Should a Woman Forgive?

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This is not the problem play that its title suggests. It is simply an amateurish and wildly improbable melodrama, having for its central motive the determination of a father to prevent its daughter’s marriage to the man she loves in order to force her to marry a hated rival of his own choice. To achieve his end the father stops at no crime. Although he knows that his daughter’s marriage is necessary in order that her expected child may be legitimate, he tops it by a blow which lays her lover senseless on the morning of the intended wedding, and by then kidnapping him to carry him off to his regiment -he is a young soldier just ordered off on Foreign Service. The deserted girl swears that she will never forgive her lover, whose letters from abroad her father suppresses, and whose death he announces, though he knows the lad to be a prisoner in a German camp. From the crudely illustrated brutalities of that camp the hero is rescued by the puerile strategy of a couple of his comic but benevolent English friends, posing as medical inspectors authorised by the American embassy: and a happy ending to the foolish romance is provided in the utter discomfiture of the wicked father, and in his daughter’s forgiveness of the lover who had never intended to add faithlessness to seduction. Poor stuff but harmless. Recommended for license Ernest A. Bendall.