The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
First class laughter
By Florence Fisher Parry
I used to think, when I was a drama critic, how nice it would be if I could wait to write my review of a play until all of its local audience had seen it. Then my readers would be participating in what I was writing about it, instead of merely reading about something they had not yet seen themselves.
Indeed, if the coming attraction were not so importunate about Advance Publicity, I can think of nothing nicer than to fill my space, each Sunday, with observations about the Nixon attraction just departed.
The same holds true of books. What value reading a review of a novel one has not yet read, compared with the satisfaction of sharing, with a writer (disagreeing with, for that matter), his opinion?
Late last week I went to see “The Late George Apley.” I had seen it in New York last year, and ever since had placed it first on my list of Best Plays of the Year. But it took a second seeing to cast into bronze, as it were, the clay mold of my first enjoyment.
I am prepared to say, now, that to me, “The Late George Apley” surpasses in content and execution “Life with Father” or any other recent play about American manners and thar the performance of Leo G. Carroll is as fine as any I have seen a perfectly carved cameo of a Gentleman.
Caricature
The play brought back to me the memory of my first reading of the novel. Its author, John P. Marquand, presented Mr. Apley so genuinely, so artlessly, that at first I had the feeling that I was remiss in not instantly identifying the gentleman as an actual figure in Boston’s contemporary history. And in the same way Mr. Carroll gives us the sense of having known Mr. Apley as one might have known Justice Holmes or Senator Lodge.
The remarkable thing about Mr. Carroll’s performance is that although the text of the play gently satirizes Mr. Apley, he never appears ridiculous but maintains such dignity and gentility, that although we laugh at him, our laughter is touched with affection and rue – rue that we have been so quick to exchange so much that was valuable for the skirmish of today… We are amused at Mr. Apley, oh yes; but we are not making fun of him when we laugh any more than we could make fun of virtue or honor – or gentility.
He is dead now – he has passed from the American scene. He has become outmoded. But we remember him with tenderness, his weaknesses and absurdities become quaint traits to us; his prejudices show up as Character, and his faults as virtues we would like to repossess…
The theater was full to overflowing – every box was full, and the balconies as well, and it was nice to look out over the audience into the faces of so very many NICE PEOPLE, and hear their well-bred laughter and evidence of GOOD TASTE in their every response.
Good breeding
And I could not help comparing this audience with many we have had at ill-bred shows, when the laughter was noisy and raucous and vulgar and the cause of the laughter was lewdness and trash.
We have a word, a word much misused, and often bandied about as a word of derision. It is the word well-bred. It is a word to which, I think, we can afford to pay respect, and restore to our every-day vocabulary. It has a deep literal meaning. Doctors and scientists and men deep in research are coming more and more to realize that the forces of heredity play their inexorable part in the shaping of human behavior, and are bred in a man; and that physical and social differences are not artificially contrived but owe their variables to a heredity as vide and bottomless as the restless yet eternal sea.
Growth… stature… longevity, the color of eyes… the shape of features… these are but the outer testimony of differences which will forever Take Charge of humankind. They have nothing to do with This-or-That side of the railroad tracks, with wealth or poverty with social programs or legislative enactments.
Obscurely we know this, and our efforts to ignore, by-pass or conquer it will never cease, and will someday, perhaps, smash the chromosomes even as we have smashed the atom!
Meantime we have with us the well-bred and the ill-bred; those of taste and those of insensitivity; those who are possessed of gentility and those who are vulgar. And so long as this is so there will be Lines Drawn; not the insular lines drawn by “The Late George Apley.” God rest his gentleman’s soul – but Lines – by no means impassable, but THERE.
What was Sir Philip Sidney’s definition of a gentleman? “High-erected thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy.” I kept thinking of that, somehow, as I watched “The Late George Apley” move through the loving sequences of Mr. Marquand’s play.