American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969 by Gerald Bordman; Oxford US, 1996

Like O'Neill three weeks earlier, Philip Barry turned to religion in his latest opus, The Joyous Season (129-34, Belasco), and quickly went down to defeat. John Anderson of the Evening Journal , almost echoing Brown on O'Neill, branded the drama "close to Mr. Barry's worst," observing that the writer "has taken leave of his good humor, his sense of proportion, and his peculiar felicities of technique." Barry had written the play in hopes of luring Maude Adams back to the stage but, when she balked, cast Lillian Gish in the leading role. Thus the Gish sisters were performing, albeit briefly, a few minutes' walk from one another. After a sixteen-year absence, Sister Christina, a nun, revisits her wealthy Irish family in Boston. She has come to choose between her late father's farm and his posh city home. But she finds her numerous siblings and in-laws in disarray and spiritually bankrupt. So she uses the Christmas season to rejuvenate the family as best she can.

Even George Abbott met with rejection when he revised and staged Lawrence Hazard and Richard Flournoy's Ladies' Money (11-1-34, Ethel Barrymore). Boris Aronson's double-decked setting showed the dingy hallway and two rooms on each of two floors on a 46th Street brownstone converted into a boardinghouse. Two former vaudevillians ( Hal K. Dawson and Eric Linden) and an out-of-work clerk ( Robert R. Sloan) are supported by their wives. A little excitement enters their lives because one of the rooms is occupied by a crook ( Jerome Cowan), who has gotten the landlady's daughter in trouble and is waiting to receive his share of the money from a kidnapping. While the police come looking for him, he is stabbed to death by the clerk, who mistakenly believes he was having an affair with his wife. A tipsy old biddy totters down the hall, gapes at the dying man, and says to him, "You can't take it, huh?" Still another plot concerned a gambler's attempt to raise money to treat his ailing wife. With her former leading man receiving glowing notices for his work a block or two away, Eva Le Gallienne also won kudos for her revival of Edmond Rostand L'Aiglon at the Broadhurst on the 3rd. Clemence Dane provided a fresh translation. No less than Ethel Barrymore assumed the subordinate role of Marie-Louise. In late 1900 Americans had been given the opportunity to see both Maude Adams and Sarah Bernhardt in the trouser role of Napoleon's ill-fated young son, and there were many still alive who could make comparisons. Granting that Bernhardt was in a class by herself, Adams was recalled as bringing more charm and tragic warmth to the part, while Le Gallienne's inherently taut masculinity made the doomed lad more genuinely believable.

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