Young Love. She was the little girl who got wet in Orphans of the Storm and wore an arresting white dress in Nell Gwynne. That has nothing to do with a play called Young Love which opened in Manhattan last week, except that Dorothy Gish, 30, is back on the stage playing opposite her husband, James Rennie, and Lillian Gish is still in the movies and still unmarried (see p. 44).
Dorothy Gish is cast in Young Love as a tempestuous and idealistic latter-day maiden striving to assure marital congeniality by pre-nuptial experiment. In the first few lines, she and her fiancé express satisfaction with last night's trial. To make it doubly sure, they exchange partners with their unconsulted host and hostess. Miss Gish completes an affair with host, but fiancé quails before hostess. Then follow two acts of confessions, recriminations, door-slammings, to end with four-way felicity the way it should be (according to the movies). Despite such items as "I love him!" "Then that's a very good reason not to marry him," despite Miss Gish's grotesque make-up and quaintly haphazard clothes, Young Love is adequate entertainment.
Americana. The U. S. has many peculiarities, some of them absurd. Among the latter, it would appear, are business conventions, talkies, the beds in railroad cars, Chicago schools, the faces of taxi-drivers, women temperance addicts, Will Hays, subways, Roxy's cinemansion, and Gene Tunney. All of these, J. P. McEvoy, who wrote Show Girl, snubs with villainous though somewhat protracted gaiety in this speedy second edition of his famed revue.
Revues also have many peculiarities, some of them absurd. Among the latter are somewhat naked chorus girls, most burlesques of Strange Interlude, Frankie and Johnny contortionists, and the later works of Roger Wolfe Kahn. These J. P. McEvoy does not snub.
The Unknown Warrior. Paul Raynal, who fought in French trenches, wrote the play and it was presented four years ago at the Comédie Français amid the indignant growls of old men. Since then it has been played all over Europe, to great cheers in Germany, and the approval of Bernard Shaw in London. Last week Charles Hopkins, who now has a small theatre of his own in which to produce the plays he likes, unveiled it for Manhattan.
The universal respect for the play abroad contrasted with the reactions which it induced in Manhattan theatre-goers. Something was the matter with the performance; partly, it seemed, the acting, partly the direction. A French soldier returns home on leave; his fiancée, who has been living at his father's home, no longer loves the soldier but she conceals this fact until after she has spent the night with him. In the morning, the soldier's father berates his son for a seduction; whereat the soldier berates in his father selfish and truculent senescence which so blatantly permits the young to die.
The three characters are intended as symbols and the play is a fiercely lyrical analysis of horror. But, last week, it sounded vapid and declamatory, and after a few performances closed.