By KELCEY ALLEN

The river of time has journeyed on to a significant confluence of theatrical forces when the Theatre Guild Acting Company, the foremost and most articulate group in the country, in producing “Marc Millions” at the Guild Theatre, offered for the first time in its history a work of the foremost American dramatist, Eugene O’Neill.  Except for an early O’Neill play which the Washington Square players, progenitors of the present Theatre Guild, once produced, no recognition was accorded O’Neill by the Theatre Guild until last night, although he is perhaps the lone American dramatist whose works are relished by sophisticated and cultured Continental palates.

Last night was one of the most eventful we ever spent at the theatre.  First, as to the dramatic literature of “Marco Millions” – it is a coruscating satire, biting in its irony, suffused with poetry, rich and dramatic in its simple story, and resplendently colorful in its background, atmosphere and imagery, “Marco Millions” is a many faceted jewel.  Although he has chosen for his theme the quasi-historical and a fabulously legendary Marco Polo and his sojourns in the empire of Kublai Kaan, imperious ruler of Cathay in the 14^th century, O’Neill aims the stinging shafts of his irony, and the rapier-thrusts of his corroding wit at contemporaneous foibles.

With mellow and gentle irony, he travesties the inquisitive instincts, the cupidity, the high-voltage salesmanship type of civilization developed in the Occident.  We feel he is constantly poking fun at American philistinism, American money-grubbing and money-wallowing.  He has made of Marco a smug idol of overstuffed self-suffiency, whose ideals are tinged with a metallic luster and resound with a metallic clang.

Through the character of the Polos, he contrasts with expert craftsmanship the acquisitive urge in the West, its stress on the welter of mass and quantity of volume, as opposed to the serene gravity, the poiseful dignity and infinite wisdom of the Orient.  As we mine deeper, we find many more nuggets of gold:  In mere glancing fashion, and with great compression, O’Neill satirized the mythical, not the ethical, basis of all religions by showing that the respective devotees, priests and dervishes, who worship at different shrines, believe in the same common myths; and yet Confucians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians and Taoists all claim supremacy of their own beliefs, not recognizing their origin from a common progenitor in comparative mythology.

O’Neill satirizes the obtuseness of the worshippers of Mammon.  He brilliantly portrays the blunted sensibilities, the spiritual hump, as he terms it, of young Marco, the man of action, and kinetic energy, the idol of material efficiency, who has not the more rarefied and delicate poetic instinct to perceive that a Cathaian princess yearns for him.

On the physical facets of “Marco Millions,” the Guild must have lavished a prodigious sum in costumes, scenery and background.  Lee Simonson has eminently well succeeded in suggesting the opulence of the Orient.  In the cataract of color, the hues and tints have been selected with admirable taste.  They are never overgaudy to the point of flamboyance, never splotchy or variegated, but always harmonious both in costume and in background.  The colors have also been chosen for the symbolic and dramatic values, for they always aptly represent with artistic fidelity the mood in which a particular scene is cast.  The sumptuous production could have done justice to the most ambitious extravaganza of our musical impresarios.  On the aesthetic side, “Marco Millions” is a wondrous achievement, as each picture in this rich kaleidoscope of Oriental beauty is a canvas of rare beauty in itself.

In one respect, we were somewhat disappointed.  When the direction was assigned to Rouben Mamoulian, the Armenian youth who manipulated seething and frenzied mobs of “Porgy” with such virtuosity, we thought the Guild in “Marco Millions,” too, would resort to mass movement to show the teeming Est.  But this mass phase had to be restrained and subdued by the exigencies of production and the compulsory excisions from the O’Neill text to compress “Marco Millions” into a one-night play.

We missed somewhat the frenetic huddle of the courts of Persia, India and Cathay, but Mamoulian did extraordinarily good work in suggesting stage multitudes paying homage, or making obeisance of carrying out peremptory orders of the high-powered Marco.

If the waits between scenes could have been eliminated by some Reinhardtian waziardy, or by the witchcraft of stagecraft, and one scene melted into another so as not to interrupt the illusion this wondrous production of “Marco Millions” might have been made even more wondrous.

“Marco Millions” is acted with the consummate histrionic skill of the Guild.  Alfred Lunt again established that he is one of the greatest American actors.  As the callow lad Marco, at the court of Tedaldo, Papal Legate to Acre, Lunt acts with the droll loutishness, the adolescent hesitance of an immature gauche youth.  As Marco rises in power at the Court of Cathay, Lunt’s self-assertiveness and self-adulation increases.  He taps all the rich veins of humor and irony the role contains.  In the scene revealing his abtuseness on the score of the passion of the princess, in the many scenes where her is the high-voltage commercial traveler, in his quotation of bromidic platitudes, in the scenes in which he sells Kublai Kaan the idea of paper money and the potent usage of gun powder, Lung acquits himself masterfully.

Margalo Gillmore was the beautiful princess Kukachin, and no aids of stage illusion were necessary to encompass her wan beauty, her delicacy of spirit, her mild, yearning gentility of mood.

Baliol Holloway, in his resplendent robes as the regal Kublai Kaan, was magnificent as the heart-wise and thoughtful man in the purple.  Dudley Digges, as the sage of Cathay, yielded the serene and sagacious philosophy of the East by the unruffled mien of acting, the inscrutable mask of his thoughtful expression.

Such others as Morris Carnovsky, Henry Travers, Ernest Cossart, H.H. McCollum and Mary Blair, regrettably have to be lumped together for lack of time and space all in one paragraph of general commendation, though the work of each is deserving of more detailed praise.