PERCY MACKAYE VISITOR Appalachian Play Reviews

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 09: BIOGRAPHY – Visitors
Reviews of Appalachian Plays by
Percy MacKaye, PMSS visitor 1921

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TAGS: Percy MacKaye, theater, poetic drama, reviews of Percy MacKaye’s plays, This Fine-Pretty World by Percy MacKaye, Kentucky mountaineer dialect, lists of casts, folk-drama, Old John Shell, Hell-Bent Fer Heaven by Hatcher Hughes

TRANSCRIPTIONS: PERCY MACKAYE VISITOR Appalachian Play Reviews
[Publishers Unknown]

Broun review of “This Fine-Pretty World”

001

THE WORLD: THURS…[truncated]

It Seems to Me
By Heywood Broun

Justice Ford spoke last night before the Young Folk’s League of Ohab Zedek and from the advance copies of his address we are struck by the following:

“Many nations have risen, flourished and died since the creation. The downfall of every one of them was presaged by growing sexual laxity. No country in the world has so high a standard of personal conduct in this respect as our own. The foundation stones of America’s greatness were laid on the bedrock of sound morality. Nowhere in all the world has womanhood been so exalted and reverenced as in the United States. Our country has won for itself abroad the proud title of ‘The Paradise of Women.’ ”
———-
This seems to us an excellent example of the imperfection of Justice Ford’s mind. As a man of legal training he ought to feel that no statement should be made unless evidence is available to confirm it. Manifestly, this is impossible in regard to his present message. He is merely talking. Or at best, he is stating an opinion when he says, “Nowhere in all the world has womanhood been so exalted and reverenced as in the United States.” To the best of our knowledge, there are no precise figures as to the quantity and quality of reverence for women in various quarters of the globe.

But when Mr. Ford goes on to accept for this country the title “The Paradise of Women,” he is dealing with a claim to which statistics may, in a measure, be applied. We will be pleased to tell Justice Ford some things he does not know, so that he may avoid making silly speeches in future.

In America, as elsewhere, maternity remains the chief occupation of women. And how does the woman of America fare in the task of child-bearing in comparison with her sisters across the seas? The answer is very indifferently indeed. According to the figure issued by the United States Children’s Bureau September, 1923, America stands twentieth on the 1 in the proportion of women who die in childbirth. This seems a good deal less than paradise.
———-
As to the reasons for the high death rate America, the fallible factors of interpretation a… opinion must enter in. But it seems to us significant that the countries with the lowest maternal death rates are Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. And these are countries which allow frank treatment of sex matters in print. Education of children in the facts of life is a commonplace in these countries. Birth-control information is not banned. Motherhood is voluntary.
———-
It may be true, as Justice Ford says, that America exalts and reverences women above the estate of women throughout the world. But it seems to us a situation a little less than satisfactory. The mother in France, the mother in Japan, the mother in Uruguay has a better chance for life in her great battle than the mother in America. If this condition is the result of reverence, and exaltation, it may well be that many American mothers would prefer a little less reverence and a good deal more light.
———-

002 [DISREGARD]

003

When Percy MacKaye went into the remote regions of Kentucky last year in search of dramatic material he seemingly came upon a community which offered material as rich as that which presented itself to Synge on the western coast of Ireland. He found a mountain people into whose casual everyday tongue the idiom of the Bible had been largely incorporated. It was talk with a tang-rich, poetic, warm and violent.

And in writing his play “This Fine-Pretty World,” Mr. MacKaye has captured the color and violence of his mountaineers. As a poet his ear has not been at fault, but his dramatic judgment has been a little less than consistently shrewd. His devotion to fine-pretty sounds has resulted in a dialogue too intricate, too rich and too heavy for the theatre. The spectator must strain his attention for the meanings of words and cannot comfortably surrender himself to the current of happenings.

For our taste, a certain clipping and modification of outlandishness would help this interesting play, now to be seen at the Neighborhood Playhouse. But our cleavage with Mr. MacKaye goes a little deeper than this. In some manner which is difficult to define he has set down a primitive people on the stage and made them self-conscious. They are to some extent literary figures rather than persons. When MacKaye, the explorer, penetrated into their country, it may be that they showed off a little for his benefit. Certainly, the characters of the play seem a little more intent [on] pleasing and amusing their creator than in busying themselves with their own concerns.
———-
And yet, though we are a good deal less than enthusiastic about “This Fine-Pretty World,” it seems to us a definite step down the road which leads to substantial American drama. Here MacKaye is breaking new ground. His play is not related to last season’s success or something which went well the year before that. There is no touch of Times Square about it. The material is fresh and vital. It has not quite come to life when transported.

