If you buy and .read these footnotes, you will even learn
that "Medicine has advanced further in the last fifty years
than in the preceding fifty centuries." Mr. Kingsley's foot-
notes are
required reading.
Some time ago, Mr. Kingsley contributed an article to
The
New York Times,
describing how and why he wrote
Dead
End.
If I recall that article correctly, it seems as if Mr.
Kingsley was wandering along the docks by the East River,
his mood philosophical. Seeing the urchins diving and swim-
ming, it somehow occurred to him that ours was a strabismic
civilization producing sarphodytes. This is the germ of the
play. Also, it occurred to Mr. Kingsley that the theatre
needed a return to realism. And so we can consider
Dead
End
as a realistic play, concerning a strabismic civilization
that produces sarphodytes.
All the,a'ction in this play occurs on a tenement street end-
ing in the river, and staliding next to a swanky, modern
apartment hotel. The play tells of the urchins diving and
swimming in the river, squabbling amongst themselves, steal-
ing; like the boys in Henry Roth's impressive first novel,
Call It Sleep,
they are savages in the midst of civilization.
The lives of the adults they see around them prefigure their
Revolution Is
a
Form
of
Necking
(Soak the Rich-Astor
Theatre.)-What
we Communists
thought was an inexorable law of capitalist development
toward monopoly has been demolished, in one industry at
least, by the dazzling emergence of an independent producer,
writer, director, financier, trail-blazer-that
veritable Jona-
than Swift, Miguel de Cervantes and Noel Coward all rolled
in two, that Lewis and Clark expedition of the intellect-
Hecht and MacArthur.
Sure and a far cry it is from the
days when young Ben and Charlie were huddled together
on the corn-shuck mattress of their bleak, .rudely furnished
shanty in New York, laying their plans to unsaddle the
philistine oligarchs of Warner Brothers and Metro-Gold-
wyn-Mayer,
stocking their minds with the bitter, bitter,
brilliant cynicism that was to captivate OLirhearts. Ajar cry
indeed from those early days of struggle to 1936, when the
na.mes of Coonskin Ben and Trapper Charlie burn a foot
high over the marquee of Broadway's Astor Theatre,
when
their smiling faces, set off by jaunty top hats, appear vastly
enlarged in the lobby over this incisive quatrain:
We're the gents that wrote the yarn
And here's what it's about:
Class ideas don't mean a thing
W hen Lave kicks them out.
The yarn! What a characteristic of true greatness thus
to describe that py~otechnic profusion of satire, socia! philoso-
phy and superb analysis of passion contained in
Soak the
Rich.
Acutely,
it is made to revolve about a lovable, har-
assed millionaire. His wife cheats and his stomach is bad, his
butlers bully him and his daughter is bored. It is all he can
do to remain wrily charming, for day in, day out radicals
are planting time-bombs in his path and boring from within
in the university he founded. To conceal their nature, they
26
ends. Thus, one of the characters is a famous and hunted
gangster whose school of experience has been the same street
and the same milieu as theirs. In Act Two, he is shot down
like a dog by G-Men.
In addition, there is a prig for an
adult hero, an unemployed architect, and he falls in love with
a gi,rl from the nearby apartment hotel.
Although
Dead En'd
is meant to be a play, it is actually a
spectacle. Whenever the juvenile actors occupy the center of
the stage, it is alive and exciting, and one cannot get too
much of them. Against the background of Mr. Geddes's
remarkably photographic set, one feels as if one is actually
watching East Side kids in the raw. However, when the kids
are in the background,
the play is merely tabloid eyewash;
and before it is finished, one is so harassingly bo.red with
sub-tabloid banalities, that one begins disregarding the play
and studies Mr. Geddes's set, counting the bricks he has so
realistically put into his tenement house. Every adult charac-
ter is rubber-stamped with Hollywood and the New York
Daily J1.1irror.
The love scenes are the final word in banality.
As a spectacle,
Dead End
is worth seeing because of the
juveniles and the set; as a play, it is even worse than
Men
in White.
JAMES T. FARRELL
shave their long hair, and their leader, Buzz Jones, makes
inflammatory speeches, to which they respond by chanting
"Kill Dean Philpotts, kill, kill, kill." To complicate matters,
persnickety daughter Bindy and Buzz fall in love with each
other, and Bindy renounces her father, calls him a parasite,
a worm living off a leaf, and she goes to live with Buzz
but Buzz wouldn't live with her because he is dedicated to
a cause, he wants to be a leader and the Russian men and
women leaders simply work side by side all day and all
night, no sex, see? When Bindy finds that Buzz is out to
dampen her ardor, she walks out on him and gets kidnaped by
the leader of another radical sect, and his name is Mooglia.
He ties her up in a chair but her fa.ther and three G-Men
save her and take her home. So meanwhile Buzz realizes
that he loves her more than he loves the theory of surplus
value, and he gives her a buzz, but all he gets is a toss of her
shapely but frigid shoulder.
Her scorned but lovable old dad (Walter Connolly) de-
cides that the only way to save Bindy from subversive Buzz
is to marry her off to a discarded but willing fiance, who
parenthetically wants to know what's up anyhow; and here
is where the audience is allowed a glimpse into the play's
subtly contrived machinery.
Subtly, subtly, the playboy is
told that the ceremony had better take place immediately, or
else he might never be able to take the honeymoon trip in
time to celebrate the cherry blossom season in the Orient.
So gradually on the night the engagement is to be announced,
Buzz arrives in front of the millionaire's hO;11ewith a mob
of his fellow-radicals,
yelling for the reinstatement of a Pro-
fessor Popper. They are led by a band paid for with the
money from Bindy's pawned bracelets.
At this point both the nerves and the seats of the audience
are on edge. They lean forward, expecting to see that palatial
residence razed, its revellers put to the bomb, but again
Hecht and MacArthur do the unexpected. The colleg-e boys,
after all, are wholesome lads with keen, young appetites.
While Buzz is being received inside, they get drunk on
MARCH,
1936
