New Play in Manhattan

Colonel Satan. Booth Tarkington has turned back to the mood of his first best seller, Monsieur Beaucaire, a slender novelette which became a play and afterward a cinematographic vehicle for the late Rudolph Valentino, as a source for this romantic costume melodrama about Aaron Burr. Unfortunately, that mood is not recaptured, probably not recapturable, for the inspiration of Monsieur Beaucaire, of its swagger and dandyism, was youth, and in Colonel Satan there is no youth and no reality except a shadow of the personal bad luck of the courageous man who wrote it. Author of a dozen engaging novels and several good plays of the American scene, Booth Tarkington, now almost totally blind, and having at 61 begun to outlive his own vogue, has executed his play with the impeccably literate technique which has always distinguished him. He has costumed his hero in the glamour of the fallen great. Aaron Burr (McKay Morris) is poor, old, an exile in Paris, his political career over. By chance, in a mean Paris wineshop, he finds himself eavesdropping on a Royalist intrigue. With the expert, knowledge of character proper to so eminent a confidence-man, Burr turns the intrigue to his own use. He makes love to the only woman in the conspiracy (Jessie Royce Landis) and steals the fine clothes of the richest conspirator. He fights a duel with a young Yankee in which, reversing the role he played in his affair with Alexander Hamilton, he fires into the air. He postures elegantly, makes desperately winning speeches, executes paltry and artful stratagems, yet remains dull -- a character falling halfway between life and fantasy. In spite and perhaps because of the glittering flood of language poured over it, Colonel Satan is too far from the idiom of the modern theatre to be satisfying entertainment.

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