New Plays

Ernst Vajda has contributed two additional entertainments for our artistic edification--Grounds for Divorce and The Little Angel. Appearing in one and the same week, they illustrated a pretty little pamphlet that might be drawn up on theatrical production. For the plan of Grounds for Divorce is thin, almost out at the elbows, while the Little Angel is nourished with sustaining spice of satire. But Grounds for Divorce has Ina Claire and it is Ina Claire that makes it the pick of the Vajda basket.

After the opening performance, Miss Claire was rather precipitously promoted by certain of the referees to the post of leading U. S. comedienne. Though this seems a stiff jump to take on so slight a steed as Grounds for Divorce, there can be no doubt that what spirit the play developed she supplied. If the comedy had been a champagne cocktail, she would have played the bubbles.

There was another who, unseen, stirred the glass and made the bubbles dance. That was Henry Miller, whose flawless direction flavored the whole with vigilance and sting.

Grounds for Divorce causes a husband to neglect his wife, who throws ink at him and deserts. On the eve of his second wedding, she returns to ask his advice, as a prominent lawyer for divorce, on the quickest method of shedding a second husband in order to marry a third. Disturbed at the delay, his new fiancee also throws ink; his wife's husbands turn out to be fictitious; and reunion is effected.

The Little Angel is a young lady (Mildred Macleod) reared in such innocence that she discovers herself about to have a baby and can't imagine how she got that way. It seems she was at a ball and swooned, or something. Through the machinations of her flint-faced aunt (Clare Eames) the culprit is revealed and forced to marry her. Finally they fall in love.

Minick. The story is simple enough. A septuagenarian comes to live with his son and his son's wife. Into the painfully middle-class household he brings a curious chaos of little things. He does not fit and he gets in the way. Finally he completely shatters a ladies' civic club meeting. Meanwhile he has come to know the denizens of an old men's home nearby. In the last act, he comes to realize that generations may mix but cannot blend. He goes to live among his cronies at the home.

Edna Ferber originally wrote this chonicle as a short story--Old Man Minick. George S. Kaufman (coauthor of Dulcy, Merton, Beggar on Horseback, etc.) helped her turn it into a play. Between them they very nearly did a masterpiece. The play is amusing, deeply touching in spots, but overshoots the mark by a too tenacious realism. The characters are types rather than individuals. The detail becomes too authentic.

Critics disagreed over the performance of O. P. Heggie as Minick. Some said he caught completely the blithe spirit of the old man who upset the household by staying too long in the bathroom mornings. Others averred that he "photographed" the character instead of painting it with the sure stroke of a creator. Phyllis Povah, on the other hand, was credited with the most distinguished work of her not undistinguished career. The rest of the cast, the atmosphere and the direction were judged satisfactory.

Dear Sir, formerly called Vanity Fair, has nothing at all to do with either Thackeray or formal correspondence. It has merely to do with Long Island society and is just another one of those things. Chiefly conspicuous is the amiable score of Jerome Kern. Walter Catlett makes his first appearance after three years in Sally. Genevieve Tobin comes out of straight comedy to sing the lead with more or less success.

Hassan was produced after a London model which had run successfully and was therefore deemed; Art. This London model, based on 1904 specifications, was flavored with old-fashioned Hamlet. Hassan is a semi-poetical drama with great beauty lingering in its words. The combination was too strong for the director (Basil Dean). He produced Hassan with all the pomposity of out-at-the-elbows Shakespeare.

Since great things were expected of this strange, fanciful drama of olden Bagdad by James Elroy Flecker, the critics foamed. It has been around in printed form for some little time, several editions of it. There is within it an undeniable quality of beauty which it seemed that no stage production could stifle; but if Hassan was not stifled by the present production, at least it was made to gasp audibly.

The story tells of a shoddy confectioner of Bagdad, how he blocked the plot of the King of the Beggars to kill the Calif, rose to a great position in the State, fell because he could not countenance the Calif's cruelty to the captured Beggar King and left Bagdad behind him to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

Two girls are added to the plot. The first, a harlot who rejected Hassan, came to him with power and fled when he fell, is an easy part that almost any pretty actress could portray. Accordingly the producers gave it to their most expensive player, Mary Nash. She did what she could with it. The other girl, for whom the King of the Beggars wove his plot, was entrusted wisely to Violet Kemble Cooper, who made it easily the most important role of the play. Randal Ayrton, from London, played Hassan, conventionally, correctly, completely missing the weakness, the beauty, the humanity of the character. One actor who might have done the part justice is Dudley Digges.

Of the settings and costumes there had been much ballyhoo. They were unfailingly elaborate, and almost as unfailingly in bad taste. A Fokine Ballet clogged the action.

Lazybones. Owen Davis has permitted this "chronicle of a country town" to be billed as his best play. He seems to have underestimated The Detour and Icebound and to have shown unwarranted overconfidence in the present cast.

Small town prejudice branded Lazybones as a failure because he always went fishing instead of tending to work. In the first act, he adopts an illegitimate child born to the sister of his fiancee. The fiancee believes the child to be his and deserts. Twenty years later, the baby's mother, married in the interim to a mean country banker, dies of a broken heart; and Lazybones marries the child

The author endeavored to make the play homely and human. He succeeded, but at the expense of interest. The action drags one foot after the other interminably. The characters seem too familiar; the comedy is rare.

George Abbott, recalled agreeably for his comic cowboy in Zander the Great, stepped beyond his depth in the lead. He seemed to manufacture the part instead of living in it. Martha Bryan-Allen gave her usual competent performance as the child; while the single bit of really excellent acting was contributed by Elizabeth Patterson as a black silk mother-in-law of rocky prejudice.