New Plays

The Way of the World. It is a far cry from 14th Street to Congreve. Yet just a little below that tawdry thoroughfare, buried in the back of Greenwich Village, is the tiny Cherry Lane Playhouse where Congreve has come back to life. The gentleman under discussion is an English dramatist of the 17th Century. He was considered the Bernard Shaw of his time. His plays are witty, caustic causeries of a decadent society. The Way of the World is often thought his best.

The plot is an involved attempt to marry a servant to a wealthy old woman. Various subplots and small intrigues are woven in, solely concerned with love or its prevalent imitation. The cast was rather carelessly thrown together with no notable performance offered.

Students of the stage professed themselves interested. Considerable laughter arose from the benches. Yet the casual theatregoer found the wit too long drawn out, the story preposterous and the atmosphere difficult to absorb. He realized that the play was not produced for him. His more inquiring neighbor, on the other hand, quite liked it.

Parasites. Francine Larrimore belongs in this play about as much as she belongs in the Chinese army. Miss Larrimore is a vivid young woman with a drawl. She is the kind that ought to go suddenly into an Apache dance with the District Attorney and stab her way back to the underworld. Against a Bar Harbor background she jars perceptibly. Still that was the way the whole play went. It was a cheap conception by Cosmo Hamilton, probably having originally a sound satirical value. The latter was played out of it by a poor cast and burlesqued by a bad director.

The girl can't pay her bridge debts and takes money from a tall, taciturn bank director. He thinks he is buying her, but she fools him in the end and marries him.

New Brooms. Frank Craven, that small man with the worried smile, has given himself cause to be worried in reality. He has become a producer. He started as an actor, progressed to playwriting and now becomes his own employer. Under the stress of the occasion, he has deserted his own cast. It was the opinion of those his first guests that the stage had lost a solid asset in Frank Craven the actor and gained only a minor asset in Craven the producer

This conclusion was derived by comparing New Brooms with the manager's greatest success, The First Year. The latter will be recalled as a genial and amazingly human comedy of married life. It lacked a plot and was replete with homely wit. New Brooms boasts a plot, little penetration and less laughter.

These observations should not be taken to indicate that New Brooms is a dull show. It is distinctly diverting, yet scarcely up to Craven standard. Father and son are cast in contrast. Father is irascible and successful. Son is amiable. Son is therefore loaded with the father's business and finds that pleasantries and profits do not blend. Father becomes indolent and the soul of geniality. There is also a girl, properly played by Blyth Daly. The single sentient and complete performance is Robert Mc-Wade's as the old man. The Desert Flower answers the old question, "What would you say to a tramp on the railroad tracks?" You probably shouldn't say anything. But this little girl did and from then on her life intensified rapidly. She was keeping house in a box car when the tramp came along. In the next act, she was a dance-hall girl in a gold-rush town. In the last act, her stupid old stepfather came back and started breaking her fingers. In tramped the tramp.

You have probably guessed it by now. The tramp wasn't really a tramp at all, but the son of a very rich man from Manhattan. He had gone a little sour, that was all, and taken to tramping because tramps' wages don't buy whisky. She liked him because he talked like an actor and she thought he must be educated. She couldn't read a word. But did that matter to him? No. She was clean and fine and REAL.

Lest the impression be derived that the play is wholly minus, let it be said that Helen MacKellar gives an excellent performance. And it will all make a rousing cinema.

Blind Alleys. It was with some regret that the critics crowded upon this play with displeased adjectives. For it was brought forward by the Disabled Veterans of the War and deserved the good fortune that has so signally deserted its sponsors. The critics therefore apologized and said it was terrible entertainment.

The story dealt with an Army chaplain whose traditional opinion of the church is burnt by war. He comes home, obtains a divorce, marries an Ambulance girl. The cast was inexpert.