The Kelly Play

THE KELLY PLAY GEORGE KELLY BEGAN HIS CAREER in the early twenties when monochromatic realism moved onto the American stage. It was the realistic play that seized his imagination, and he has never once, in a career that reached upwards of forty-five years, ventured beyond its narrow confines. This is singular. In Kelly's heyday, throughout the twenties, American drama was a straw to every European wind that had blown and invited novelty and imitation. Other dramatistsAnderson and O'Neill, for example-who assayed the realistic play often deserted it because of its banality. The usual complaint was that literal realism stifled invention and yielded only surface impressions , like a camera. Kelly had a mind of his own which unfavorable reviews and failure at the box-office could not daunt. He consistently refused to bow to hostile reviewers-too few of them "have an eye for the social scene and a nose for essences," he once wrote-or to adjust his theater to a money grab. On the vaudeville stage where the demand was for farce and hearth sentiment he presented sketches as early as 1912 that "had a certain idea" and bite to them, and though the realistic play was his model on the so-called legitimate stage, he did not scruple to depart from the conventions and tendencies associated with it. He adapted it to his own end which meant borrowing its form, la piece bien faite, and abandoning it as a vehicle for the "portrayal of a painful or sordid story." Neither did he use it as a weapon to attack society for man's injustice to man. Kelly's people belong to the masses, to middle-class suburbia, but the life he captures is not bleeding. And to say that he directly concerned himself with social issues is not true. It is true that what John Gassner has called "the idea of environment " in dramatic realism is strong in the Kelly play, but hardly one of his plays argues that he presented "environment as a conditioning element and as a reality to be reckoned with, opposed, or changed by the individual."l Unlike most realists in the theater Kelly had no deep concern with social forces. Not only did he not write social-attack comedy, he also ignored certain themes which comedy has appropriated to its end. 1 John Gassner, Form and ldea in Modern Theatre (New York, 1956), p. 19. 245 246 MODERN DRAMA December The three plays which show Kelly coming nearest to treating social problems are The Torch-bearers (1923), Philip Goes Forth (1931), and Can Two Walk Together (1949), still in manuscript. The first, a farce-comedy, has for its theme the expose of the Little Theatre movement in the second decade of the century. The movement covered the whole of the nation, but Kelly did not suggest that its birth was owing to any coalition of social forces as Kenneth Macgowan did when he wrote the history of the movement, nor did Kelly shift, in keeping with the tendency of his day, "ethical responsibility ... from the individual and place it upon the broad shoulders of society." The absurdities committed in the name of art were the responsibility of those who committed them. Behind them was vanity or the hunger for applause. The subject of his ridicule is the vain, affected incompetents who make fools of themselves and crow about it. The attack is upon individual failings. In Philip Goes Forth the theme is the "mad going forth to New York or abroad to take up writing or painting or music...." Kelly did not charge society with setting up false values to mislead those who could not discriminate and thus fell victims to them. The brunt of his attack was made upon the individual for his failure to discriminate , for displaying those weaknesses in character which made him easy prey to flattery. In 1921, ten years before Kelly brought out his play, Owen Davis, in a domestic comedy, Detour, had the artist Dana remark, apropos of a young girl's ambition to go forth to New York and paint, that New York is full of them (would-be artists] breaking their...