New Plays

The Fall of Eve. Another heavily heralded comedy stumbled in the first act and was stimulated to complete the evening with fair effect only by the unique and astonishing talent of Ruth Gordon.

Some people think that Miss Gordon is unattractive, that her impenetrable bewilderment is monotonous, that her attitudes and gestures are sparse and plainly scheduled. Others, meaning almost everybody, maintain that her personality and her ability are among the few utterly original items in the annual theatrical exhibition, in case you do not recall the name and wish to decide for yourself without waste of time, she played Lola Pratt in Seventeen, and the daughter of the curiosity shop in Tweedles (TIME, Aug. 20, 1923); was a year on tour in The First Year with her husband, Gregory Kelly; and last season was the incredibly dumb girl friend of the family in Mrs. Partridge Presents (TIME, Jan. 19).

She plays in this adventure a young wife who suspects her lawyer husband of certain indiscretions with an actress client. It seems that the night before the income tax returns were due he sat up with this client fathoming her finances until all hours. Two well meaning bachelor friends of his set about to prove to his wife that it is possible for a man and woman to spend a night together in a house without alarming developments. To this end they feed her much champagne and she falls asleep in the bachelors' library.

From such a second-rate and cheap conception little of merit could survive. There were various bright lines and a fair amount of acting. People will go to see Ruth Gordon rather than The Fall of Eve.

The Book of Charm. A drug clerk in a Southern village is desolated because his beloved is going to New York "to work and live". What can he do to keep her? He buys Charm, 412 pages for $8.27, reads the last chapter, on "Sex Appeal". A very adequate and pretty plot, this, for a musical comedy--it offers neat openings for such songs as That snug gle-up-and-hug-store, That hold me tight and-- mug-store-- That clove-kissing, licoricing, Drug-store Ma-a-a-an.

Or a ditty .entitled, Be My Charm Mama, and I'll Be Your Soda Pop. But alas! there are no such songs. For this production, not a musical comedy, seeks to explore further the vein of Merton of the Movies, The Show Off--to be gracious, tactful, gay-- in short, to be charming. The first act--the most amusing first act of the current season--achieves this, but in the second the plot lifts its girlie-girlie face, and ghosts of the unsung ballads interrupt the accomplished small-town gabbing of Maidel Turner, and the adept gaucheries of Drug Clerk Kenneth Dana. Mildred Mac-Leod, as a dreamy girl troubled by an explosion of cloudy and fervent aspiration, plays her part with a pretty precision.

Clouds. Another vague and vagrant production somehow found lodgement on the slippery stairs of metropolitan endeavor. The lodgement will be temporary. The story tells of a shell shocked male and a sweetly suffering mother. The story goes that the leading actress wrote the play under a nom-de-plume. Which explains it.