The Washington herald., 1919-10-28

.Robt:t 0bes
Mrs Rossitsr Ustty's Mothsrl. -. Ida Waterman
Howard Moore the Family Attorneyl.
Albert Gran
LeiS hosatef. joel
Ellen "a Maidl.... Nellie Callahan
An Louis hlmoAli
Another Intruder. Martin LAWS
inspector ...-...Frcderick Besne
John Wenoel.. VIVIAN
Tie action Of the play occurs In Letty's room
in the Rossiter aparment. Riverside Drive. New
York City.
BY EARLE DORSEY.
In common with every corner gro
ceryman. We. too. have dreamed Of
authorship. We've even dared to
hope that we might attain to one
act sketch authorship. bit our am
bition has been veiled. II is now
time to tear aside this false mod
esty and get TO work. The Amer
lean sts &c has reached the point
where sny theme. any treatment. any
cast and any author may aspire
toward authorship and get a run for
his labor.
Take for instance Lefty Arrives. %
the brain-child OF Sydney Rosenfeld.
which had a Garrick premiere last
night. Mr.. Rosenfeld has sought to
demonstrate that there should be .
more painless method Of settling
down. than matrimony. Not a down
right impossible theme, granted the
demonstration had been workman
like. but b. no means a theme that
would captivate the fancy of a Bar
rie nor intrigue the typewriter OF a
Shipman.
Its treatment. however. lacked deli
cacy or craftsmanship. 1t wns treat
ment of a type we efttimes bestow on
our four-cylinder slowster when the
carbureter shows signs of boredom
Like Mr.. Rosenfeld we roll up our
wrenches and screw-drivers, work
ourselves into a fine. important frenzy
and end up by phoning for the garage.
Mr.. Rosenfeld has made a most i'm
posing racket in trying to make Let
ty Arrives" work. He has brought to
bear the most complete and volumi-
nous assortment of dictionary-fller
the current drama has afforded since
the season began. He has laid out a
sequence of scenes that dazzle the
vision and strain the memory. but
somehow. he doesn't seem to handle
them right. There Is more dialogue
than play The situations stumble
over each other. He even lost char
acter, IL failing to account for him
constitutes a loss. The cast struggles
feverish with a world of verbiage,
wastes its force in combating a too
attentuated tensity and surrenders
weakly to a strain that robs the effort
of proper cumulative power.
Lefty Rossiter Is a parlor bolshevist,
though the term Is more relative than
absolute. She doesn't want to marry.
A long time before there has been a
kid affair that ended by cutting a
| dollar in half with the departing
swain keeping the other half. In sum
and substance the youngster comes
back again. impersonates a burglar.
makes love to Lefty in burglarious
guise. puts the dollar together. and
| finally wins her after confessing that
! he's the nephew of a man whose un-
revealed nephew she had fiatly re-
fused to marry. In the end. Author
Rosenfeld admits. of course. that
there was no less painless a method of
settling down than matrimony and ad-
mitted also that he had wasted an
evening In an attempt to prove the
contrary.
Such Is the pish-posh on which this
comedy is based. Mr.. Rosenfeld must.
however. be credited with avoiding
as fine a bedroom scene as ever tickl-
ed AL Woods heart and he must be
given praise for sufficient insight into
the pet foibles of his feminine audit
ors to get Lefty safely married and
prove afresh that after all. marriage
Is a woman's real destiny. He might
have gone afield. Quixote-fashion. try
ing to prove that Lefty could have
settled down in some other occupation.
but il he had, they'd have boiled him
! in oil.
Clara Joel succeeded to an astonish-
ing extent in landing sanity and
veracity to a role that was endowed
by the playwright with little of either.
Louis Kimball. in the opposite role.
was not well cast. He was quite too
vibrant. quite too bubblins over, quite
too a lot of things to make his per-
formance creditable, though we sus-
pect that in the proper kind of a role
he might do excellently well. Mona
Bruins has an insenue part that as
sists in swelling Producer Weber's
payroll. 1t may have other values but
they are as invisible as the necessity
for the role opposite her, played under
difficulties by Robert Ober. Ida
Waterman made the best stage
| dowager we've seen since the weather
turned cool and John Wendell, the
uncle Of the hero. was sufficiently au-
thoritative in a character role to i'm
press himself on the audience in a
very short interval George Vivian
should associate more with detectives.
His prisoner could have Drained him
no less than six times in five minutes
Nellie Callahan was fair enough as a
a maid.
Frank stammer has staged the piece
with skill and taste