It is very difficult to react intelligently toward "Lady Precious Stream," In all honesty it must be confessed that its excessively exotic qualities have the immediate effect of alienating the baffied spectator. He is more than apt to take the thing quite unsympathetically, and dismiss it as infantile makebelive. It is only after he has leisurely considered the explanatory notes on the program that he begins to wonder if he should have enjoyed the play in spite of himself. There is an elucidator in the performance, but he's such a fop that one is inclined not to listen to him, and his remarks are not very pertinent, anyway.

Dr. S. I. Hsiung has committed to letters an old Chinese play that has been handed down by word of mouth for sixth-six generations, or some two thousand years. Primitive conceptions of romance apparently have much in common, for the story contains such supposedly Occidental elements as the third daughter of the family's being far and away the best; a princess's being mortally bored with her noble suitors and throwing herself into the arms of a commoner; and a wanderer's returning in unrecognizable pomp after having departed in lowliness.

The properties are barely suggestive of the objects they represent, and a vivid imagination is demanded of the audience. There is not the remotest effort to secure realism, and actors knock at invisible garden gates, and gallop about gayly on horses that are at best ethereal. The strangest part of the mechanics, however, is the behavior of the property men. They are always very much in evidence. Slouching all over the stage, they evince only occasionally a condescending interest in the anties of the performers. In general, they withdraw their attention from their newspapers only to sling a cushion to the boards in the nick of time to soften the fall of some suppliant's knees.

All this the elastic-minded spectator gladly accepts, but the quality of the lines in a bafller. At first they seem to be simply pedestrian, and lame at that. But a glance at the notes assures us that they are "deliberate and caluclated naivetics." That they are so intended we have no right to doubt. But the spectator must decide for himself whether the simplicity on this side of the subtle differs from that on the other side. It is hard not to be skeptical about the value of what so resombles childish buffoonery as the admonition issued by a gatekeeper in this play that the invading army must not charge his gate, for it is only made of cloth. If one is appreciative of the super-subtlety of this sort of thing, he will probably enjoy the acting of Clarence Derwent and Constance Carpenter, which is in the same vein.