Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/476



HIS (mid-August) is the morte saison of the theatre. It is the period when there are a great many openings and almost nothing that is worth seeing. It is the period when theatres are easy to rent and when they are consequently used for trying out all sorts of dubious and abortive productions with limited means at their disposal. It is also the period when the dramatic critics, after the theatrical intermission of the summer, return with appetites refreshed and appreciation revived. They enjoy an indifferent play more in August than they do a good one in May. If you do not believe this, read Mr Heywood Broun, who is under the impression that he has, since his vacation, witnessed a dazzling succession of splendid plays all distinguished by the most brilliant acting. But then August is the deadest, sultriest, stupidest, most prosaic month of the whole year and, in the dull stagnation of the town, one is perhaps inclined to be extravagantly grateful for the faintest phosphoresence of wit or the meagrest twitch of emotional animation.—I have, to be sure, seen two quite amusing and very well acted comedies—, by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, and, by Vincent Lawrence—but there is nothing particularly interesting to say about them; and I hope that the readers of will forgive me if I speak to them for a few moments instead about the comedies of the Restoration.

Once or twice every year in New York there is a solemn and pretentious revival of Sheridan. This year we had both and. But why wouldn't it be a good plan, for a change, to revive Wycherley or Congreve instead? The comedy of the Restoration was much more interesting artistically (if a little less easy to put over dramatically) than the comedy of the late eighteenth century. Sheridan himself admits in the tameness of the comedy of his own day, debauched by the importation from France of the comédie larmoyante, and what is most vivid and amusing in Sheridan is surely the part that comes nearest to the vein of Wycherley and Congreve. But Sheridan, in keeping English comedy wholesome in order not to offend the taste