Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1906 — “The Road to Yesterday” [ARTICLE]

“The Road to Yesterday”

“ The Road to Yesterday ” is the imaginatian appealing title of a new play which is to receive its premier performance at the Garrick Theatre Sunday, Nov. 11. It is declared to be an absolute footlight novelty, and, as its name Implies, it has a somewhat mystic element of the supernatural in it. The central idea is that of the Reincarnation of Souls, and all the characters of this play, the action of which begins in modern London, are made to relive for one half of the drama their seeming lives of three hundred years ago. This theme might have been treated in a highly serious fashion by a disciple of Mme. Blavatsky or a believer in the Hindu Nahatmas; but the authors of this latest unique stage offering have, so it is said, approached their subject with such a spirit of humor, of mingled fantasy that the result is a fsntastic comedy. Since the play begins on Midsummer Eve and a dream figures in its plot, one might be inclined to class it with that type of fanciful drama which has so long had its supreme exponents in Shakespeare’ “Midsummer Night’s Dream and “The Tempest. But no fairies or elves or other extraordinary fold-lore characters enter into “The Road to Yesterday,” although there cross the scenes the picturesque figures of a gipsy and a witch. Neither, it appears, can the title of dream play be applied to this odd new piece, if dream play be used in its original German sense of “Traum-spiele,” of which the best known example to Americans is The Sunken Bell of Gerhardt Hauptman. “ThebSTsnffiGTSdP legory, according to advance account. in The Road to Yesterday, noa does its story deal with any impossible characters o‘r events. Just how the authors have made its Reincarnation episodes plausible may be seen at the Garrick this week. The piece certainly attracts and piques the curiosity, while a strongly balanced cast including Minnie Dupree, Helen Ware, Miriam Nesbitt, Alice Gale, Agnes Everett, White Whittlesley, Hall McAllister and others, has created a fine interpretation.