Theater: Rain

Rain, the tale of a conflict between a chippy and the Church on a South Sea island, was the dramatic success of 1922. Its profanity, its treatment of the problem of “sex-starvation,” its revelations on the Freudian significance of dreams about “the mountains of Nebraska” titivated the Harding era. The late Jeanne Eagels played Sadie Thompson, the raffish trollop, up to the hilt, and after the play had run two years on Broadway she was established as one of the U. S. theatre’s legendary great.

One who has never forgotten Miss Eagels’ performance is Tallulah Bankhead. Nor has that wilful, luxuriant actress, daughter of the Democratic House floor leader and niece of a Senator, forgotten that William Somerset Maugham, from whose short story Rain was taken, vetoed her for the part of Sadie Thompson 13 years ago. “Here,” said she last fortnight in Philadelphia, where her revival of Rain opened, “here is where I get even with Willie Maugham.” Last week Manhattan critics had a chance to see if “Willie” Maugham had indeed erred in preferring Eagels to Bankhead for the Thompson part.

Consensus was that he had not. But while nobody would ever again electrify the part of Sadie Thompson as Jeanne Eagels had, it was agreed that Tallulah Bankhead’s Thompson was well worth watching. Where Jeanne Eagels’ Sadie had seemed to maintain at least a vestige of hidden personal reserve, Tallulah Bankhead’s flounced all over the stage with the abandon of the late Texas Guinan. In accounting for Miss Bankhead’s failure to shade her various denunciations of the preacher who wanted to bring Sadie to salvation by way of a penitentiary sentence, only to fall prey to her allure, most commentators fell back on the observation that Miss Eagels’ Sadie was “mental” where Miss Bankhead’s is “physical.” But all were agreed that if Tallulah Bankhead, after her spectacularly successful years in London, wants to stay home and fill the niche that Jeanne Eagels left vacant on the U. S. stage, she should have little difficulty in doing it.