(4 of 5)
The Living Mask. Another Pirandello play has come to baffle wit and start psychopathic conversation. The play was originally named Henry IV, because the hero—an embittered contemporary Italian—is discovered at a masquerade carnival in the guise of Emperor Henry IV (the one who went to Canossa barefoot in the snow to ask the Pope's pardon). The masquerading Italian is pitched off his horse onto a stone, and when he wakes up believes himself to be the actual Henry IV.
The play is a study in that kind of personal make-believe which all of us, to a greater or less degree, build up about us.
The play is not as good as Six-Characters in Search of an Author. The best performance is by Robert Edmond Jones, who made the beautiful scenery.
Candidates
Who Will Win the $1,000?
With 1923 safely in the cycle of the past, it is time for the small company of successful American dramatists to build atmospheric castles with the $1,000 Pulitzer prize. This prize is awarded every spring to the best American play of the previous year.*
Although there was hoarse outcry from great groups of intelligentsia over the award last year (Icebound by Owen Davis) the verdict is usually accepted and the winning play recognized as the leader in native dramatic literature. In face of the quantity and quality of successful American plays produced last year, this judgment for 1923 will be no moderate honor.
While the perils of prophecy are proverbial, the prize appears to rest among the following plays:
Tarnish by Gilbert Emery.
Sun Up by Lula Vollnaer.
The Potters by J. P. McEvoy.
You and I by Philip Barry.
Roseanne by Nan Bagby Stevens.
The Changelings by Lee Wilson Dodd.
The inclusion of The Changelings is possibly a trifle arbitrary and may be laid to the dictum of a member of last year's committee that it was the best American play of the year.
Tarnish and Sun Up are deeply imbued with tragedy—both widely divergent in theme. Tarnish is urbane, highly sexed; Sun Up is hidden in the recesses of the Carolina mountains, where such elemental emotions as hatred, cowardice, mother love control existence. Sun Up suffers slightly from a declining last act.
You and I, Harvard prize play, seems not uninfluenced by the Cambridge atmosphere—exceedingly polite, witty, moderately well-dressed. Below this brilliantly prepared surface is a foundation theme of considerable consequence. Strongly in its favor is the symmetry of its construction—a virtue lacking in The Potters, a staccato satire on middle class husbands.
Roseanne is a specialty, an American Negro story played entirely in sepia makeup.
With the exception of Roseanne, the plays have been decided commercial successes. Which will gain the a'dded thousand and the enviable prestige of leadership now rests with the Committee. W. R.
The Best Plays
These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:
Drama