New Plays

Anathema. Like most Russian plays, Anathema is a plunge into the basic mysteries and contradictions of life, but Andreyev (author of last season's Theatre Guild success, He Who Gets Slapped) works with symbolized, metaphysical ideas instead of with the raw material of actual life from which Chekov and Gorky draw.

Anathema is the Inquiring Spirit, the Searcher after Truth, who goes to the gates of Heaven to ask God what his weights and measures are for determining Justice. When God tells him that he would not understand, that the divine values are too inscrutable, Anathema goes, back to earth vowing to show the irony and misery of God's justice to his creature Man. He picks out a Jew, David Leizer, and bestows upon him an inheritance of two million dollars, which he exhorts him to give away to the poor for the glory of God. David does so without reserve or discrimination, even bringing death and agony into his own family in his altruistic passion. But the effect of his gifts is to turn the people against him when his money runs out. They stone him because he cannot perform miracles. Anathema, exulting in his proven exposure of divine justice, then returns to the gates of Heaven to demand an explanation. He refuses to tell Anathema anything more, declaring that the ways of God must remain forever inscrutable.

The play is, in a curious way, a combination of some of the basic legends of literature. There is the Faust motif in David's brief hour of the pleasure of giving which will cease when the last kopeck is gone; there is the Job motif in the curse that he suffers; there is a touch of Milton's Satan in the heroic defiance of Anathema; there is a strong suggestion of Stephen in the stoning of a Christlike man by the people "who know not what they do."

Alexander Woollcott: . . . "An obscure work made doubly obscure by the leaden footed thing it became when done into English."

Heywood Broun: . . . " Anathema was disappointing to us."

J. Rankin Towse: ..." There can be no question of its descriptive and imaginative power."

Zander the Great. Salisbury Field, author of Zander the Great, is one of the most graceful writers of drawing-room comedy. He is, .in a way, the American A. A. Milne. An adroit describer of familiar and unfamiliar types in the upper and middle circles of American life, he can always be depended upon to be amusing.

The story of Zander the Great concerns the efforts of a young woman to restore a foundling child to its father. She gets a clue and takes the child to Arizona where the father is conducting business as a prosperous bootlegger. The woman (Alice Brady) decides that such a man is not fit to bring up the child, and resolves to marry her old suitor from New Jersey--when it develops that he, too, is a successful bootlegger. The real father then conforms to the exigencies of the plot by reforming under the beneficent charms of the child. A happy curtain is rung down. The cast is well selected, and Alice Brady, who takes the leading role, gives, according to the critics, a notable performance. Heywood Broun: "We saw one of the finest performances the American theatre has known in our time." Percy Hammond: "Nice, rough, nursery stuff, calculated to charm the sophisticated drama lover who wishes to be made a child again just for tonight."

The Exile. An historical play of the French Revolution, by Sydney Toler, starring Eleanor Painter and Jose Ruben, in which most of the devices and dodges of court drama are given a Spring airing.