AT 33
By Eva Le Gallienne Miss Le Gallienne, succumbing to a habit which looks like becoming de rigueur among talented and successful young persons of today, has written her autobiography before her life has exhausted half of its allotted span. Probably she has more justification for doing so than most of her predecessors in this questionable practice : she has certainly had uneventful life, she does not overestimate the importance to others of her own experience, and she has a certain talent for writing. Consequently At 33 (Lane, 12s. 6d.) will no doubt succeed in providing a number of people with an hour or so of agreeably light reading, though one would not like to guess how long most of it will remain in the mind once the book is finished. The author was the daughter of Richard Le Gallienne, and, after a childhood largely spent in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Parisian artistic society, went on the stage in London at the age of sixteen. Two years later she migrated to America, and, after a period of slow progress, sprung into stardom as Julie in Molnar's Liliom. A series of other successes followed, and then Miss Le Gahienne, feeling that she had worked long enough under the management of other people and desiring to produce herself plays which interested her and to present them at prices which could be afforded by people who did not regard the theatre solely as an after-dinner recreation, started the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York. The story of this enterprise occupies the last—and Most valuable—portion of the booL During the six years af its existence the Civic Repertory Theatre probably did more for the drama than any other institution in America. Certainly in its choice of plays it maintained a far higher standard than any organization in this country (among the authors whose plays it produced were Giraudoux, Bernard, the Quinteros, Andreyev, Tolstoi, Wied, Sierra, Tchekov, and Ibsen), and it was a calamity when it was submerged in the general slump in 1932. Its work in America is clearly not finished yet, and it is to be hoped that when Miss Le Gallienne writes the final account of her life she will be able -to chronicle its renewed and sustained activity.
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