The Theatre: New Plays: Oct. 18, 1926

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The Immortal Thief. Last season, Mr. Hampden revived Kennedy's The Servant In The House. This season he begins with Tom Barry's The Immortal Thief in a continued effort to reconcile once closely related religion and drama. Perhaps it is because Mr. Hampden's particular symbols of religious fervor are alien to modern audiences that his efforts fail to win popularity.

The Immortal Thief originates in the New Testament account of the crucifixion. In Walter Hampden, innately a scholar and a gentleman, it is difficult to see a tigerish outlaw of harsh Jerusalem. Yet there he is, leaping to good, plunging into evil, denying the gods, always thinking of them, a strange duality of ruthless passion and grand sacrifice. He breaks a fellow thief's legs, cuts off the hand of another, supposedly traitorous. To atone for his cruelty, he sacrifices himself to save a girl, unloved, who adores him. Salvation comes at the end in a fiercely realistic crucifixion tableau. It is all deeply sincere, beautifully staged. Claude Bragdon's sets and lighting effects startled the audience into frequent gasps of admiration. Yet to many the play seemed more of pulpit than of theatre.

The Jeweled Tree. Before Pogany's sets, an Egyptian fantasy unrolled itself out of Tut-Ankh-Amen vestments. Once upon a time Prince Rames sallied forth to possess himself of the fruit of the tree. And did. Authentic folklore it is, with talking alligators —scholarly, picturesque, but apparently not the thing to engross an audience.

Black Boy. Into the brutality of a prizefighter's camp strays a giant Negro, peaceable, with song in his heart. Paul Robeson, one-time (1918) all-American end, star basketball player, Phi Beta Kappa, of Rutgers College, more recently famed concert singer, enacts the role of the black boy. The white man's ways force him into the fight game. Swiftly the hungry straggler mounts to world championship, hangers-on, Fierce-Arrows, booze, kotowing, all the tinseled impedimenta. After two years of demoralizing opulence, double-crossed by his manager, disillusioned by the discovery that his idolized Irene is tinged with black blood like his own, he forsakes the devious paths of Harlem, seeks out the sunny slopes of California, wanders away again, a singing hobo.

The triteness of Jim Tally's plot, exaggerated coarseness of language, superficiality of dialogue, are more than offset by two redeeming features: the authentic note (struck most poignantly when Actor Robeson sings the spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child") of the Negro's inability to find himself in complicated mazes of the white world; and Mr. Robeson's personality. His organ-like voice croons, booms in husky, mellow tones filled with all the languor and ebullience of his naive race. In the third act he appears stripped to the buff—an Apollo in black marble, a sight for any sculptor. Across the footlights prejudice turns to admiration. Black Boy, with the debased morale of the U. S. Negro, can see no beauty in his own people. Even passion withers when his sweetheart is revealed a yellow girl. But Paul Robeson, personally, shines forth unashamedly black, true to the best of his own.