The Beggar and the King looks at first like a pleasant absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities.  The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him.  Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil.  Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority.  And yet, just as of old, not only kings, but all others who attempt dictatorship and the playing of providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to rebellion.  Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of the curtain.

Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a family tradition is a descendant on his mother’s side of John Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father’s of the executioner of Charles I of England.  His writings include Maracca, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical sketches.

George Middleton:  TIDES

Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems which are not easy to solve.  And he does not try to give ready-made solutions.  He merely shows us how various people have tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed.  Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these plays appear in the lists following. Tides is about a man who has supported an unpopular theory.  Nothing is said about whether his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution.  But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal.  The fable is similar to that of Ibsen’s The League of Youth, but the telling here is straighter and clearer.  William White’s self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it.  “Haven’t you sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means:  a failure within oneself?” she comments wisely.  An effective contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly abandoned his father’s theories in the face of new realities as he sees them.

Eugene O’Neill:  ILE

Eugene O’Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and dramatist, has been associated for several years with the Provincetown Players.  This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once tethered!  In 1919 Mr. O’Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the most important American play of the year.