New Plays

Tiger Cats. This department can scarcely putter about any longer with the season's drama without presenting to its followers the uncomfortable observation that the season's drama is a most gaunt and tattered contribution to the Theatre's annually increasing family. Two good plays only have come in (What Price Glory? and The Guardsman). The prospects of a weedy fall crop were cer tified when David Belasco's opening production went onto the first night threshing-floor and returned an incredibly low per cent of entertainment. Just why the autumn's offerings, while high in quantity, have been meagre in merit no one can explain. The fact remains. Robert Loraine, an English actor of some prominence, was lured from Lon don to play Tiger Cats. He impersonates an "eminent neurologist" who hates his wife mentally and craves her physically. So sharp becomes the inner struggle that he shoots her in the second act. By the end of the evening, they have agreed that they love each other. From every normal point of view, it seems entirely probable that he will shoot her again in a week or two. As his aim grows progressively better with prac tice, he will no doubt succeed in killing her off before the year is out. Katherine Cornell gave to the part of the shallow, feline wife an acrid brilliance that justified in part the so-called entertainment. A most doggedly unpleasant wife, yet somehow crookedly alluring, she made the author's thesis possible if not plausible. When she was on the stage, streaks of gleaming silver showed through the leaden surface of the play. Alexander Woollcott--"Miss Cornell and her finely competent performance provided the only interest to sustain us through a ponderous and uneventful evening." Heywood Broun--"I cannot remember as much as five minutes in the entire evening which were not tiresome."