Review of “This Fine-Pretty World” by [unknown author]

[First column]

“Hit’s Shore A-prile” in a Play

THIS FINE-PRETTY WORLD. By Percy MacKaye, 197 pp. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.50.

TWO premises must be accepted by the reader (or spectator) of Percy MacKaye’s new play,”This Fine-Pretty World.” before any particular pleasure can be taken in it. As both of these premises appear to be impossible the drama, or tragi-comedy or farce, falls down lamentably. In the first place, one must accept a dialect that is patently built up by an author who is correct in everything except the general spirit of the matter. No one doubts that the Kentucky mountaineer dialect, in which “This Fine-Pretty World” is fashioned, is not the result of more or less study on Mr. MacKaye’s part. He went into the mountains and lived among these people for a short period of time, studied their habits and language and, in his own words: “I recorded them in penciled notes, which now comprise several typewritten volumes, which perhaps I may some day deposit in some library for reference.” It is upon these notes. the notes of an observer who has passed but a few months in the milieu which he attempts to translate into drama, that Mr. MacKaye bases the dialogue of his play. His phrases in themselves are no doubt correct; the archaic words, the compound adjectives, the ungrammatical picturesqueness, all these things he set down in those voluminous notes. But the general spirit of the dialogue is unreal. does not smack of actuality. It is as though a student attempted to write a play in Old English with the use of dictionaries. The writer is inclined to use in close juxtaposition all the unusual words, the surprising twists; in other words, too much color is no color at all. One speech by Beem Sprattling (who, by the way, is the second premise that must be accepted by the reader) will show how Mr. MacKaye composes:

What is hit when a man kicks out his fire-log, and quits of his cabin smoke, and he goes crickin’ his neck to the mornin’ star, jist to be out under yan green timber, when the forest of leaves gits their beautifulest kiver; and the thaw-dew drippin’ him, and the…

[Second column]

…whip-a-will she’s whippin’ her last; for the day-dawn comes dawzlin’; and a wrenny-bird hollers in the high gap, and a Larty[?]-bird evens him in the low gap; and the tides of the branch bumblin’ in the bottom yanside the sheep blawtin’; and the British-lady flies — her wings red-fire in the green; and the ground like Joseph’s coat buttoned up with flower-buds; and hit’s shore A-prile.

One doubts a speech like this. One feels that the Kentucky mountaineers are not such a race of natural poets. Mr. MacKaye is attempting to do for the Kentucky mountain dialect approximately what Synge did for the patois of the Aran Islands; but for some reason it does not come off as well. It is a little too exotic, too emphasized; the writer is too anxious to make poetry of it.

The second premise which must be accepted by the tolerant reader is the characterization of Beem Sprattling. Beem might be described as a conscienceless mystic, a tender lover of nature and life in the world, constantly apostrophizing the world about him and unduly confident in his own chosen state. Yet he exhibits the utmost cruelty of nature himself, a cruelty partially the result of an unwarranted egotism and a complete absence of conscience. He lends himself willingly to the scheme of old Gilly Maggot who desires to get “shet” of his wife so that he may take up with Goldy Shoop, a buxom mountain girl, even going so far as to get up in a public assembly and “noratin'” to the effect that Gilly’s wife has been his mistress. All of this he does in order to get a shoat that possesses a dream-bone. Beem’s machinations to destroy the honor of Mag Maggot and so make it possible for old Gilly to divorce her are complicated by the wiles of Roosh Maggot, Gilly’s nephew, who loves Goldy and eventually carries her off. Roosh is also anxious to become the heir of old Gilly and to clear the way he attempts the destruction of Gilly’s only living child, a baby which he sends off in the sack to Beem who thinks that he has the shoat in it.

[Third column]

This situation is absolutely impossible and all semblance of reality drops from the play when the baby in the sack becomes the central situation.

