THEATER CHRONICLE
who has been for too many years in harness to the rOle of the English
Gentleman to deviate from his eternal and international character.
The mistaken commercialism of the Guild has not deprived the
theater of a good play.
To Quito and Back
was never that. What has
been lost, or at least obscured, is a kind of curious case-history written
by the patient himself. Mr. Hecht is a veteran exhibitionist, and this is
perhaps his fullest confession. Here he states his symptoms often and
earnestly. The weakness of the play is that it cries for diagnosis. The plot
has to do with Alexander Sterns, who arrives in Ecuador on a rather
dismal elopement, and gets embroiled in a revolution for which he
eventually dies. Thematically, it is a study in irresolution. The hero, who
describes himself as "a second-hand Hamlet with a hollow heart and a
woodpecker mind," for two acts engages in vacillation, amorous and
political. He can love neither a woman nor a cause truly, no matter how
desperately he desires to do so. In all branches of experience he is ir-
revocably a tourist, and his most poignant cry is "If I could only care!"
His heroic death, which (to Mr. Hecht's mind) is his final salvation, is
admittedly the product of a mood, whose impermanency he recognizes
even while yielding to it.
The melodramatic absurdity of the play lies in the Hamlet com-
parison and its implications. The playwright assumes that his hero's ir-
resolution is of a tragic order, while, as a matter of fact, it is comico-
pathetic. It is not, as Mr. Hecht believes, the irresolution of a man who
is able to see all sides of a question; it is the impotence of a man who
is afraid of making a fool of himself. The play, indeed, is a small, un-
dignified monument of social and intellectual terror. The see-sawings of
the hero are a mere objectification of the nervousness of the author. Mr.
Hecht, it would appear, has been converted, or frightened by intellectual
fashion into giving lip-service to radicalism. Yet this radicalism he does
not dare face squarely in the drawing-rooms of New York or the studios
of Hollywood. He must transport it and himself (in a somewhat flattering
disguise) to a comic-opera Ecuador, where revolutionary generals are
just-too-pricelessly-funny, Emperor Jones Negroes are commissars, and
the working class is represented by a sentimental servant girl who sym-
pathizes with the communists but knows her place just the same. Only in
a baroque and slightly goofy setting is communism accessible to Mr.
Hecht. Even there humor must be regularly applied as an antiseptic to
idealism. Throughout the play, Mr. Hecht's Sense of Humor keeps pop-
ping up like a grisly jack-in-the-box whenever he feels that eloquence
may have betrayed him into
gaucherie.
Even his relentless self-revelation
showsitself to be a form of insurance, a peace-offering to the perspicaci-
ous; and his agonized sincerity must be rated as the final, most vulgar
sham.
The temperament of Mr. Maxwell Anderson is antipodal to Mr.
Hecht's. If Mr. Hecht has converted face-saving into a minor literary
art, Mr. Anderson has built a career on incaution.
The Star-Wagon
at the
Empire, while not one of Mr. Anderson's major efforts, is nevertheless
very characteristic of him. Once again he has been inspired by a lofty
theme, and once again the mediocrity of his talent has reduced it to
inconsequentiality. Here the theme is quite as ambitious as ever, but the
play is more homespun, more trivial. There were forebodings of
The
Star-Wagon
in
Winterset,
in the philosophical musings of the rabbi:
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