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The play is partly preachment but it is so exciting that even Otto Kahn, you may be certain, would wish to set his teeth in the ear of the suave, knavish judge and in that of the dirty district attorney. The minor parts are badly taken; but Charles Bickford, as the flaring Macready, Horace Braham, as the less truculent, beseeching Capraro, and Sylvia Sidney, as the well-gowned and eventually hysterical fiancee of the former make you, as one shrill memuer of the audience remarked, wish to "go to Boston and kill a few people."
Jealousy is played by a cast of two persons (Fay Bainter, John Halliday) and a telephone. Its one set is a neatly furnished studio; offstage noises are confined to round knocks upon a resonant downstairs door. Jealousy, which Eugene Walter derived from the French of Louis Verneuil, will be a popular play among little theatre addicts who have no cash.
Jealousy avoids being entirely a tour de force because its theme is one in which suggestion is more powerful than presentation. Maurice Theulot suspects his wife, Valerie, of intrigues with an old lecher, Lambertier.
Maurice murders Lambertier; Valerie admits the adultery which she has lied about before and committed for reasons which are the weakest element in the play. Maurice then gives himself up to the police to save an innocent man from execution. Valerie, by explaining the true circumstances, will save her husband.
So skilfully do Fay Bainter and John Halliday play their parts that the anger, folly, fatigue, cowardice, love, lies and bravery of Maurice and Valerie Theulot burn brightly, with unsteady continuity, like candles in a room of woven draughts.
Exceeding Small is the way in which the mills of God grind, as stated by Friedrich Von Logau in a much misquoted German poem.* In this play, the first offering of the Actors' Theatre this season, the mills ground a girl, Gert, and a boy, Ed. Ed, who earned $20 a week, married Gert. On his wedding night, he discovered that he had a weak heart and would soon die. The idea of suicide came to him like an inspiration or the thought of a journey. Gert did not wish to live any longer either; so Ed closed the window and opened the gas-jet.
The title would, as a matter of fact, apply to the play better if it were not a quotation. Author Caroline Francke is writing, not about the vengeance of romantic deities upon heroes, but about tiny people and their puny, terrible grief. So honestly does she do this and so honestly, if not brilliantly, do Eric Dressier and Ruth Easton, as well as the minor members of the cast, interpret her observations that the sorrows of small characters assume their true enormity and depth. There are moments of murmur about wage-slaves and capitalists which injure but do not destroy the sometimes strained, but plausible and exciting, sadness of Exceeding Small.
*Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
With exactness grinds He all."—Retribution.