For two acts the reader is in doubt as to whether or not “This Fine-Pretty World” is to be a tragedy or not. Facing one is the unhappiness and the plaguing of Mag Maggot, the sinister schemes of Old Gilly, the callous flirting of Goldy, who transfers her charms alternately from Roosh to Gilly, and the conscienceless scheming of Beem Sprattling. Then, with the third act, an entire change of atmosphere occurs. The action here is a ludicrous burlesque of a mountain trial in which Beem is the defendant on a charge of defaming Mag Maggot. The usual tobacco-cuds and absurd parallels of actual judicial procedure are introduced and with them all the seriousness of the situation vanishes. The reader is faced with impossibilities here, with something which could never happen. Beem is eventually sentenced to the penitentiary for six months by a Justice of the Peace, a sentence which must, of course, be imposed by the judge of a higher court.

Mr. MacKaye, in his preface to the play, illuminates the reader regarding his desire to do a series of plays which shall preserve the regional characteristics of various odd corners of this country. In “Yankee Fantasies,” a book of one-act plays published some years ago, he presented the old New England. Here he presents the Kentucky mountaineers. What will come next is problematical, although he hints that he is at work on more plays about these same mountaineers.

It is to be hoped that if he is desirous of actually preserving various aspects of America he will be more reasonable in his plot structure, less bizarre and more suggestive of reality in his dialogue. Something seems to be lacking in his dramaturgic intuitions and one is suspicious that it is composed in almost equal parts of overly developed instinct for propaganda and a literary sense that often carries the writer away.

Review of “This Fine-Pretty World” by [unknown author]

From Late Editions of Yesterday’s Time … [truncated]

MACKAYE’S PLAY FORCEFUL
“This Fine, Pretty World” De … [truncated]
With Kentucky Mountaineers

THIS FINE-PRETTY WORLD, a com … in three acts by Percy MacKaye. At … Neighborhood Playhouse.

[List of characters and cast]

Percy Mackaye has written a play varying interest in “This Fine, Pretty World”– a study of manners, customs and language deep in the Kentucky mountains, a bit of folklore with certain minor digressions by the author. Mackaye, emerging from a lengthy study of Kentucky mountaineers, came to the theatre with an interesting story to tell, but he has not been quite content just to tell it. He has tried to give it a touch of cosmic significance and has thereby weakened it just a little as drama.

It is, however, a play with a good deal of sturdy force, and last night’s audience at the Neighborhood Playhouse received it with unmistakable enthusiasm. Mr. Mackaye has not spared his mountaineers in the writing — they are revealed as an ignorant, superstitious and immoral lot. With all his attempt to get down to the heart of them, however, Mr. Mackaye never quite dissipates the feeling that he is putting his people through their paces rather than permitting them to do their own trotting. There is the constant suggestion that his folk are being shown under glass.

The language of the play, undoubtedly faithfully mirrored, is picturesque in the extreme. It requires a few minute to get the hang of it, but a good deal of amusement can be got out of it thereafter. The piece is concerned with the attempt of one Gilly Maggot to “git shet of” his wife, and of his ready acceptance of a friend’s suggestion that he should swear to lies regarding her virtue. The first act is brisk and spirited; the second contains a good deal that is repetitious, but the final act, laid in a rustic courthouse, is vastly entertaining.

It requires a stretch of the imagination to believe that even these Kentucky mountaineers would have written “Jedge” in chalk across the judge’s bench, but Mr. Mackaye has been down in Kentucky and probably he has the documents to prove it. Either way, however, it is a comic trial that compares favorably with that in “The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet,” which held the stage of the Neighborhood just ahead of it.

The performance is generally good, with chief honors going to the women in the cast. There is more than a hint of mountain breeze in the performance of Joanna Roos and other women of the hills are excellently played by Aileen MacMahon and Esther Mitchell. The leading male roles are more than capably discharged by Perry Ivins, E. J. Ballantine, Albert Carroll and John F. Roche. The play has been well staged, the ensemble scenes being handled with particular skill.

Review of “This Fine-Pretty World” by [unknown author]

This Fine Pretty World. With the avowed intention of preserving behind the translucent glass of the Theatre some of their race idiosyncrasies, Percy Mackaye took up his temporary abode among the primitive peoples of the Kentucky mountains. The results of his explorations were revealed last week in a sinewy tragedy within the secluded precincts of the Neighborhood Playhouse. Critics cavilled slightly at his tendency to inject cosmic significance into his characters’ activities. Otherwise they judged the play an important contribution to the season’s drama.

