"PROMISED LAND" A SUCCESS

"The Promised Land," the first production of the recently founded Dramatic Club, impressed its audience at Brattle Hall last evening as an important and vigorous, though sombre, play, performed with almost professional ease and distinction; it presented a serious and worthy appeal.

Perhaps the first act of the play seems of lesser consequence and lower workmanship than the rest. So also the second, due perhaps to "cutting," seems not yet to have struck the right balance between the stories of Hartwell, the leader of his people, and Hartwell, the lover of a Christian. But the third and fourth acts bring the play to an eloquent and direct intensity which holds until the end.

Of the actors, the earliest to distinguish himself was H. G. Eisenstadt '12, who played to the life a naive peddler. Hartwell himself was taken by R. M. Middlemass '09, whose acting grew steadily better from beginning to end, a gentle, noble, and at every crisis finely impassioned figure. Miss Gragg in an uneven role gave through the last two acts so sincere a performance that the house broke into applause at her defiance of the Rabbi, and then at the last became physically uncomfortable over her anguish at Hartwell's well-acted deatn. Her appeals, her sobs, her despair, were surprisingly effective. It would be easy to go on commending: the solicitude of Gregov, as played by O. Lyding '09; the fervor of Ussishkof as acted by J. A. Eccles '10; the naturalness of Chayim in the hands of G. D. Marti '12, the sonorous vim of the Rabbi in the voice of D. Gardiner 2L.; and the pleasant unction of Sir James Wingate in the smile of E. A. Bemis '11; or, to amplify a specific word of praise for the three-cornered scene in the third act, so admirably played by Miss Gragg, Mr. Middlemass, and Mr. Gardiner. Mr. Davis, in his speech after the third act, did well to express especial acknowledgment of Mr. Wilfrid North's coaching. It was evident not only in the principals but in the many crowds. On the whole the acting, individual and concerted, was well above the standard of amateurs. This is all the more a matter for remark when one realizes that no more difficult task could imaginably have been set them than an interpretation of "The Promised Land." In comparison Shakspere would have been easy.

This leads again to consideration of the ambitious quality of the play. Its mood is the mood of poetic drama, but its matter is contemporary and actual. One is given at times a conviction that if a millionaire, instead of a practical but unmoneyed idealist were leading them, the Jews would follow as one man. So much of necessity has money meant to them. But then again one sees only the sublime doggedness of their one highest ideal-resisting compromise. The play in short sets one thinking, sets one contemplating a great ungathered people's fate as well at its own as at others' hands. Mr. Davis has proved himself behind certain crudities of technique, a playwright of power.