165

BUSH STREET THEATER.

Of things strictly dramatic the week has
furnished little, Buffalo Bill and his play
Life on the Border being almost the only
exception, and that has little calling for
genuine criticism. It were easier to make
bricks without straw than to construct an
elaborate critique from such material. The
play has had the advantage of a strong cast,
stronger than it has merited, though judged
sui generis it can hardly be considered weak.
Mr. Bradley has given a picture of a rough
trapper; Mr. Barrows, a portrait of a coarse
Irish rascal; Mr. Mortimer has depictured
the heavy villain of the piece with as much
simulation of malice as is possible
to him; Mr. Simms has played a
Quaker Peace Commissioner, molding
his conception: on "Aminadab Sleek;"
and Gertie Granville has given us an Irish
girl w ith boarding-house manners and conscious
city ways, that made the part piquant
enough without making it at all realistic of
the border. This has been the character of
the support which Mr. Cody has had to depend
on in transferring his identity bodily
to the stage as "Buffalo Bill." The two
great exemplars of frontier honesty, virtue
and pluck have been himself and Captain
Jack, both of whom have lived lives much
like that which they endeavor to represent.
Both of them by their acting give satisfaction
of a certain kind. Both are free from
stage artifice: they speak their lines in a
manly way, and walk through their parts
with a naturalness and a realism which
go far toward suplying the place of
art itself. The border play will
probably last as long as the border
fiction, that is, until there ceases to be a
border, and if we are to have it we may be
well satisfied to have it in so good shape as
this. The play is of course too high-colored
for genuine art, but in borderland truth
itself is gorgeous and art does not exist.
The management deserve credit for having
given the piece so much pictorial elegance.
The audiences have been large and always
pleased, the gentle pleasure of the parquet
and dress circle becoming absolute rapture
in the gallery. We are to have Life on the
Border for a few nights longer, after which
we are promised The Red Right Hand and
other pieces fruitful in carnage.