1915-02-06-New York Evening World-New York Likes Polygamys Lesson

New York Likes "Polygamy's" Lesson

New York Evening World, 6 February 1915, page 4

by Mortimer

Mormon boy and girl, grown up and married and, then, "their chickens coming borne to roost."

That's "Polygamy," and done by the players at the Park Theatre.

Mr. and Mrs. New York, Mr. and Mrs. Brooklyn and Mr. and Mrs. New Jersey and Mr. and Mrs. Out-of-Town from everywhere sawayed in their seats and forgot their stoicism and wept softly as the young wife sank crumblingly to the floor outside the bedroom door of her husband's new wife as she turns the knob and knows then that the door is bolted from within.

That audience was a good old New York audience, the jewelled kind, the kind that clothes its women folks in furs and tucks them in in comfortable limousines. Also, the democratic kind that one sees in subways and surface cars, husband and wife, ONE man and ONE woman, and that's the real New York. Not as one of the Mormon wives in the play said: "Why, If you arrest a man for having more than one wife, you'd have to build a jail wall around every big city."

May be so, but New York isn't in that list.

Last night, when nerves were strained taut as young Brigham Kemble plunges his hooked fingers into the throat of the Mormon elder and pulls him to his knees, the men in that audience loosed their held back and banged their hands together with smacks like gatling guns, and they did it and were unashamed. And they looked as if they'd like to yell out the good old American "Bully!"

And, when the curtain lowered on that act, you could see all around you and in the seats just in front of you brown-haired, gray-haired and white-haired Darbys and Joans snuggling up a little closer together.

Some of the homely old Darbys showing the scars of the battle of life--bald headed and seamed of face, and the old girls, the brides of their youth, sitting beside them with rage in both hearts at the monstrous wrong that the play was revealing.

And their hands were clasped hard, tight, seconds after the curtain fell, when they waked from the spell and leaned down to put on "her" rubber galoshes.