Show y 11w TIlE PLAY The piece which is on the boards at the Salt Lake Theatre is one of an already overburdened class and one of a class that is not of a high order and in which there can never be the best of acting for the reason that such pieces do not furnish furn-ish any occnsion for it The plot is somewhat i some-what older than sin itself and is of such a nature that an adept at playwriting should turn out about two a week with an extra on Sunday What is this plot I It is this A young rake leads a young girl astray and abandons her to the world and when she comes back to the town from which she went she finds her lover and betrayer and with a few words of kindness he awakens her oldlove for him and induces her to tell a lie to the young woman whom he seeks in marriage that he may get some few hundred pounds The lie accomplishes the purpose for which it was told and the villain marries the virtuous girl and the virtuous girl has a baby which dies I which must have been a good thing for the baby for the characters in the play are not fit to have charge of a baby In one particular this wonderful play the Wages of Sin or the Sin of Wages as one young boy called it when asked what this affecting piece was nor is the boy a communist or a dynamiter either departs from the beaten track and makes the clergyman a man of honor and not a disgrace to his cloth as is usual in such pieces and this is a merit The piece is long tedious and torturing and to help it in its more touching and tender parts it has low soft music such as the swan is said to sing when she floats down to death It is a very lame copy of the Silver King a play of none too much merit itself The reason for the success of such pieces is that in the place of the passions of the heart having play in great actions which arouse the soul of man and make men seem for a while almost gods there is introduced low appetite and common intrigue and they take that which is so common in life as a foundation that it is branded as a crime of so low an order that it disgusts the mind and is revolting to the feelings In such pieces the soul never plays apart a-part and there is nothing in them which stirs thought and induces reflection For the quiet allabsorbing passion which consumes the soul we have loud ranting and brutal murder The force of the play should be in the thought and not in the situations For the development of a thought and the carrying of it into action without sensational scenes and stage auxiliaries aux-iliaries the classic idea of the unities was best suited and the play founded the unities put to the supreme test the power of the actors The classic idea was suited to a single passion but only in the romantic school have many and conflicting passions full play I and complete development To the romantic i ro-mantic school belonged Shakespeare Beaumont and Fletcher Ford Massin gej and others whose names shed a lus tre over the English stage In France it was otherwise and Corneille Racine and Moliere were of the classic school but when in 1830 Victor Hugo introduced the theories of the romantic school into France they were badly received and for many years were frowned down But the great writers of either school knew that it was in the deeper regions of the heart that the elements of a great drama lay and not in startling situations and common com-mon betrayals Their productions were art while such productions as the Wages of Sin are artifice They were born of genius such as these latter seem to have been born of necessity and long labor Such plays can never bring back the glory of the stage nor produce such actors as Garrick and Macready Booth and Irving ing and Salvini nor such actresses as Mrs Siddons Rachel Bernhardt and others It is better to have no plays than poor plays |