New Plays

Red Light Annie. Infinite are the dramatic uses of iniquity. Yet the ending is always the same. Virtue struggles through the clouds of sorrow to shine on the departing audience.

The high lights: Annie is a woman of the streets who practices, as a sideline, needlework (hypodermic). She kills the brothel keeper in whose abode she made her living. The audience is given every reason to hope that she will not be convicted. Mary Ryan, as the lady of crimson illumination, shines but dimly.

The first act easily justifies the production of the play. Ten scenes are shown. They pass so quickly and so smoothly from one small alcove on the darkened stage to another that even the mechanics of Johannes Kreisler creak dismally in retrospect.

Home Fires. This final play of Owen Davis' trilogy of domestic American existence (The Detour and Icebound preceding) is the least worth while. In attempting to satirize suburban domesticity Mr. Davis has erred in sacrificing his deeper theme for surface laughter. The commuter who attends Home Fires does not rush from the theatre to the railroad station pointing an accusing finger at himself and sobbing " guilty." Yet the lines are undeniably amusing; Mr. Davis has fed them to the flames in sufficient quantities to keep Homes Fires burning on Broadway for some time.

Children of the Moon. The moon, according to the thesis of this curiously cabalistic play, is a bad parent. Each month when her silver face is toward the earth she curls invisible, strange tentacles around her children's minds and cuts for a time their contact with the world.

The Athertons are children of the moon. Though her father and her brother stumbled to their deaths under the lethal fascination of white moonlight, Jane Atherton has apparently escaped the taint. She engages herself to Major John Bannister, aviator.

The pivot of her mother's consciousness, driven a trifle off center by the disasters in the family, revolves about her daughter. Overpowering possessive selfishness sets her to keep Jane to herself. She forbids the match. When Jane stands her ground the mother bursts into a blind fury and pours into Jane's sensitive, overwrought brain the poison tale of her inheritance among the children of the still, white satellite. The girl's mind falters under the shock, and as the final curtain falls the audience hears the purr of airplane high in the foggy night in which the lovers are climbing to the moon.

Able performance is required to weave convincingly this eerie spell. The requirement is brilliantly fulfilled by Henrietta Crosman, (who last appeared three years ago with Sir Herbert Tree in The Merry Wives of Windsor), Beatrice Terry, Florence Johns. Particularly in the playing of Miss Johns one seems to see the gathering nebula of an inceptive star.

We've Got to Have Money. Like the mystery plays and the bedroom plays, the business plays seem to have a perpetual field on the American stage. In the present instance the sudden fortune is acquired by promoting brains. It is all rather rapid; familiarly amusing; shrewdly seasoned to the public taste. Robert Ames and Vivian Tobin are thoroughly acceptable in the leading roles. The visitor may also take delight in recognizing in the cast Flora Finch, cinema comedienne with the most angular features that ever cracked a custard pie.

Zeno. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will be annoyed to learn that ectoplasm is not taken seriously by the producers of this singular melodrama. In the middle of a second act seance various ectoplasmic entities wander about the darkness sicklied o'er with the pale cast of greenish spotlights. It is subsequently explained that the entities are bogus and controlled by wireless from the next door attic.

During the spiritualistic proceedings somebody robs the safe, locking therein one of the best detectives in the play. When the lights finally begin to glow stock is taken and the deed ascribed to " Zeno." Zeno, it seems, is an important individual among criminals who has been making matters unpleasant for the local police the past six months.

Subsequently the actors discard the drama of gestures, speech and electricity and open fire. Although a dozen shots jab the darkness, aimed by individuals who should have known their business better, the intended recipients remain in normal health. In one last frenzied fusillade Zeno is discovered hiding right in the middle of everybody.

These highly geared mysteries are driven somewhat to the twelve-year- old credulity limit by a cast of unskilled laborers.

Artists and Models. Despite a scene "in Henry Ford's Cabinet, 1924" with William Jennings Bryan, Thomas A. Edison, Edsel Ford present among the secretaries, Variety, trade paper of the theatre and bulletin board of the stage, stated that Artists and Models was the " dirtiest revue " (in point of risque jokes) ever put on in New York and that if the police did not stop it, nothing else could.

Lee and J. J. Shubert, the producers, have braved the pool of immodesty about the margins of which their bitterest enemies, George White and Florenz Ziegfeld, have been stepping gingerly for years. They exhibit an entire chorus with unveiled bosoms.

The New York public reacted normally. Shortly after the opening reviews of the production were on the newsstands it was virtually impossible to obtain a seat for Artists and Models at any price. Lines stretched from the theatre half a block to Broadway. The second night there was a fight in the lobby over the final standing room coupon.

The Shuberts shrewdly took their plunge under the auspices of the New York Artists and Illustrators. The production is a professional version of the Illustrators' Show given last Winter at the Century Roof.

Thus far the police have waved no clubs.