If there is any one foolproof generality to be evolved from the record of the Broadway theater season to date, it is that the cash customers will fight with almost the same grim and determined ferocity to avoid attending meaningful and significant plays that they will to achieve admission to the most fanciful and ephemeral escapist entertainment. With this unusual qualification: that the escapism be expressed with intelligence and presented for persons of adult sophistication and circumstances in life. Here is no ready market for farce of the Up in Mabel's Room genre, but audiences have packed to overflowing the two houses at which rich and rewarding revivals of Oscar Wilde are playing, while they gave the quickest sort of brusheroo to a conscientious revival of Yellow Jack and, as this is being written, are only barely supporting All Your Sons with the critics riding herd on their flanks and shouting rah and olé in the interest of a rather dreary evening for no better reason than that it represents what passes for “serious drama.”
All Your Sons, in point of fact, stands as an excellent example of the morbid and wholly improbable theatrics devoted to the pondering of moral values which enchants the vast majority of play-reviewers and whose plugging and incessant recommendation serve to discredit these aisle-seat custodians of the general taste. Not, in all fairness, that the reporters did not almost unanimously cheer and smash their hats for both Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, because they did, and in so doing showed both their good sense and their discretion. But it is a safe bet that many of them did it under inner protest and in the simple knowledge that not to applaud what so patently had taken the public fancy would make them superlatively ridiculous.
The truth of the matter is, of course, that the professional critic of the theater is a serious-minded and intellectually pretentious reporter who, if his first city editor hadn't assigned him to cover the opening performance of the Ben Greet Players at the local Oddfellows' Hall, would, ten to one, have become a labor reporter or otherwise concerned for significant and phony causes. It is only with reluctance that he lends the dignity of his qualified approbation to anything so frivolous and unsignificant as mere entertainment, an attitude toward the pleasures of the theater which he consistently maintains by the evolution of a wholly synthetic tradition that play-reviewers never applaud a performance by laughing or clapping for the actors and never, if they can avoid it, wear evening clothes, regarding formal dress as a sign of frivolous disposition and almost the equivalent of having a good time.
Charity will readily suggest that the occupation of being a play-reviewer is not in itself conducive to a merry outlook on life, and it is possible that being forced to view an annual succession of significant and meaningful plays may even nourish a corrupt and macabre taste. To the healthy disposition, this is certainly true of such plays as All Your Sons. Simply it is more the pity that persons of integrity; which the New York reviewers most assuredly are, and of taste and perception, which most of them are outside of the theater, should be possessed of the preposterous notion that any play mentioning world policy, no matter how stupid or bathetic its contriving, must per se be considered a fine thing, while a play concerning itself with good manners, agreeable conversation, and staffed with butlers is hardly worth their educated consideration. Year after year the box office cannot instruct them to the contrary.
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