By JAMES WHITTAKER

Says Dramatis Eugene O’Neill of the passion love, which subject he treated last night in the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre in the play named “Welded.”

“You gotta learn to like it.”  He generalized, but he excepted himself.

We are beginning now to believe that O’Neill has not learned anything very well.  His “Emperor Jones” didn’t like his luck, his man of “Beyond the Horizon” didn’t like his job.  “The Hairy Ape” didn’t like his friends, and now, in “Welded,” his gospel of dislike touches its climax, and, we trust, its end, in the man who didn’t like his love.

To his pair of lovers, represented in the play by Doris Keane and Jacob Ben Ami, O’Neill plays the role of a bilious cupid with poison-tipped arrows.  These two are plagued by ecstacies which end in sobs.  They are welded in embraces which are hurtful half-Nelsons.

Mr. O’Neill’s thesis is that the soft passion is most hellish when it has been civilized by the ceremony of marriage.  When the guests are sped, the cat put out and Darby and Joan are legally alone – then, divulges Mr. O’Neill, is when the fight begins.

With grand air of exploring a bleak shore as pioneer, O’Neill steers his story steadily in the direction of woe, with brisk and wrathful blizzards bellying all its sails.  Mr. (Jacob) Ben Ami, in the course of this romance, is shipwrecked into the arms of a siren of the streets.  Miss (Doris) Keane fetches up, bedraggled, in a bachelor apartment which she fills with the sound of her lamentations.

For these two have had an argument in their own home and like two Noras where only one grew before, have both rushed out into the night to tell it to the neighbors.

In his first act, O’Neill ventured higher in the social scale than is his wont.  A good sign, we thought, when the curtain rose on a neat studio and Miss Keane, lovely in a black gown and a rich Spanish shawl which margined her white shoulders; for O’Neill’s fancy has hitherto be exiled among louts, and it was cheering to find his two protagonists an actress and an author. 

We have always wanted to see what refinement would happen to O’Neill if he were brought out of his accustomed grog shops into a china shop.  Alas, he is a bull in both places.

A small cast of four share among themselves the miseries of “Welded,” and each has noble opportunities to spit out between clenched teeth Mr. O’Neill’s most effective curses of a world gone wrong.

Mr. O’Neill, campaigning for defeat, reckoned with all elements but one.  That was the loveliness of his star, which cannot be blighted.  At the end of the play’s mischances Miss Keane’s proud head was neither bloody nor bowed.  By her beauty the downhearted message of the play was misspelled victory.