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Show ' SIX GIRLIE HEROINES IN AS MANY PLAYS ON BROADWAY. By FRANKLIN FILES. New York, Dec. 30. The actress born to look ingenuous and trained to be ingenious in mock un-sophistication, un-sophistication, has an advantage over a far better actress of more years and pounds. Audiences do dote on girlies in dramatic plays as fondly as in frivolity shows. Six of them are heroines just now in plays along Broadway. I have told you about Marguerite Clark as a roguish little bogus mother and Edith Talliaferro as a naive rustic maiden. Now I will introduce you to Edith Luck-ett Luck-ett and Dorothy Parker, strangers of that same typo, and presently will remind you of the familiar Annie Russell and Jessie Busley. In the new "Drifting," Edith Luckett is at the first the most knowing bride that ever was brought from the west by a miner millionaire. Ostensibly she is twenty, in behavior she is not over fourteen, four-teen, and in intellect she is infantile, l don't know whether Edith is like that partly through clever simulation, or because it is her own personality. per-sonality. Anyway, at the last she is wayward enough to quit her middle aged, humdrum, indulgent indul-gent husband and run away with a smart-set young rounder. For she has taken one supper's course of tuition in social laxity leading to depravity. The play is placed altogether in this bride's drawing room at Newport. The husband has no liking for our imitation of foreign aristocracy, but is willing to pay the cost of putting the girl of his wedlock into it, although he would rather have her devote herself to domesticity and motherhood. So he hires an influential matron a widow by divorce, di-vorce, not by death to place Edith in the inner circle of Newport's utmost smartness. This chap-eronic chap-eronic promoter tells the protege that she must get rid of her rusticity right off. So we see the girl choke on her first cocktail, but acquire a taste for strong drink, get sickened by a cigarette, but develop into a willing smoker, and advance from a maidenly vocabulary to glibly profane diction. The promoter, having tutored Edith out of her social ignorance, undertakes next to rid her of innocence. For the woman is crafty. She has squandered her fortune, run into debt, and needs more money than she is getting for sponsoring the western bride. Might she not get the millionaire for her own husband if she could but rid him of his present wife? She sets a degenerate but rich and rakish rounder to qualify Edith for a divorcee. Edith sees that married flirtation is deemed smart in the Newport set. So she lets the rounder fool with her, and the trustful husband believes she is amusing herself without serious misbehaviour until One night she is seized, hugged and kissed by the rounder. She doesn't like it especially; nor does she mind it as an incident in her smart J progress; and her husband, who catches her at it, wouldn't raise a row, but that he finds in her hand the rounder's check for two thousand dollars. The money is to be a loan to the promoter, but the husband believes it is payment to his wife, and as he has been extremely liberal with her, he regards her as an ingrate as well as worse. So he will get a divorce if he can. The promoter will supply false evidence gladly. And the wife? Oh, she will elope with the rounder. Finally, though, Edith is proved innocent of adultery and the husband takes her back to the west. Now, if Clyde Fitil were alive to take that story of "Drifting" to any American manager, he could get $5,000 for an option on the resultant play, and rich royalties might come of its graphic depiction of smart-set behavior. But Preston Gibson, Gib-son, known only for several ludicrous dramas, had to write out the play full-length to be read and declined. However, he is very wealthy, and his new piece is under public ridicule. Mr. Gibson is a gentleman of liberal culture, theatrical famil- iarlty and thorough knowledge of Newport ways. Why need his composition be like a schoolboy's? How could he but, on second thought, why not? For so many of us convince ourselves that we can do work of the kind we want to. Why abuse Mr. Gibson? And why not pity Edith Luckett forgetting forget-ting In wrong? Gentle Annie Russell, who won't grow old, and can't get out of ingenuous acting Into intense emotionalism emo-tionalism as she aches to is the immaculate maiden again in "The Imposter." She may find solace, however In being a fraud during most of the new play really, and reasonably mistaken for something much more degraded. In "The Imposter," Impos-ter," as in "Drifting," the girl is hugged and kissed suddenly unawares. May I Interject a question? Are you affected, and if so how, by the off-stage relations of persons sentimentally complicated onstage? on-stage? Does it hurt the fiction for you If the lovers are husband and wife In fact? Oswald Yorke brought Annie Russell into his room at the Hotel Savoy, London. You know that, if it were actual, the register in the office would contain the line: "Oswald Yorke and wife." But In the play she was a maiden out of a job as a singer, out of a bed because an unpaid landlady has ejected her, and out of food because her purse is out of coin. At nightfall of a wintry day, cold and hungry, footsore and heartsick, Annie could hardly totter along the Strand. Oswald looked at her pitingly. She asked him to lend her a little money. He was convinced that she was no vicious creature. He warmed, fed and further comforted her with a gold sovereign. One of the solaces was brandy, which soon qualifies her as an imposter. Not that one nip of alcohol vitiated the girl's virtue, but that the man took several, and his desire de-sire changed from polite kindness to gross sensuality. sensu-ality. He seized and kissed her. Thereat she threw his coin at him and started to go back into the street. Now if you saw that, would you think it absurd in Annie Russell Yorke to make a fuss at being tousled fondly by Oswald Yorke, or would you put their real conjugality out of your mind, and regard them as a libertine