Page:The Pacific Monthly volume 17.djvu/362

 DRAMA

A Group of New Plays

Novelties of the New York Stage

By William Winter

MONG recent new plays performed in New York that bid fair to be conveyed through the country and shown in various cities, the most conspicuous are "The New York Idea," by Mr. Langdon Mitchell; "The Rose of the Rancho," by Mr. R, W. Tully and Mr. David Belasco. and "The Man of the Hour," by Mr. George Broadhurst. The first of these, produced by Mrs. Fiske, relates to marriage and divorce; the second, produced by Mr. Belasco, illustrates the iniquitous sequestration of land in California, after the Mexican War; the third portrays and rebukes the wickedness of "graft" in American civic politics. Another, but somewhat less interesting and less effective play, is "The Daughters of Men," writtten by Mr. Charles Klein and produced by Mr. Daniel Frohman; this involves the stormy theme of labor and capital. Each drama contains a more or less trivial love story. The old and right fashion in play-making was to tell a story in action, necessarily implicating characters, and to allow the spectator to deduce the moral for himself. The present drift is towards discussion of popular topics and insistence on practical "lessons." Mr. Mitchell's play is a farcical exposition of some of the remotely possible consequences of loose views, and still more

loose practice, as to the marriage relation. Cynthia Karslake, brilliantly impersonated by Mrs. Fiske, has obtained a divorce from her husband, on the frivolous ground of incompatibility of mind and temper; and she has become betrothed to Judge Philip Filimore, who has also obtained a divorce, on the same ground. John Karslake, the divorced husband of Cynthia, and Vida Filimore, the divorced wife of the Judge, are attracted towards each other, or seem to be so, and Cynthia, who all the time really loves John Karslake, becomes resent- fully jealous, and, at a critical moment, when the clergyman has actually opened his book to read the marriage service, frus- trates her own intended wedding, in order to prevent the supposititious one of her for- mer husband; and, later, in a neat scene of equivoke and sentiment, they are reconciled and reunited — discovery having been made that the divorce granted to Cynthia was illegal. Situations of a merrily ridiculous order are contrived by bringing those di- vorced persons together, in a semi-social way, and by complicating their affairs with the precipitate amatory proceeding of a volatile, sentimental, impossible Englishman, Sir Wilfred Cates-Darby — acted so as to be made almost credible by Mr. George Arliss — who offers marriage to eaeh of the ladies in turn, and eventually weds Mrs. Filimore. The play lias been discussed as