AMUSEMENTS.
[
Gustave
Frohman's
](n01193) company played "[
Lady Windermere's Fan
](n01192)" at [the Lansing](n00066) last night.
The company is very much better than most of those which bear Mr. Gus Frohman's
name. Indeed it is a company of very clever people. The cast is very nearly
the same as last season with the exception of [
Mr. Hammell
](n02201) and of [
Charles
Jehlinger
](n02202), who makes a much more elegant and dangerous [
Lord Darlington
](n02203) than did
[
Edward Emery.](n02441) Perhaps the strongest member of the company is [
Olive Oliver
](n02442), who
plays the complex role of [
Mrs. Erlynne
](n02443), the mother who never knew what
motherhood meant until she sees in her daughter the danger of her own sin and of
the same retribution. Miss Oliver simulates well the recklessness and the
occasional spasmodic and unstable bursts of feeling and remorse which belong to
women who can only learn to value love and purity after they have lost them;
the remorse which can suffer but cannot regenerate, which can atone for its
past by spasmodic heroism in a great crisis, but which cannot redeem its future.
She assumes well, too, that strained, hectic mirth, whose laugh is only a
futile mask for pain.
[
Miss
Laura Gilvry
](n02427) is in most, perhaps in all, respects just what [
Lady Windermere
](n02428)
should be. She is young enough to play it naturally and she has a beautiful
face, to which innocence and pride are always possible. Her poses are always
graceful and full of meaning. Her pride and anguish with her husband and her
abjectness with her lover, her loathing for her own love that she thinks wasted
and dishonored, seem the most real things in all that hopelessly artificial
play. She is just a little monotonous and somewhat too insipidly good at
times, but the part rather demands that.
[
Frank
Gilmore
](n02429)
[played a difficult part](n02430) with feeling and the proper English reserve.
[
Leona Clark
](n02431), as the [
Duchess
](n02444), was as clever and heartless and complacent as
ever, and [
Robert
Jenkins
](n02445) made a dear old boy of [
tuffy
](n02446), [to whom everything was
easily "explained."](n02432)
As
to the play, it amuses one even more on a second seeing than on a first, and
the falseness of it jars less. When you are reconciled to the fact that the
play has neither plot, construction nor truth, the wit goes down very
well. The play abounds in cleverness, but lacks in imagination; is rich in
words and poor in feeling and action. To put it mild, [
Mr. Wilde
](n01191) is an abortive
son of England. He is not a normal Englishman. He utterly lacks the one
English virtue, honest sincerity, and I cannot see what he has to compensate
him for his loss. He has something of French cleverness, but it is poor in
comparison with the original; something of French audacity, but it is forced where
the French is natural. One thing nature did not give
Mr. Wide
Mr. Wilde
—a heart. It
is doubtful if all the gifts of all the gods and all the ingenuity of man can
ever make up for that. ["One thing thou lackest,"](n02433) sincerity, the soul of all
great work, art's only excuse for being.