In Manhattan last week there arrived a great actor, Alexander Moissi (Moy-see). The day after his arrival, he began to act in Max Reinhardt's production of Redemption, as produced by Morris Gest.
It was not his first visit to the U. S. nor his first performance in Redemption. Moissi was one of the troupe of German players who came here a year ago with Reinhardt to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in German, as well as other lovely and pretentious novelties. Now he is here with his German company to go touring* in Redemption, in which he has played at intervals for the past 15 years. Curiously enough, Moissi was not born back stage on a winter's night, while his mother was making a quick change in The Sunken Bell. His paternal progenitors, with their clanging names, were great men in Trieste; one of them, Moissi Golemi, was a general under the Albanian national hero Scanderbeg. His mother, extant at 86, is a descendant of one Carlo di Radis, a famed Italian physician. Moissi's father was a merchant in Trieste and it was there, in 1880, on the day after April Fool's, that Alexander Moissi was born.
He grew up in Trieste (Austrian then, Italian now) and learned to speak Italian perfectly and German with an Italian accent. There is no anecdote to account for his becoming an actor; he merely decided to be one and began to play in Prague, with Angelo Neumann's stock company. Later, he decided to go to Berlin and there he met Max Reinhardt.
Max Reinhardt, like all great theatrical impresarios, possesses the most subtle of all talents, that of recognizing genius. It was a question of time until Moissi should become famous; at first, his Italian accent made him unpopular; then, little and ugly and sad, he became a matinee idol; at last German critics, who are to other critics as the snail is to the turtle, awarded him their approval.
Moissi has played in Shaw and Hauptmann, Chekhov, Pirandello, Shakespeare and Euripides. He has played in Paris, Petrograd, London, Budapest and the littlest villages in Austria. In Moscow, he played in German while the rest of the cast spoke Russian. He lives on a hill near Vienna with his wife, Actress Johanna Terwin, who is also in the Redemption cast.
The opening night in Manhattan was attended by an enthusiastic audience.
New Plays in Manhattan
The Squealer. Among the more spirited of Manhattan's antiquarians is Mark Linder; he wrote a play from which lamed Mae West evolved the picturesque excitement of Diamond Lil; now he has scratched up further blood and thunder about San Francisco's underworld, 22 years ago. It is a candid melodrama, of vice rampant and virtue triumphant; yet its most bitter climaxes are meant to be accepted and enjoyed in a somewhat mocking spirit. The audience will gloat, not shiver, when a character says: "I'll get you for this, Logan, if it takes me twenty years"; or, "Wong, you'll pay for this."