THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF PLAYGOER

Much heralded, and burdened with a host of favorable criticisms, "The Emperor Jones" comes to the Selwyn under auspices that would prove fatal to any but the most robust product. Over praise is the only complaint from which it suffers. When one goes to the theatre expecting to see "America's greatest drama," and to come away with hair on end, feeling like the proverbial jelly, it is just a little disappointing to receive only a moderate thrill, and to have the guilty suspicion either that your ideas of the greatest drama are all wrong, or that someone has exaggerated. Remarkable drama, artistic drama, "The Emperor Jones" assuredly is, and possibly also the greatest of its kind that America has yet produced--but that, after all, is a conservative assertion. Mr. O'Neill has succeeded in a difficult and ambitious task; he has traced in the character of a single negro his whole racial history, and the whole psychology of terror as well, Beyond that, he has skillfully developed an abandoned element of dramatic machinery--the monologue; and he has manipulated his material with an unusual power born of freedom.

If the play itself falls a trifle short of meriting its lavish praises, the same cannot be said for Charles Gilpin. There is only one character, to all intents and purposes, in the play; yet the stage never seems empty and the monologue avoids any suggestion of monotony. There is more time on the stage when nothing is being said than when there is speech, and it is in his silences that Gilpin does some of his best work--though his speech, too, is excellent, and his rich, musical voice is a delight in itself. His gradual degeneration from brazen self-assurance to abject terror proceeds by subtle and orderly degrees, and carries the audience along in cumulative terror. In the first act, a dialogue between the pullman-porter, emperor and Smithers, a while trader on his island empire, is all that makes up the action; yet in it the whole exposition is stealthily unfolded at the same time that the atmosphere of terror is being created. Beginning with the emperor's nocturnal fight, author and actor carry us through three scenes of steadily increasing intensity, each a step downward in the scale of the negro's character, and each culminating in a nerve-wracking climax.

The fourth scene is a welcome (though unintentional) lot-down. The next two again build terror, that ends in the shooting of the witch-doctor with the silver bullet which negro had intended to save for himself. The catastrophe is powerful in its contrasting mildness; the death of the emperor offstage, and the subsequent appearance of his body, verges dangerously on the anticlimactic. Perhaps it will sound like a plea of the sensational, but one cannot suppress a feeling that the play would end more effectively when the natives fire the fatal shots.

Each of the scones in the forest is perfectly timed, beautifully set, and complete in itself. It is regrettable that the imaginary ship's hold, one of the best scenes, completely falls to "get across" to a Boston audience. The ceaseless beat of the tom-tom is a diversion of remarkable assistance to the dramatist. The whole is not a pleasant afternoon's diversion, but with the single exception of "Liliom", Boston has had no play this year as well worth seeing.

"The Emperor Jones" is a short play--no audience could endure its intensity through three full acts. The program is filled out with a curtain-raiser, Susan Glaspell's "Suppressed Desires", a good-natured satire on the Freud-mania. It is full of humor, but on Tuesday night Boston's ponderous intellect was moved to laughter only twice