The Flaming Corsage

Letter to the Editor”, Albany Argus, May 14, 1912

Dear Sir,

I rush to correct the general misapprehension of the play The Flaming Corsage, which closed after a single performance on Saturday. The play is seen as a violation of our Magnificent Municipal Moral Code (would that it were!). But it was not that at all, and judgment of it on that basis should be left to the philistines. The play will have, most certainly, a secure place in the history of American theater, as a curiosity. It has kinship with dreadful Ibsen’s one great achievement, Peer Gynt, and may be as great a literary benchmark as Beowulf, that ossified ostrich egg of fictional narrative, though the Daugherty play resembles neither work.

The Flaming Corsage must be judged a failure, a great botch of a work that should probably have been a novel, just as Chekhov’s plays, overstuffed with characters and incident, would have shone as novels. Daugherty, the playwright, was, potentially, a novelist of the first rank, but abandoned the genre for playwriting, a major mistake, the success of his last play notwithstanding. That play, The Masks of Pyramus, owed its success to its paralleling of Romeo and Juliet, just as the Shakespeare work owed its nucleus to Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. Plagiarism in the arts continues apace.

But The Flaming Corsage does have its merits. It casts aside the weeping and wailing of our mouldy melodrama and the contrived realism of our present potpourri of pygmy playwrights, and instead it offers up scenes rich with raw realism, as well as stinging satire of a high order. The bovinish women of the piece, and their hopeless husbands and lovers, all struggle between lofty intentions and hidden animal instincts, much the way Peer Gynt confronts the evil trolls of his life in the Ibsen play.

No one in American theater has ever written with as much insight into the dark quotidian reality as Edward Daugherty. It is a great pity that he is such a paltry buffoon when it comes to organizing his play, and sorting out the fates of his characters. He creates fine china, then destroys it all with his unruly hindquarters.

Like Beowulf, which was fated to be unreadable, this play is fated to be judged unplayable by future generations. But it will also be studied as a grotesque curiosity that broke new theatrical ground. It does not surprise me that it was closed, but it was closed for the wrong reasons.

THEATER LOVER

(Name withheld)