American Dream (by George O’Neil; Theatre Guild, producer). Unlike Poet Stephen Vincent Benét, Poet O’Neil makes no attempt to evoke the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost with dollar-silver in its saddle-horn, the pure elixir, the American thing. Poet O’Neil’s preachment is the sort of cheap claptrap with which a third-rate evangelist might try to impress a young folks’ Bible class. That it impressed the Guild’s hard-headed production committee is cause for wonder.
Dramatically, the playwright had two strikes against him when he set out to follow the New England Pingrees, in three acts and on one set, from 1650 to 1933. Act I finds one Daniel Pingree about to be turned out of his rock-ribbed home because he has taken up with a wild young thing who lives in the woods. Act II presents another Daniel. He flees the homestead when the factories press too close, goes to California and makes good.
American Dream gets in its most heavy-handed propagandist licks when the contemporary Daniel, a parlor pink with just enough genuine instincts left in him to know that his life is abominably warped, returns to the seat of his ancestors. Daniel (blond Douglass Montgomery who was also Daniel in Act I) futilely protests against his own social sphere by wearing turtleneck sweaters and dirty tennis shoes. He has also written a book on the New Economics.
To illustrate rot in the national fibre, Poet O’Neil introduces an incongruous parade of vicious types, an interpolation wooden enough to make a 13th Century miracle play seem like a production by Noel Coward. All four sexes are represented, besides a Banker, a Society Boy, a Negro Poet, an Indian Lecturer, an Agitator, a Sweet Old Thing. It is not surprising that these, and his thrill-chasing wife, drive young Daniel to self-destruction as the curtain falls.
Hangman’s Whip (by Norman Reilly Raine & Frank Butler; William A. Brady Jr., producer). “The fear o’ hell,” wrote Bobby Burns, “is a hangman’s whip.” For 30 years, with whip and gun, Cockney Trader Prin (portly Montague Love, who muscles people around with his stomach) has put the fear o’ hell into the natives living far up an African river. He has also broken most of the white assistants that have served under him for, as he says, “I ain’t run this river plying tiddly-winks.” But two of his helpers he does not quite break. One recovers his courage in time to run off with the trader’s ill-used wife. Another, who had liked her too, sticks with Prin until rebellious natives pink him with little poisoned darts. Then Prin sits down on his rotting houseboat, gun on fat lap, to wait until they come for him.
Not half bad for melodrama is the last act of Hangman’s Whip. Not half good enough are the lumbering first two acts. Author Raine, writer of the Saturday Evening Post’s “Tugboat Annie” stories, used some of his previous Satevepost material in his present concoction.
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