Dramatic Club's Fall Production

The fifth production by the Dramatic Club will be presented in Brattle Hall on December 12 and 13, and in Jordan Hall, Boston, on December 16. The play, a farce-comedy in three acts called "The Progress of Mrs. Alexander," was written by Miss L. R. Standwood, a Radcliffe student. Mr. Francis Powell, who was eight years stage director with Sothern and with Sothern and Marlowe, and who was with Madame Nazimova last year, has consented to act as coach. Tickets at $1.50 and $1 can be purchased from H. R. Bowser '12, Randolph 55. On and after next Monday they will be on sale at Herrick's Ticket Agency and at the Co-operative. By a special clubbing agreement the Dramatic Club and the Hasty Pudding Club have placed on sale passes at $1.75 which will admit the bearers to any unoccupied seat in the second performance of the fall of 1910 and the spring of 1911 productions of the Dramatic Club in Brattle Hall, and to any unoccupied seat in the balcony of Jordan Hall for the Hasty Pudding play in the spring of 1911.

Criticism of Play.

Mr. H. T. Parker '90, dramatic critic of the Transcript, has written for the CRIMSON the following criticism of "The Progress of Mrs. Alexander.":

"The Progress of Mrs. Alexander" differs in three particulars from the plays that the Dramatic Club has acted hitherto. It is a light and satirical comedy of the present hour; it has its local interest and entertainment, since the longest and the most amusing of the three acts passes in a Boston drawing room at the meeting of a Boston club; and it has been written by a student of Radcliffe. It will be the first long comedy and the first play by a woman that the club has acted. It is, besides, a piece actually written by a student in the University here and now. It was a part of Miss Stanwood's work in English 47; it was one of the plays submitted in the recent competition for the Craig Prize; and as it was plainly unsuited to such a theatre as the Castle Square, it passed readily and happily to the Dramatic Club.

The comedy runs in three acts: one in a rising middle-western city of families that would also rise socially; one in Newport at midsummer among the socially ascending and ascended; and one in Boston among those who already dwell in a higher social aether. In all three scenes the central figure is Mrs. Alexander Smith--hyphenated after the first act--who wishes to mount socially and who deserves her progress. At Breezeboro, where the action begins, she is capable of handling simultaneously a perturbed party of women at bridge and a high-placed matron of New York who has dropped down upon her. At Newport she has climbed to those higher social plateaus where dwell susceptible Russian princes, envious rivals--and troublesome servants. At Boston she has reached the heights of Beacon Hill and goes to and fro in a society that has only first names, that speaks the language of super-refinement and precision; and that is deeply and equally solicitous over the squirrels on the Common, the arts in Copley Square, and the milk or the babies in the slums--it is not quite sure which. Arrived there, Mrs. Alexander-Smith has supped full of social intrigue and conquest and the curtain falls upon her turning her likable and amusing self again.

With Mrs. Smith go a little company of lightly sketched, diversified, and amusing personages: her husband who provides the money for this social pilgrimage and takes the right of free comment upon it for his compensation; her secretaries, a well contrasted Boston youth of the aether and a western girl of less rarified atmosphere; the Russian prince, exotic and amorous, that she gathers into her train; women of Breezeboro, women of Newport, women of Boston--aesthetic, intellectual, philanthropic, or "merely" social; and finally, entertaining "specimens" of the "younger set" of society in Boston and of the University in Cambridge. The comedy is brightest, most observant, and most entertaining in the act that assembles playfully and good-naturedly what may be called its Boston collection. A thread or two of intrigue and deceit holds together its picturing of character and manners; the stages of Mrs. Smith's progress give it its movement; and seldom does Miss Stanwood lose her light hand. Such a satirical comedy of social "actualities," it is safe to say, no dramatic club in an American college has dared to attempt.