AFTERWORD
Mr. Remsen has honored me by an invita tion to write a footnote to MR. BUNT. I have heard the play read and seen it acted; but there has been, of course in the midst of its simultaneous production and publication - no copy available for bystanders to read; nor indeed, had there been, would there have been due time to read it—at least to read it aright, for the play demands and deserves a quiet and unhurried mind. So all that I can say is said from those two memories, of hearing it read and seeing it played.
When, a week or two before its production, the author read it to his producing staff and let me listen, no one who was present - even if, like myself, he had before known at first hand none of Mr. Remsen's plays, nor indeed any of his writings - could but recognize that here was some thing with a real reason for existence: the things said were things that mattered; they were mellow, they were radiant and wise, they were infinitely tender, and they were said with rapture.
Its dramatic qualities were harder to judge; but there seemed, perhaps, faults in the architecture, a lack of structural unity, almost, it might be, of organic growth in the form itself. Was there “story”, suspense, a plot that "held "? Were there acting values ? I, for one, could not tell. There was a rich humanity, I knew; there was marked creative power, I believed. Was there drama? I did not know.
At the first performance, many of these doubts were resolved. Maybe the inevitable changes which rehearsal brings accounted, in part at least, for the fact; but at all events there was clearly now a unified story, with plot, acting values and even, though in a lesser degree, suspense. That lovely “something” which I had heard read had become for me, quite definitely, a play. And if the category, as we know it, of “play” is not wide enough to include MR. BUNT, then so much the worse for the category.
The extraordinary charm of the production which MR. BUNT was given intensified this feel ing. First, there was the magic of that fairy glade which is Carmel's Forest Theater-the stillness of the great trees, the rare call of aa bird, the deep heart of night under the stars and near the sea; we came and we went by lantern light, and our voices and our feet fell gently on the pine needles and the quiet earth. Add to that spacious silence a simple beauty of staging and costume, delicate and unobtrusive lighting, sensi tive music from wind - instruments and strings, and above all the naive and spontaneous joy which children (of all ages) take in their own make -believe, and it is easy to tell why we sat, a hushed and enchanted audience, with the lump of sheer delight gulping in our throats for two unbroken hours. In the best sense of the word, it was an amateur performance: love lay in every moment of it; and it was an articulate and expres sive love with singularly few traces of that other quality so abhorrent to the artist, amateurishness.
To that evening of magic, only a heart dulled by worldliness to all the tender and brooding charm of wistfulness and naive beauty could have remained insensible. Maybe there is overmuch sentimentalism, maybe overmuch preaching, in MR. BUNT; I dare say; but unhappy are they who have not eyes to see the ripeness of threshed grain, nor ears to hear the moral order of the stars in heaven.
This footnote is written hurriedly, with the printing presses waiting for the final “signature”; that inevitably precludes any considered criticism of the play as such, and I have to content myself with half-evasive statements, philosophical rather than aesthetic. As a man of the theater, I would like to weigh this and to balance that, to discussfor instance-whether the play is, or should be, " Lu's tragedy" or "Jim's comedy". That, and all such criticism , is not possible here. But there is one opinion which every critic is bound to express, every critic at least who believes, as I believe, that a primary function of any work of art is to evoke a corresponding mood in the spectator. MR. BUNT, in performance especially, evokes and sustains such a mood, at all events for me, with mastery.
The particular mood of MR. BUNT is one of which our theater, like our life, today has des perate need. It is the mood of “Prunella” and of “Peter Pan”. By those plays, which in their own way are masterpieces, this play must be judged. It challenges the comparison, and it merits it.
Until it can be read in print and at leisure -and not then, likely enough - will one be able even to form an opinion as to whether or not it is " literature"; how importantt it may be as "drama” is, for this hurried but happy once, no concern of the critic; but that it is, for me, a thing of magic and of beauty, my own experience with it tells me. And for that, among much else, I am grateful to its author.
In this quiet place, with its few hundred resi dents (and its several thousand summer visitors) there are three non -commercial theaters-one of them an open-air theater that is fragrant, peaceful and lovely; another an interesting and typical “little theater"; the third the most beautiful and best equipped indoor theater of its size in the whole country. Some of us, who love the Theater greatly, believe that in America today, and especially on this Pacific Coast, a true dramatic Birth begins; a few of us dream that it may perhaps even come here, in this little town with its three theaters between the mountains and the sea. It is at least a happy augury that so delicate and kind a work of the human imagination as MR. BUNT should be the first in a series of projected publications of Carmel plays. May it have worthy successors. MAURICE BROWNE.
July 4, 1924.
The music used in the production of MR. BUNT was written especially for the play by FREDERICK PRESTON SEARCH