1on s%traighten out the tangle. The
artist is to get a divorce and he and