assaulting an unprotected un-protected girl? Awaiting your answer let's stick to the comedy. The open door lets in a fashionable woman of the man's acquaintance. Some explanation must be I given instantly. He blurts out: "Permit me to in- r troduce my wife's sister." The woman greets the stranger warmly. Other friends of the man enter. They insist that his bogus sister-in-law shall go home with them to lodge. She refuses positively; but can't tell who she really Is without exposing to scandal the man who warmed and fed her, even though he turned lnsulter afterwards. She declines de-clines and protests, but dares not explain; and at length, with the thought of a night's bed in comfort com-fort against misery in the streets, she is tempted into the imposture. This would be a play of facetious impropriety if it had been written in French for Parisians; but L Michael Morton and Leonard Merrick have made It in English for Annie Russell, and it contains no other lascivity than the kissing assault at the outset. The role of the impromptu imposter is in accord with the personal charm of the actress. The action, beginning in quiet fun, develops emotionalism emo-tionalism within in her scope. The adventure leads to her denunciation as a fraud by a man whose love engendered by her week's stay in the deceived household turns to as much of revulsion as the amiable Charles Richman is able to express. ex-press. However, after she has been punished far more than her offense deserves, she is headed for happiness in his arms. Jessie Busley Is like Annie Russell in juvenile delicacy of face and form, a voice that sounds childish when she wants it to, and many years of practice In youthful mannerism. Jessie is so well adapted to the German prlnce's-college sweetheart in "Old Heidelberg," as the play is revived at the New Theatre, that the audience trios to single her out for special approval, but no one is allowed to respond alone to a call on that stage. You may have seen her only In one or another of those eccentric roles that managers like to utilize her mimetic knack in, You should see her with her hair hanging girlishly down the back of a simple ' white frock, while she is in happy cahoots awhile with her royal lover, and then pitifully resigned to inevitable separation. If this were her debut, she would get a raise in salary and perhaps be lifted to the height of the stars. Along with "Pomander Walk," which Louis N. Parker brings to New York for production prior to London, comes his young daughter Do ithy to make her stage debut. Her first part is i 1 English maiden of a hundred years ago, educated in France, and mingling quaintly some Gallic accents, shrugs and pretty tricks of coquetry with much more of Anglo-Saxon honesty. An earl's son comes !$ boating along the Thames to where she lives with her father, a retired admiral, and the young pair's progress in love is a part of Parker's play. Dorothy is sweet, gentle and agreeably ingenuous. Some plays have plots worse than worthless from overwrought originality, others are plotted so faintly that they are too weak to be of any account, ac-count, and here is "Pomander Walk" written, so the author declares, plotlessly altogether and on purpose. Parker named his play for Sothern " "Change Alley" after a money mart of hustle and bustle, but this new piece Is a barely formulated showing of inconsequential things done by the dwellers in six secluded houses. They are an assortment as-sortment of distinctly English characters and an all English company has been brought here to delineate de-lineate them rightly. Their names would mean nothing to you. The title of "Pomander Walk" made its first audience wonder what it meant, but their curiosity wasn't held in uspense a minute after the one unchanged place was seen. Six mansions in miniature, min-iature, built exactly alike in the reign of Queen Anne, faced the Thames in a crescent. Each had I a tiny front yard fenced and gated from a graveled promenade. At the widest part of the clear space was a big oak on the green with a bench circling. A summer house overhung the river's edgg. It was accessible only at one end by a pathway for persons afoot. It had been called a walk because it was not a drive. The residents of Pomander Walk are far and away out of Bloomsbury fashion, yet so exclusive a community among themselves that, when strangers strang-ers stroll into the suburban reserve, oi come ashore from boats, they are warned to be polite or quit quickly. These neighbors are congenial among themselves, though, excepting that gossip tends toward scandal once in a while, and there is some hating along with the loving. One householder house-holder seems like an old acquaintance to those who knew the old fisherman in "Evangeline," who never spoke a word, nor caught a fish until the play was almost over. One of the six houses is occupied by a retired naval officer who fishes with persistent persist-ent patience in the Thames, but doesn't land his first trout until the curtain is ready to fall. Somewhat more enur. ss n? are the two young women who have as a lodger a man both desire to marry. They are willing be shall choose, but he likes both so much tJ it he can't bear to take one and leave the other; so finally they draw lots for him, the understanding being that if the loser survive sur-vive the winner, she shall become his second wife. Another household of many girls is tortured be tween hope that a baby almost due will be a boy and fear that it won't; but the issue is happily masculine. A widow and her spinster daughter have had grievous disappointments in love, but retain re-tain ample ardor for sweethearting, and are jealous of each other until there is a suitor for each. The most nearly romantic couple of the lovers ;et at odds through a misunderstanding, and are set right by the clergyman of the small community, whose motive as a peacemaker is to make matches and so get wedding jobs for himself. His efforts at coupling lovers results finally in five weddings. So the outlook for Pomander Walk is that it will soon be too small for an increased population. |
