HARVARD NIGHT AT SHUBERT

Last night many members of the Dramatic Club accepted the invitation of the Shubert Theatre to Mr. Knoblauch's play. "The Faun" is an unusual piece of work--unusually original in conception and unusually successful in execution. The comedy is genuinely amusing and the "teaching" of the play sanely convincing. Barring a little uncertainty in some of the characterization and an inevitable sense of incongruity when the Faun first appears, the play is a genuine success for those who attend the theatre to think as well as to laugh and to enjoy as well as applaud.

Lord Stonbury, who is the centre of an artificial social group, is just about to commit suicide partly from financial losses and partly from what appears to be chronic ennui when the Faun appears. Led by a desire to know what men are like, the Faun has come to England from a convenient Mediterranean country, and agrees to give Lord Stonbury tips on the horse-races provided that the Lord will introduce him into society. The first act closes on the rather humorous attempts of the Faun to adopt the dress and manners of conventional society.

Once among men, the Faun brings about all manner of changes by preaching the gospel of naturalism and free self-expression. In the second act he brings together two lovers who had been separated by a difference in social rank, and reawakens the idea of love in a converted suffragette by a genuinely Werther - thunderstorm - Klopstock method. Little happens in the third act except the completion of the two incipient romances and the final return of the Faun to the realm of nature.

The play is unusually well mounted--the thunderstorm and the sunrise deserve much credit. Mr. Faversham makes the Faun singularly attractive and entertaining and at the same time sensible and convincing. A less capable actor would make his speeches on free self-expression and unsatisfied affection seem anarchistic or worse. But Mr. Faversham's Faun is sane even while he is radical. Altogether the play is a delight to those who have a thinking interest in the theatre, and a credit to Mr. Faversham, Mr. Knoblauch and what has been called the "school of Harvard dramatists.