In spite of Tolstoi, I fancy. For at certain moments of his highest creative being Tolstoi was so bitterly unreconciled to life, so hateful of humanity, that the common sights and sounds of men and women became offensive to him and he peopled his stage with horrors. The version of The Power of Darkness now produced is mercifully gentle; in its full brutality, with its mordant emphasis on every physical detail of cruelty, lust, and crime, the play is unbearable. Even in this version I find that the average human being's resentment is justified because the spiritual conflict and the spiritual victory are submerged in the tawdry plans and gruesome adventures of his people. The play must justify those hesitant speeches of Akim: "It is your soul that God wants," and, at the very end (the sense of the cry, if mot the precise words), "Here a man is confessing his soul, and you speak of drawing up an indictment." It was not an easy thing to do and Mr. Emanuel Reicher and the others of the Guild came near to success; but at times the purely dramatic values of the play, its physical power, quite overcame them. Especially this is true of Ida Rauh and Helen Westley and Arthur Hohl; least, of Frank Reicher. There is an appropriate word of praise for every member of the cast; it is not necessary to speak it here. In the way of permanent things Frank Reicher stands secure; and far more certain than any acting, the enduring beauty of Mr. Lee Simonson's scenery. The practitioners of the new art of stage settings are sometimes given to demand absolute praise or blame and to belittle the spectator's appreciation of the set in relation to the play. But perhaps Mr. Simonson will understand that it is meant as the highest praise and not as evasion to say of his sets that, surpassingly lovely as they were in themselves, they were finest because they helped to create the play as one of profound issues and not as a hot drama of the crime passionnel. Their simplicity, their depths, their clean perspectives, and their robust vigor, the rafters and the lights and the immeasurable health and fruitfulness of the grain are not technical devices or items in a decorative scheme; they are creative powers in the play, and here, as in The Faithful, Mr. Simonson's achievement has gone far beyond the work of his comrades.
The negative events of the season have been the absence of a review by Irving Berlin and of a play by and with George M. Cohan. Failing that, the truest piece of American work is Booth Tarkington's