The story deals with the efforts of a dirty, bearded mountaineer to rid himself of his querulous wife and seven children in favor of a red-haired mountain flapper. He bribes his witless nephew to swear to certain indiscretions of the wife to render her divorceable.

New York Tribune: “A tragedy . . . that does not leave one overly depressed.”

Review of Plays by Percy MacKaye by [unknown author]

LETTERS ~ AND ~ ART
LITERATURE DRAMA MUSIC FINE-ARTS EDUCATION CULTURE

POETIC DRAMA IN KENTUCKY’S MOUNTAINS

SIGNS OF THE RISING FOLK-DRAMA have been multiplying on our stage this season, and it is the South which is the chief contributor. “Sun Up” and “The Shame Woman” have perhaps done no more than aim to present a truthful and poignant picture of primitive life. But Mr. Percy MacKaye has gone a step further and linked his dramatic interest with his poetic and linguistic. He has taken the remote people of the Kentucky mountains as his material, and has tried to realize them in their language, thought, tales, songs and superstitions. This he regards as “the loam of an authentic subsoil for the growth of a native Theater of Poetry”; and from his researches, gained through a journey on horseback to these regions, he hopes to produce a group of plays for the theater which he conceives will “become a conservation of spiritual wild nature, with its precious diversities of man — his distinctive species of soul-life, his unspoiled heritages of thought and untamed imagination.” Mr. MacKaye reports that what chiefly fascinated him in his experiences was the “vividly imagined thought” of the native, and “its expression in a speech of amazing freshness and plasticity on the part of those who had been least affected by the outer world language literacy.” In The Survey he sets forth for us some of the aspects of this ethnological mining:

“The mountain dialect exists, of course, in all stages of deterioration, and it is quite possible to visit many quarters where its distinctiveness is weak or negligible. But at its unspoiled best, it is still a speech splendidly racy in colloquial charm and power, and as admirably adapted to an indigenous literature as the Scotch or Irish, of which indeed it is a kind of American ‘mutation’ from a blending of those with ancient English stock. Especially its constructions — vitally responsive to the ebb and flow of spoken (not written) thought — are as sensitive to natural rhythms as the speech of the ear-trained audiences of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

“This language is a precious heritage of the mountaineer from a thousand years of folk-culture; yet so cramped is the standardized culture of the average normal school teacher (blissfully ignorant of the Elizabethans and Chaucer and ‘Beowulf,’ not to mention Burns and Synge) that the first admonishment of the mountain child — who has braved lonely miles of storm-swept trails, humbly to ‘crave school larnin’,’ is for him to ‘correct’ and shamefacedly disavow his own ancient mountain speech in favor of the ‘grammatical rules’ of a rubber-stamp education.

” ‘Yea, sir, hit war the first cold spell that come, right when the grapes is about all gone and the rest of the berry tribe, between the turnin’ of the weeds under and the dyin’ of food, and thar comes in a gang of jay- birds, and they fills the mind of the bird poetry.’

“There is a sentence I wrote down from the lips of an old mountaineer. How would the average normal school graduate ‘correct’ it by ‘grammatical rules’ in a ‘composition’? (Are the images and rhythms of elemental nature admissible to a ‘correct’ education?) Would the gracious charm of that old man’s speech raise an educated titter from the school-benches, where the new generation is being solicitously ‘civilized’?”

All poetry, declares Mr. MacKaye, is by its nature akin to illiteracy, “for its function is to quicken and perpetuate, through a long, colorful after-glow of memory, by the contemplation of which new lives of the tomorrow are touched and influenced.” Mr. MacKaye reports finding “the oldest man in the world”– old John Shell, of Big Laurel, reputed to be one hundred and thirty-three, whose eldest son was aged ninety. With such conservators, tradition has no chance to die:

“In direct touch with this long, living past, the mountain children are reared, most of the year, in the outdoor, all-round work of the soil, synthetic in its development of mind and body; and during the indoor months, they are intensively tutored in that unsurpassed college of oral imagination — the winter logfire: a college also of nobly simple good manners and gracious hospitality, where even in a one-room, windowless cabin, crowded with four generations — the stranger is always given a whole-souled welcome, in which the gentle voices and highbred demeanor of the children reflect the schooling of their elders.

