THEATER CHRONICLE
175
the wife is jealous of the bride across the street, she is to play the leading
role in the amateur theatricals, she opens an anonymous letter which
tells her that her husband is being unfaithful to her with an osteopath
out near the Merrick Memorial, she reads in the paper that a man
her husband plays poker with on Willow Avenue has just been found
dead with his wife. The play continues. The widow from across the way
brings over a bunch of roses; the daughter, whose child goes to progres–
sive school, drops in to report a quarrel with her husband; a woman
friend calls and cannot make up her mind whether or not to dine at
the golf club ; the telephone keeps ringing; the maid fetches a glass of
water. Meanwhile, the plot moves forward: the husband asks his wife
for a divorce, or breaks an expensive ornament, or has a heart-attack
from seeing his wife on the stage. An event has happened, and the play–
goer, when the curtain drops on his first George Kelly play, may notice
nothing unusual, except that there has been rather a lot of stage business,
and that something about the story seems not quite resolved.
It takes a second or a third George Kelly play for the spectator to
perceive, with the horror he remembers from dreams, that the stage
business is everything. "Tell them to say something, Nelly," shrieks the
directress, Mrs. Pampinelli, in
The Torch-Bearers,
during a humiliating
pause in her production, when the amateur actors sit frozen on the
stage waiting for the prop fountain pen that nobody has remembered
to put on the desk. "Anything at all! Something about the weather!"
Mr. Kelly, as a playwright, has taken Mrs. Pampinelli's advice. The
George Kelly play is, in essence, a long ad-lib. Its subject is inanity.
Stage-time here, like life-time, is an interminable gap which must be
bridged by desperate conversational maneuvers, remarks about the wea–
ther, the time of day, vital statistics, golf scores, menus, clothes, train
schedules, people's addresses ("I don't know where all this rain is
coming from.... You can't tell, it might not be raining in Albany....
Aren't those roses lovely? ... I heard her telling Miss Austen she's got
over two hundred rose bushes in her garden.... 2214, that must be
out near the lake.... I think there's nothing in the world so exhausting
as train-riding.... Have you got the time?"). This gabble is the chorus
which speaks the meaning of the play; and like a chorus it has its pan–
tomimic expression in a compulsive dance of pocketbooks, pencils, fancy–
work, glasses of water, cigarettes, hats, timetables, and newspapers. The
pocketbook is the leader of this chorus. This "accessory," with its self–
possessed air of indefinable value, its bulging, ftappy, serviceable exterior,
and its obscene interior jumble of scraps and bits, is the prime repository
of concern here. The loss of one of these vital objects is the subject of
one of Mr. Kelly's early vaudeville plays; and though it never again
assumes such open thematic prominence, the heroine's pocketbook is
always resting on a lower shelf of the audience's mind. All action halts
