New-York tribune., 1922-11-08

| what 1t Is like.
We are, and it is very Modern
And Intellectual.
| The hero is young bachelor, who
is about to become Father.
He has been betrayed by a young
woman who has afterward refused
to marry him.
He begs and pleads with her, but
she laughs at him scornfully and
| cynically He can no to the devil
for all she cares. "Ha! Hal" she
says, while he weeps.
1t is almost more than he can
bear. He thinks of suicide.
He shudders when he understands
that this first false step may be but
the Beginning Of an irregular life.
He discovers, from an old nurse
who has been in the family for
many years, that he has inherited
from his own father susceptibility
to the wiles of women. "It is in
your blood!" she says.
"God!" he says, about the middle
Of the second act. Cod" Just
like that.
"A man pays!" he remarks a
little later.
There is one thing that can save
his good name for some
chivalric woman to marry him be-
fore the child is born.
Is there such woman?
There is!
But that doesn't settle it. You
aren't going to get out of the theater
before 10:45, and probably not un-
til 11:05.
Our hero suspects that our heroine
is willing to marry him just because
she is generous and noble and SYM
pathetic, and not because she really
loves him. He is not willing to ac-
cept her sacrifice on those terms.
Dot w loVS you, says ouI
heroine.
"Alas!' says he, "but do not
love you'll" A e
He feels that loveless marriage
would be sacrilege. Along about the
beginning Of the third act he says
SO almost in those very
words. And moment later he
adds: "It would be living lie!"
"I will redeem you and you will
learn to love me-" says the heroine.
Lots Of men would let it go at
that and marry her, and save their
good names. But our hero is made
of finer stuff. He is a sensitive
sort Of man, if you get what we
mean. Anyhow, it is only 10 o'clock.
And he feels that he may be even
weaker than he knows. He broods
continually over his own hereditary
traits. He thinks all the time of
what the old nurse has told him.
He has a really fine scene here.
He is looking at the portraits of his
father and his grandfather and his
great-grandfathe and half a dozen
uncles. He wonders if all of them
have not suffered from the same
sort of situation he is suffering
from. All the portraits are whis-
kered. BY trick of lighting it sud-
denly appears to our hero, and pos
sibly to the audience also, that the
whiskers move slightly, as if the
the Mona Lisa smile transposed to
the male face and struggling
through these masculine boards.
There must always be some struggle
in play, so a course in playwriting
that we once read informed us. And
Professor Baker, at Harvard, makes
point of it, we understand. We
are trying to get across this struggle
between the Mona Lisa smile and
the whiskers in such way that the
critics will all say it is a symbol
of something or other. But we shall
not tell them what it is a symbol
of, and each critic will say it SYM
bolizes a different thing, and that
will bring on more talk and adver-
tise the play.
The woman who ruined the young
bachelor will be on in this scene, and
she will see the faces smile, and she
will clutch her bosom and cry 20
God" and stagger off. Nobody will
know just why she does it. There
are half a dozen reasons why she
might do it. The reason you i'm
pute to her will be Test, Test
of your own intellectually and
spirituality. To digress for
just moment, the next play we
write after this one we are writing
now will be called "Test of the Dis
turbervilles."
endings.
They fall into three general
classes the happy ending,
the compromise ending and the
tragic-artistic ending.
> In most plays a choice has been
made from among the various end
ings which suggested themselves
when the play was begun.
But we are not going to make any
such choice. We are going to have
three endings.