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The third play on the fifth bill of the Players first New York season was John Chapin Mosher’s Bored, of which Kenton writes that it “fell far below his Sauce for the Emperor,” and for which no extant script is known to exist.(1). The program shows four characters in the play, Dolores Macdougal, Mrs. Macdougal, Mr. Siddons, and Mr. Moffat, played by Betty Turner, Elsie Hamilton, Don Corley and B.J.O. Nordfeldt respectively, and it lists that the scene was designed by Corley. This was the last play by Mosher the Players would produce.(2) With this less than stellar bill, the Gelbs write that Cook was “seemingly unable to impose the discipline necessary for sustained artistic results,” and that he “sorely felt the loss of John Reed’s flair for organization.”(3) Kenton writes that the bill was “frankly mediocre” and then puts it simply: “We were sinking fast.”(4)
Copyright 2007, Jeff Kennedy
(1) Kenton 49.
(2) Mosher was a free-lance writer who joined the staff of New Yorker magazine in 1926, became its film critic in 1928 and remained so until his death at 50 in 1942. His writings included short stories published in the New Yorker, many of which were collected in the book Celibate at Twilight, published in 1940,and he wrote articles about authors, including Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His obituary in the New York Times (Sept. 4, 1942, 24) describes his writings “had a personal note and were noteworthy for their humor and bristling style.” He served in World War I with the American Medical Dept. and taught English at Northwestern University upon his return.
(3) Gelb, Monte Cristo 593.
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