New Plays

Welded. Eugene O'Neill takes matrimony drastically between thumb and forefinger and turns it over for inspection, shaking it rather roughly. He finds a union between two vivid temperaments to be unsuccessful. He concludes that, in the process of fusing, these two personalities are liable to flare up into a white hot flame that may consume them both.

The husband is a playwright, the wife an actress, and so far their marrriage has begotten only temperament. O'Neill shows them snarling and yapping, making quarrels their chief recreation. They bicker about nothing, repetitiously, inconclusively, murderously, amorously. For they actually wrangle because they love each other too much to leave each other alone.

Here is shown that strange and fascinating affinity between love and hate that sometimes drives playwrights to their pens. The connubial convulsions of this pair recall the passionate spats and spasms of Alfred De Musset and George Sand. They are modern de Medicis in love. There is poison in their kisses.

Wearied at last of this outlawry of love, they turn to less frantic dalliance. The wife seeks balm of Gilead in the arms of a theatrical manager; the husband pins his hopes for philandering on a street walker. But they miss their erotic apoplexy. Eventually they drift back to each other, into the maelstrom. They must return to the bonds of holy acrimony. Marriage, they find, is the penalty for those in love.

Inasmuch as a playwright and an actress are not features of every home, no universal implication can be drawn from O'Neill's forceful yoking of two creatures so wildly attuned and so woefully apart. Despite the everyday naturalness of his domestic shambles, he makes out no general case for marriage as a vise and a vice. Plentifully in evidence is his instinctive plumbing of the human heart, and his flair for real talk in copious draughts. But the searchlight of his realism throws up figures that are drab instead of highly colored. Jacob Ben Ami rather luxuriates in suffering. He pities himself with much fervor. Doris Keane, his costar, shows her customary sensitive discrimination, but reads her lines like the Psalms. Catherine Collins as the street walker is the one splotch of color.

Sweet Seventeen. To save the family mortgage, a girl machinates to marry her elder sister off to a young man who has just struck oil and is therefore eligible. The girl loves him herself, but is willing to sacrifice him to keep him in the family. But the youth her sister really loves comes into a chewing gum fortune, thereby re-establishing his status as a suitor. Sister throws her fiance over, and the flapper catches the oil magnate on the rebound.

In the final act the piece turns into a bedroom farce without warning. But it is innocuous enough to make Avery Hopwood blush for his craft.

Ziegfeld Follies. Around this time of late years, when business slackens, the Ziegfeld Follies have a new film of talent drawn over them. This is announced with great pomp and circumstance as "a new spring edition of the Ziegfeld Follies." As a matter of fact, there is usually not much that is new in the production, save in the bedazzled eyes of the publicity department. The showgirls, that essential base of the production, remain the same collection of sleeping beauties, glossily torpid with pulchritude.

In the latest turnover of comeliness, Fanny Brice is characteristically diverting in several skits, and Clyde Cook, cinema buffoon and onetime Hippodrome favorite, falls about sedulously until he cracks, laughs and nearly breaks his neck. There is a new Victor Herbert ballet, and a Ben Ali Haggin tableau, lustrous and well poised, called The Duel for the sake of a change. But the underlying fabric is of the customary silks and satins.