Farewell Appearance

At one time or another, Mississippi-born Stark Young has labored in virtually all the artistic vineyards that might attract a courtly, sensitive Southern gentleman: he has taught at two universities, painted, translated (Chekhov, Moliere, Machiavelli), directed for the stage, written poetry, plays and novels (including 1934's best-selling So Red the Rose).

But Young's specialty has been the drama criticism which he wrote, in the New Republic, for a quarter of a century. Last year he quit the magazine, which had completely changed its style under the corn-fed editorship of Henry Wallace. Now he has published Immortal Shadows (Scribner; $3), a collection of critical pieces spanning his years of professional playgoing. "This volume," he notes, "represents the last writing that I shall do on the subject of the theater."

Among the best of Critic Young's immortal shadows preserved in the book: John Barrymore's Hamlet, Duse, the visits to Broadway of the Moscow Art Theater and China's Mei Lan-fang, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts.

Critic Young's theater reviews are probably the last writing of their kind. No periodical is currently printing anything about the theater that even resembles them. His essays, often more critical of the acting than of the play, walk through the field of esthetics, far from Broadway. He berates the doorway of a certain stage set as "lean and trivial," and objects to the cut of Juliet's gown. He sees the theater as a complex collection of arts, each to be weighed. His judgments reflect poetic perception, solid scholarship and standards far loftier than Times Square is accustomed to. If his writing lacks the sparkle, and sometimes the clarity, of some of his colleagues, it has a depth and substance as rare in the theater's critics as in the theater itself.

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