176
PARTISAN R)EVIE:W
on the stage while the heroine fumbles in it, opens it or closes it, loses
it, finds it; the heroine's maid does not feel that it is safe to leave the
stage without telling her mistress that she has put her pocketbook in
the drawer. The maids in Mr. Kelly's plays have a kind of weight and
portentousness that does not derive from the plot, to which they make
no contribution. Their masters and mistresses dally with them in obsessive
conversation; offstage maids answering offstage telephones are greeted
ceremoniously by name ("Hello, Selina, this is Mrs. Espenshade") . They
are laden with gravity because they are the servants of the objects which
are the plays' gods; they tend the telephones, the tables, the cigarette
boxes, the suitcases; they know the time of day and carry in the inev–
itable glass of water, reverently, like a communion cup; they have
devoted their lives to the weather report and
the
evening news. Mr.
Kelly's heroines have come and gone; Ina Claire has succeeded Tallulah
Bankhead and Chrystal Herene; but the Irish maid, Miss Mary· Gildea,
who is acting in
The Fatal Weakness,
was answering the door
in
The
Torch-Bearers
in 1922, in
Craig's Wife
in 1925, in
Here Comes the
Bridegroom
in 1917, in
The Deep Mrs. Sykes
in 1945. Presumably, Mr.
Kelly, like his own matrons, "would not know what to do without her."
Early in Mr. Kelly's career, this pedantry of ceremonial and vacuous
busyness was related to the official subjects of his plays. In
The Show-Off,
the hero is a ritualistic greeter who lives on small talk, idle boasts, and
gratuitous lies; in
Craig's Wife,
the heroine is a house-proud woman who
lives through her furniture and will not let her husband smoke in the
parlor. Both of these people are mad; they are monsters in the Jonsonian
manner;
~
human trait has been carried in them to the point of inhu–
manity. But they have at any rate a consistency of character that respects
the conventions of the human personality; their personalities are over–
developed but intact. Mrs. Craig is
in
love with her house, but she is
not a house; Aubrey Piper is a compulsive stream of words, but he is
also a man who listens to them. In
The Deep Mrs. Sykes
and
The Fatal
Weakness,
however, character has become utterly disassociated, and it is
hard to say whether this is an advance or a regression. In these plays,
type with its simplicities disappears. One lady may be designated as
jealous or proud of her intuition, and the other as romantic, but these
traits are weak, stunted, undeveloped, like rudimentary organs of char–
acter that have not been able to complete their growth, or like vestigial
remains of some extinct race of beings that went by the name of hu–
manity. The personalities of these late heroines are fluctuating and dis–
continuous. With complexity comes a loss of stability. Emotion with
these characters is a kind of bird-mimicry of emotion; and, like amateur
actors, they cannot hold a pattern. Mrs. Sykes wobbles between jealousy,
masochism, and mediumistic vanity, while Mrs. Espenshade, who is
supposed to be a romantic nature, cannot remember for five minutes to
