PULITZER PLAY ATTESTS JUDGES' ACUMEN

The attitude of audience or reviewer at a Pulitzer prize play is bound to be unusually critical. The mere fact that the play has been singled out from many others for the honor makes those who go to see it inclined to inquire closely into what justification the play presents for the judges' decision. To the audience which saw the opening night in Boston at the Arlington Theater of Paul Green's "In Abraham's Bosom," however, there was little doubt but that this play fully merited some such honor as the Pulitzer award it received last winter.

Perhaps the chief elements in this work which give it a claim to eminence among contemporary dramatic productions are its striking individuality and its thoroughly consistent theme of inevitable tragedy. Added to these elements is an unusual realism in the delineation of the minor characters, all of which, by the way, are played with great native ability by their negro interpreters.

The play starts back in slavery days, a few years before the Civil War had brought about the legal emancipation of the colored race. The central theme, in which the action of the whole play is centered with more than usual intensity, is built around the life of a mulatto--a champion of the negro cause who is doomed to increasing disappointment and failure because his aspirations and his pride are out of all proportion to his abilities and his environment. The blood of the old colonnel, his natural father, makes him unwilling to submit to the indignities attendant on the negro's position in society, and his desire for enlightenment leads him to neglect a means of livelihood with the consequence that his family endures poverty and suffering and he earns for himself the cordial hatred of the whites wherever he goes. The final tragedy is striking and effective, leading through the stages of discouragement, unjust injury, a murder of desperation; and finally insanity to the sudden and merciless reprisal discharged through the rifles of the whites.

Except for Colonel McCranie, in which part Rufus Hill is everything that a Southern colonel ought to be, the cast is composed entirely of negro actors who accentuate the distinctive quality of the play. Thomas Moseley fills the difficult role of Abraham, the ill-starred hero of the piece, with credit, while the minor characters introduced as back-ground or as comic relief are so natural and at times so amusing that it is difficult to find any point in which improvement might be suggested.