What with the journalistic invective that greeted the arrival of the watered-down fit for Boston version of Tobacco Road, assailing it on grounds of rank indecency, and the very fact that it had been adjusted for the adolescent minds of the Hub city, the play which ran so long in New York will probably soon fade here. Crowded to the rafters on the first two nights by prurient sensation hunters, the theatre was only half filled on Friday, and unless a sudden renaissance is experienced, Henry Hull and Company had better make tracks elsewhere.

To this reviewer, the bowdlerizing of the script seemed no great loss, except that it brought the exceeding weakness of the dramatic construction out from behind the screen of "life in the raw" or whatever it was that the censor didn't like. For in this case the play certainly is not the thing. Two acts of half-baked comedy are capped by one of equally misshapen tragedy, with the whole thing ineffectually sprinkled over by the note of abject poverty and misery.

For while the play is meant to be a portrait of the share-cropper's life in the poor worn out agricultural South, the author, Jack Kirkland, has written a play, that, with some few changes in the denomination of the money mentioned, might as well have been set in a good second-rate apartment hotel on Park Avenue. In this sense, indeed, it is a universal work, and while he should have been casting the spell of poverty and misery, he lets his love of dialogue run away from him, and the momentary humor of back talk of somewhat Chick Salian hue masks the enduring tragedy of the problem under discussion.

Mr. Hull, as the share cropper beset with family troubles and besieged by starvation, who would rather work than borrow, if work on credit he can, who would rather borrow than steal, and who would sooner steal than leave the land on which he was raised and of which he feels himself an integral part, is superb. There is a certain gallantry in his self-willed squalor that remains as one of the abiding impressions of the play. His supporting cast is excellent, and as a team, they manage to pull the very best possible from the script. On the whole, the result is interesting and amusing, hardly sensational.

In conclusion be it said that there remains, if any there was, no part in the performance that would bring a blush to the cheek of the most sensitive Boston virgin. And the only thing that bothered this reviewer was the sight of Mr. Hull's slimy, grimy Southern feet, when he took off his shoes.