Word: playing
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Monterey with a musical comedy called Rataplan when someone from Hollywood saw her and took her north. She worked for a month in Hal Roach comedies, then as Douglas Fair-banks's leading lady in The Gaucho. Brunette, she is five feet high, weighs 105 pounds, can play the ukelele, likes dancing best...
Katerina. This latest addition to the programs of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre is further justification for the rediscovery of Alia Nazimova. It is more. Leonid Andreyev's play has been left behind by changing social codes but it retains a turbulent glow which shines through its drenching melancholy...
...rebellion which sends her out, in spite of a reconciliation, to defy him. In the playwright's mind she sinks lower and lower. That, however, is against a background of Victorian moral standards. What would happen to Katerina in real life in 1929 would make an entirely different play. Andreyev deals with the Russia of before the War. That Russia is gone, so much of his play vanishes...
Nazimova, except for moments when she is too much the actress, gives a performance that is fine and true. She rises to the play's tensity with the real genius of a tragedienne and she sinks into its swamps of woe with equal effectiveness. There are also excellent characterizations by Leona Roberts, as a mother, and Walter Beck, as the husband...
...stand up at all the play demands the lightest touch in the acting. This it does not receive, except from two members of the cast, Cecile Dixon and J. M. Kerrigan. The others are so conscious of the whimsy with which they are dealing that it vanishes in their eager hands. This is particularly true of Mary Ellis and in a lesser degree of Basil Sydney. However, not even heavy performances can completely weigh down ebullient dialog. There are worse places in life than Pooh Corner...