“Here, in this university of the lighted ‘log-heap,’ over the department of Humorous Fantasy, in the region of Greasy Creek, there presided till recently for almost a century the genius of a Santa-Claus-Munchausen in the person of ‘Old Sol’ Shell (brother of the “oldest man’), whose oral annotations on the history and science of ‘The Pumping Sow,’ ‘The Inverted Lightning Stroke,’ ‘The Meat of a Snow-Ball,’ and other indigenous chronicles, have helped to graduate some scores of lesser disciples, with eyes equipped with telescopic lenses for the wonders of nature. “Here, in the departments of Music, Drama and Dance (all…

[Photograph: “THE AUTHOR AND HIS MODEL Mr. MacKaye, standing with hat and stick, is being shown over the ground in the Kentucky mountains, by a native he used as a character in his play, ‘This Fine-Pretty World.’ “]

[SUBSEQUENT PAGE(S) ARE MISSING]

Review of Hatcher Hughes’ “Hell-Bent Fer Heaven” by [author unknown], 1923

001

[Truncated]…ER 31, 1923.

‘Hell-Bent Fer Heaven’ Is Good
Amusing and Interesting Study of
Blue Ridge Folk Presented Here

HELL-BENT FER HEAVEN — An amusing and highly colored tale of the Blue Ridge, by Hatcher Hughes, presented by Mare Klaw, Inc., at special performance preceding a series of matinées.

THE CAST
David Hunt……Augustin Duncan
Meg Hunt………Clara Biandiek
Sid Hunt…………George Abbott
Rufe Pryor……….John F. Hamilton
Matt Hunt……….Burke Clarke
Andy Lowry……..Glenn Anders
Jude Lowry……….Margaret Borough

Whether New York playgoers prefer the seashore or not they will be obliged, apparently, to spend the season in the mountains. Playwrights and managers seem to have discovered that the Blue Ridge, the Kentucky Hills, and other picturesque highlands of the South are within commuting distance of the local theatres, and they are filling them, accordingly, with these so-called native Americans and their difficulties.

The latest arrival is “Hell-Bent fer Heaven,” by Hatcher Hughes, presented by Marc Klaw, Inc., at the Klaw Theatre, to an invited audience last night, preparatory to a series of special matinées. It is described by Mr. Hughes as “a high-spirited tale,” and nobody can take exception to this modest little tag. It is a high-spirited tale, but it also happens to be considerably more than that, for it is, at the same time, an adroit piece of melodrama, an effective study in religious fanaticism with enough good comedy to make up an entirely agreeable entertainment. It is consigned, supposedly, to the vicissitudes of special matinées because of the congestion in the theatres, but it deserves a better fate. If treated kindly and given a good house this play ought to entertain New York for a long time to come.

Mr. Hughes has selected discreetly from a wealth of material. His central character is a weak youth half mad with his religious conversion, who justifies his murderous and selfish actions on the theory that he is a divine instrument, working the will of God. He revives a long buried feud between two peaceable families in an attempt to frustrate intermarriage and secure the girl for himself. Falling this, he tries to drown the successful suitor by blasting a reservoir during a heavy rain, justifying each step by his crazy notion of religion.

Mr. Hughes has managed this colorful narrative with great effectiveness. It is well put together so that some very delicate movements work smoothly and without undue strain. The dialogue for the most part is rich and highly naturalistic, revealing skillful touches of characterization and understanding.

002

The players make the most of their opportunities. Mr. Hamilton as the fanatical young man was convincing in his mealy-mouthed, pussy-footing evil. He kept the part nicely balanced without overstepping the finely drawn line which separated it from grotesque and unbelievable absurdity. Mr. Duncan contributed another of his excellent studies of a fine old patriarch of the mountains and Mr. Anders was all that could be desired as a robustious, devil-may-care gentleman of the highlands whose magnificent unbelief was contrasted amusingly with the silliness of the fanatic. Mr. Abbott gave excellent account of himself as a simple, straightforward young mountaineer, a part so uncolored as to make acting in it especially difficult. Sheldon K. Veile provided a splendidly authentic set.

In response to the insistence of the audience Mr. Hughes made a short curtain speech, explaining that his limp was due to a similar attempt at a speaking when the play was tried out in Patchogue, where, he said, the fundamentalists seemed to be in a majority. It seems too bad that the matter was taken with such seriousness, because for all persons, fundamentalists or not, who like good intelligent entertainment, this piece provides it. — J.A.