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Show HOW BROADWAY TAKES A WESTERN CRITICISM. . ;.. Observation has shown that good, acting and good plays of the normal kind- are appreciated everywhere. Shakespeare, for instance,' well represented, rep-resented, inspires as high appreciation in the cruder localities of the unconventional west as in the effete east, but the deeper of the modem plays apparently count for much less in the west than in the east. An interesting, if not an amusing, proof of this is found in the appended criticism of Ibsen's "Ghosts," in the Morning Appeal of Carson City, Nevada: "Ibsen's Norwegian play of 'Ghosts,' with one setting of scenery, no music and three knocks with a club on the floor to raise the curtain, was presented last evening. The play is certainly a moral hair raiser and the stuffing is knocked out of the Decalogue at every turn. f- "Mrs. Alving, the leading lady, who keeps her chin high in the air, has married a moralMnon-strosity moralMnon-strosity in the shape of a spavin id rake and hides it from the world. She wears a pleasant smile and gives society the glad hand and finally lets go all holds when her husband gets gay with the hired girl and gives an old tar 300- plunks to marry her and stand the responsibility for the expected ex-pected population. "Oswald, the mother's only boy, is sent to Paris to paint views for marines and takes kindly to the gay life of the capital, where the joy of living liv-ing is the rage and families are raised in a section sec-tion where a printer running a job office solely on marriage certificates would hit the poorhouse with a dull thud. Regina, the result of Mr. Alvirig's attentions to the hired girl, also works in the family and falls in love with the painter boy on his return from Paris. They vote country life too slow and plan to go to Paris and start a family. The doting dot-ing mother gives her consent, and Pastor Man-ders, Man-ders, who is throwing fits all through the play, has a spasm. The boy, on being informed that the girl of his choice is his half sister, throws another, an-other, his mamma having also thrown a few in the other act. Engstrand, who runs a sort of soldiers' and sailors' canteen, sets fire to an orphanage, and the boy, who has inherited a sort of mayonnaise dressing brain from his awful dad, tears about the stage a spell, breaks some furniture and upsets up-sets the wine. He finally takes Rough on Rats and dies a gibbering idiot, with bis mother slobbering slob-bering over him and trying to figure out in her own mind that he was merely drunk and disorderly. dis-orderly. "The players handled the sticky mess as well as could be expected, all being excellent actors. As a sermon on the law of heredity the play is great, but after seeing it we are glad to announce that Haverly's Minstrels will relieve the Ibsen gloom next Monday night." Of course there is less actual criticism in the foregoing than of a relation of the story characteristic charac-teristic of the plainness of speech in Nevada, yet between the lines one may read just what the critic of the Morning Appeal, who is assumed to represent the thought of his locality with reference refer-ence to the drama, thinks of the play as a dramatic dra-matic work. His ideas would, of course, be conclusive con-clusive were there not other points of view. But in a rough-and-ready way a sort of Nevada manner he is a wit, and wit is appreciated here as it is everywhere. Dramatic Mirror. |