Broadway, the most renowed Gay White Way in the world,
doesn’t even support its own appetite for jazz, sensation and sexy shows,
Channing Pollock, author of The Enemy
and The Fool and a host of other
serious and clean plays, declares in an article in the current American
Magazine.
Outside of New York, in the far reaches of the country, is
the stable public, the backbone of the American nation, which supports good
plays. That class, he adds, which supports good books and the same mode of
living that is traditional with America, will always be in the majority.
Sensation-mad city dwellers cannot support the noisy institutions that brand
America as decadent.
“There are more lights in library windows than there are on
Broadway. You may not be aware of them, but they are there,” Pollock continues.
“The city newspapers may be catalogues of crime and the country may be dotted
with night clubs. But men and women get married and the majority of them stay
married. Flaming youth makes matrimony and the football teams. It achieves
parenthood and normal healthy children.”
Pollock cites the past year in the theatres of New York. The
year began, he says, with an inundation of sex and murder plays, at the apex of
what is known as the jazz age. Before Christmas, all but one of those truck
gardens had disappeared and Easter found the New York stage without a single
success that did not deserve it. Reviewing plays of the last decade, he finds
that not a single lasting success was built on sex or crime in plays. Even the
light comedies were those without objectionable lines. Twenty-eight archaic
instincts of sentiment, loyalty, or pity. “There may be a rash on the face of
civilization,” Pollock concludes, “but its heart is still beating vigorously,
and its feet are still marching on and up.”
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