DRAMATIC CLUB ONCE MORE IS SUCCESSFUL

The following pre-review of "Mr. Paraclete," whose premiere in Brattle Hall is scheduled for 8.15 o'clock, was written especially for the Crimson by H. W. L. Dana '03, Lecturer on Literature at the Boston Trade Union College and at the School for Social Research in New York.

The particular play that the Harvard Dramatic Club are to present to us is one of Evreinov's latest dramas in which he merges together his various kaleidoscopic theories and at the same time emerges from them into something else. References in various English sources to a play by Evreinov called "The Main Thing", "The Most Important Thing", "The Chief Point", "The Chief", "The Quintessence", "What They Thought They Were", and now "Mr. Paraclete" prove all refer to one and the same play. The translation made by William L. Laurence '12, that is to be used in the performance of the Dramatic Club, has the merit of not sounding too much like. By Americanizing the play to a certain extent, or rather de-Russianizing it, he has helped to bring out the fact that its appeal is not local but universal.

If one wanted to go into an exegesis of its inner meaning, in to the "deep stuff", one might show that the "Main Thing" referred to by the title is the idea that illusion is as necessary in life itself as in the theatre, that illusion on the stage of life is even more enduring than on the stage of the playhouse, that illusion is "the main thing". "The Paraclete" referred to by the other title, is the eternal spirit who runs this show place called life and who seeing that men instinctively prefer pleasant lies to unpleasant truths, is a comforter to his people by providing them with the deceptions which will make them happy.

The Paraclete Plays Many Parts

The Paraclete in his time plays many parts. Like the famous Italian lightning change actor. Fregolu whose name he takes, he can shift at will from Gypsy Fortune-Teller to American Theatrical-Manager, from the brazen trigamist to the tender agent of phonograph records, from Capuchin Monk to Harlequin himself in the latest of his thousand and one Harlequinades. Such sudden shifts will offer a splendid opportunity for the versatile acting of Eduardo Sanchez '26, the President of the Harvard Dramatic Club.

This Paraclete in his role as theatrical manager enlists certain actors to play with him in his theatre of life and to bring by their acting some medium of happiness into the drab lives of a group of typical human beings gathered in a boarding house. Evreinov does not have his boarders completely transformed as Jerome K. Jerome did in his more sentimental "Passing of the Third Floor Back"; nor does he have them so quickly return to their misery as does the stern Gorki in his "Lower Depths."

Rather he plays upon the subtle confusion of what is reality and what is make-believe with a lightness of touch and yet a depth of penetration which remind us of that philosopher of relativity who wrote "Six Characters in Search of an Author". "The Living Mask", and "Each in His Own Way." If Pirandello is the Philosopher who has turned dramatist. Evreinov in this play is the showman who has become philosopher. Yet he still remains the show man. He knows that "We hear more with our eyes than with our ears".

Once more Brattle Hall these last few nights has been seething like all Bedlam let loose during the rehearsals for another fantastic and most un-Canta-brigian drama. Once more out of the chaos of undergraduate acting the pa- tience of Mr. Edward Massey '15, is succeeding in bringing forth some sort of dramatic cosmos in our abandoned New England drama-farm. Once more the Harvard Dramatic Club is about to offer to the University an opportunity for a little education in modern drama and thus help to fill that aching void--the dramatic desire under the academic elms.

This time these theatrical rum-runners are going to smuggle into our dry dramaturgic desert some strong stuff from Russia and give us for once a draught of the newer Russian vintage. Heretofore most of us have had a chance to taste Russian drama only through the beautiful but already somewhat old-fashioned and dusty museum pieces of the Moscow Art Theatre and the "twilight realism" that comes from the lower depths of Gorki's subterranean cellar or from the cherished charm of Chekhov's cherry orchard. Now at last we have a whack at a play by the most active leader in the revolt against all this realism, by that dare-devil of the Russian drama Nicolai Nicolaevich Evreinov--or Yevreynoff, if that spelling gives you more of the thrill of the exotic and esoteric.

In place of Stanislavski's love of local color, the heavy Russian atmosphere so thick you can cut it with a knife, Evreinov tries to give us an international, a universal theatre that will appeal alike to all manners and races of men. In place of the realistic this Nicolai Nicolaevich would give us, the theatre frankly theatrical.

Symbols of Sexy Saxophone Missing

Now there has been a deal of unnecessary mystification, much of it "bunk" about this "theatre theatrical" about "the theatre of the soul" and "the souls of the theatre", about Monodrama and Melodrama, about Impressionism and Expressionism, about Physico-psychology and Psycho-analysis, about all the clashing symbols of the sexy saxophone. "Lampy" is justified in his jests about those followers of the Dramatic Club who take all this jargon too seriously. The fact is Evreinov himself preaches that nothing in life is to be taken seriously. That is his cardinal principle. His play is none of these "-isms"--or all of them, as you wish. You can take them or leave them. We need not then be too much alarmed when Professor Leo Wiener bids us to make no truce with this "symbolist Salomeist harliquin-theatrical Evreinov", the "jumping-jack" that talks like a man. Nor need we be too much bewildered when his biographer, Kamienski, tells us. "Evreinov is a blood race horse of the Steppes unexpectedly tangoing with cows!"

For those who do not care a fig for his philosophy, then, there is plenty of good "theatre", plenty even of perpetual slap-stick farce in the scene in the reception room of the Fortune Teller, in the scene at the dress rehearsal in the theatre, in the hilarious dinner table scene in the hilarious dinner table scene in the boarding house and in the uproarious final carnival. The former director of the "Gay Theatre for Grown-Up Children" and of the so-called "Cracked Looking Glass" set the style for the free theatre which Meyer hold and others have carried on in Soviet Russia, and though he has himself shaken the dust of Leningrad and Moscow from his feet and wanders an exile through the Caucasus and in Paris, Evreinov still knows how to keep us amused in the same fanciful way. Evreinov, the musician who had for his music master Rimski-Korsakov, can still play fantastically upon every mood. Like the Spanish dramatist, Benavente, he had followed the circus in his youth and still knows how to give his audience circuses as well as bread. The slendor boy who at the age of thirteen had performed as an equillbrist in the little Russian village circus had grown up into the man of forty-six who still holds our attention fixed as he delicately keeps his balance between the real and the make-believe. Up to the last he keeps us in suspense, guessing upon which side his play will fall.

In this play about players, we see the point of view of the dramatist who feels that "every human being is an actor in his daily life", that a "will to the theatre", a "will to play" is behind everything: religion, revolution, crime. For Evreinov the theatrical and the real are irrevocably intertwined: "the actor is the spectator and the spectator actor". If in the hectic rehearsals now going on in Brattle Hall, it seems at times uncertain whether Mr. Massey is trying to play the piece as realism or as fantasy, that very ambiguity is perhaps in keeping with the border line spirit of Evreinov himself for whom life is the theatre and the theatre life