The Best Plays
These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:
SERIOUS THE DYBBUK--A deeply moving folk legend from the Yiddish, done magnificently into English by the Neighborhood Playhouse.
THE GREEN HAT--Katherine Cornell selling Michael Arlen's perfume and making you like it.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE-- Walter Hampden and Ethel Barrymore in a generous and markedly satisfying revival.
CRAIG'S WIFE--A sharply etched portrait of a woman who worshiped her home and drove her husband out of it.
THE MASTER BUILDER--Eva Le Gallienne and Ibsen in sound collaboration.
YOUNG WOODLEY--The trials of an English schoolboy who fell in love with his tutor's wife.
LESS SERIOUS THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN--A sharp and knowing satire on how people act behind the scenes at almost any theatre.
THE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY-- Ina Claire and an astonishingly capable troupe in a slender but scintillating tale of English country life.
ARMS AND THE MAN--The Theatre Guild's revival of Bernard Shaw's early and stimulating war satire.
CRADLE SNATCHERS--A rowdy tale of elderly women and three young men, exceptionally well played and preposterousy prosperous.
IS ZAT SO?--Most of the cast have departed to show London how U. S. prizefighters talk. The local substitutes are highly capable.
MUSICAL Maidens, melody and mischief are most agreeably combined in: The Cocoanuts, The Student Prince, Tip-Toes, Sunny, The Vagabond King, Artists and Models, No, No, Nanette.
New Plays
Sweetheart Time is, naturally, a musical comedy. It is not a very good musical comedy but that is not unusual. It is not particularly bad, and that too is not unusual. It has a lot of dancing and at least two good tunes, and a few minutes with Harry Kelly here and there that are happily hilarious. The piece is based on an old one of William Collier's called Never Say Die, and relates the adventures of a young man whom the doctors had allotted one more month to live. Said critics: "It is funny, is it not? how fellows like that in fiction always make a fool out of the doctors. The American Medical Association ought to do something about it."
The Dream Play. Strindberg's unwieldy and unhappy picture of the futility of life has been brought to being for the first time in the U. S. by the Provincetown Playhouse. As indicated by the title the action follows the wild imaginings of one whose mind is unlocked in sleep. Wealth and pleasure, disease and religion are all surveyed in a swift succession of dismal pictures ending in something like death. Christ walking upon the waters is one of the incidents. Though not badly acted by Mary Fowler and Stanley Howlett, the production is pretty generally heavy going.
Move On was a story of newspaper life. Was is accurate. The run was brief.
The Makropoulos Secret. Karel Capek, Czech author who wrote R. U. R. and who pronounces his name "Chapek," has fastened upon the curiously fascinating and not wholly unusual theme of one who lived beyond her time. Marty, the singer heroine of his conception, has lived 339 years and is still active.
Marty had a secret formula which disappeared. In the play she looks for it; finally it is found and rejected by a group of contented mortals, who burn it to ashy bits. The play is a mixture of mystery melodrama and philosophy, neither of which seems to fulfill itself fully.
Helen Menken played the part, the same Helen Menken who for these many seasons has been playing the downtrodden French girl in Seventh Heaven. The new part is far more difficult and not so artfully woven round with that mysteriously effective element known as "theatre." Neither the play nor the actress was as excellent as many people hoped they would be.
Money Business. Lew Fields, who teamed so successfully and so long with Joe Weber, comes back by himself in a straight comedy. It is the story of a delicatessen dealer who plunged in Wall Street with grievous consequences. Mr. Fields is pretty funny now and then, and the play is pretty dull all the time.
The Great God Brown. Eugene O'Neill's new play will precipitate afresh and with renewed violence the confabulations about his pre-eminence among U. S. playwrights, the reason being that his characters have been chosen right at the theatre's ticket-window instead of, as is O'Neill's custom, out of a primitive and hence foreign environment like a barge, a jungle, a boulder-strewn backwoods farm. He has reached into "ordinary" people's lives under "commonplace" circumstances and handled them with an intensity that seems deeper-rooted, more inarticulate, more confusing than ever. We are used to seeing rivers dredged but it is appalling to behold excavations in the front lawn.
Billy Brown loves Margaret, who loves her conception of Dion Anthony, whom she marries. To represent the false Dion, and the false Billy whom Margaret loves after Dion is dead, and the third Billy, who has been amassing wealth during the real Billy's period of despair, the players are provided with masks, which they clap on and whisk off as their personalities exchange ascendancy. Productive of a wide gamut of emotions and effective for about half of the 13 scenes, this trickery becomes a dizzying harlequinade at the last. Leona Hogarth (Margaret) and William Harrigan (Billy Brown) cope very successfully with their strenuous parts, both masked and unmasked. Anne Shoemaker is bravely understanding in the all but unstageable mask of Cybel, prostitute and symbol of Earth.