Serena Blandish. It is the conviction of stupid people that only that which is solemn may be profound and that to seem satirical is to be unsympathetic. Partly for this reason, Serena Blandish will doubtless be misappreciated and en joyed by the well-decorated people who will go to see it. Its inadequacy as a play, however, is not caused by a fallacy in attitude.
Yet its perfections are not marred but diminished, because a play must do more than suggest, however perfectly, a mood, and because an epigram in several scenes is certainly too long. An anonymous "Lady of Quality" wrote the novel Serena Blandish; or The Difficulty of Getting Married.
S. N. Behrman (The Second Man) wrote the play. Jed Harris, the ill-shaven producer whose perhaps somewhat mercenary pride recently forbade him to present Ina Claire in The Gaoler's Wench, was inclined to think well of Serena. He ordered Robert Edmond Jones to design some sets and procured Ruth Gordon with her soft, broken voice and her abruptly delicate gestures to play the part of a lady who "possessed every imaginable charm of appearance and behavior."
Serena Blandish was born near the docks of London. When she grew up, she was carried off by a Countess who wished her to make a brilliant marriage. This Serena was incompetent to do. She accepted a ring from a Jewish jeweler and she accepted a luncheon engagement with Lord Ivor Cream. The ring led to embarrassments and the luncheon engagement led, not to another engagement of a more permanent nature, but to tea. Martin, the Countess's butler, gloomily observed: "A lady who stays to tea where she has been invited to luncheon never gets engaged to be married." There came, finally, a proposal from the jeweler; also, an unimportant young man whom Serena would have loved even if he had not liked her a bit. He invited her to go unconventionally with him to Monte Carlo, to start a night club. In stead of becoming the consort of a Negro, as she was made to do in the book, Serena of the play runs downstairs on her way to a golden and most likely disastrous adventure, still happily, if perilously, unmarried.
Chauve-Souris, internationally applauded Russian "Bat Theatre," has this year gone stale, sterile, incredibly flat.
Seven years ago the smart and sprightly Russian Bat flapped over U. S. cities with tempestuous and most merited éclat. As each number was introduced by the droll, Cheshire-cat-faced Nikita Balieff, an ticipant audiences rocked with a foretaste of merriment which always followed. The music of the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" penetrated every stratum of U. S. society. Not to have seen the "Wooden Soldiers" or "Katinka" or later "Katerina" was the height of rusticity or indifference.