New Plays in Manhattan

Sh! The Octopus. There were two detectives, Mr. Dempsey and Mr. Kelly. They could not refuse a wisp of a girl who asked them to investigate a certain Long Island lighthouse wherein people were frequently murdered. On discovering a painter in the lighthouse, Mr. Dempsey tells Mr. Kelly to find the painter's pallet. Whereupon Mr. Kelly tells the painter to open his mouth, but it is Mr. Dempsey who announces that all painters have weasels. Then lights blink, doors swing, screams are screamed--and people appear, one by one, a shaggy seadog with a hook for a hand, a chirping grandmother, a hail-girl-well-met, etc., etc. They are all looking for a fellow surnamed The Octopus who hangs humans by the feet when he hears the tick of a clock. They go down into the vault of the lighthouse where an octopus tickles Mr. Kelly between his shivering ribs while nobody is looking. Upstairs again for the third act, everybody confesses to be a detective. But one, The Octopus, is not; so he starts killing the others with mystic thunderbolts until an octopus gets him. A terrible noise, like a malignant god stripping his gears, ensues. The curtain goes down, and then up, showing Mr. Dempsey and Mr. Kelly awakening from an alcoholic dream.

There was some doubt whether the authors (Gallaher & Welch) of Sh! The Octopus were trying to be funny or spooky. But they were both. And the audience went shhh--before every act. Clifford Dempsey and Harry Kelly, playing under their own names, were simply splitting.

Dr. Knock. There are those theatregoers who wince when they see, propped up on the stage, a cardboard automobile. To them, this frail vehicle is a symbol for many estimable qualities of stage technique--loud clowning, eccentric costuming, futuristic scenery, boisterous laughter from the actors on the stage--which they, in hypersensitive hauteur, sometimes distrust. As soon as the curtain rose on Jules Remain's "intellectual farce," in France already a minor classic, they knew what to expect. Had usually able Director Richard Boleslavsky made it seem less like a pillow fight, they would have been delighted with this bumptious but bitterly satiric story of a scalawag physician who buys a country practice and makes it pay huge profits on the principle that, if people think they are healthy, it is merely because they don't know what ails them.

Maya is a series of nine intimate scenes in the life of a waterfront whore. These scenes, beautifully played by Aline MacMahon, allow the audience to appreciate the profound, wholesome and unfamiliar fact that Maya, for every man and for a moment, appears as the incarnation of his desires, that the face of this prostitute glitters, in the cracked mirror of each customer's longing, as the image of an ideal. This tenuous truth does not make for dramatic continuity; the play Maya stretches it against a background of homely and revelatory incidents in the life of its heroine--the death of her child, the visits of her comrades in vice, the rapid entrances and exits of her customers.

The play might well have made more exciting sense had it been translated from the highly successful French version of Simon Gantillon by a less arty hand than that of Ernest Boyd who, for example, causes his heroine to say of a girl who has only been a whore for a little while, "She's but newly recruited." Despite this, and despite the fearful crudities contributed by some of the minor members of its cast, Maya pleased critical audiences. Alexander Woollcott, caustic critic to the New York World, was moved to say that it enlarged his heart.*

Rope. Give a play enough rope and it will be a good swinging melodrama. In this one, a revivalist comes to Irontown, Tenn., to purge the place of sin. Among its most ardent sinners are the members of the gang that hangs around the town gasoline pump, captained by Abner Teeftallow who loves Nessie Sutton, and getting into fights. At the instigation of shrewish old Roxie Biggers, aide-de-camp to the revivalist ("Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord"), Abner organizes a lynching for the man who murdered his best pal. But Nessie, rather than let her true love get blood upon his hands, lets Abner carry her upstairs for no good purpose. The lynching goes forward without him. When the second act curtain comes down, the audience is looking at a most realistic hotel wall, behind which a seduction is reaching its climax, and at a noisy, blood-curdling mob in the process of hanging a tragically terrified malefactor.

In the last act there are no further seductions and the lynchings are offstage. Abner's gang fails in a surreptitious attempt to run Nessie Sutton out of town. Abner, satisfied that she really loves him instead of the genial infidel from New York who has been dispensing common sense throughout the action, eagerly marries the girl that he has wronged. At the curtain's fall, the bootlegger has come back to town and the minister is about to leave. Members of Abner's gang sit around the stage in tired complacence; the spirit for lynchings or other good deeds moves them no more, and they are drinking whiskey.

There are moments when this play, tightly condensed from Author T. S. Stribling's famed novel Teeftallow, tautly played by a genuine Southern cast, runs amuck with bitterness and action.

Eager to discover some indigenous and spectacular theme for their talents to prey upon, U. S. playwrights have of late seized upon the subject of revivalism in general and the buxom figure of Aimee Kennedy Semple McPherson in particular. The present season has contributed two such seizures. The first, Bless You, Sister, opened in December and despite the talents of famed and able Actress Alice Brady perished of inattention in mid-January. The second, Salvation, opened three weeks ago with famed and able Actress Pauline Lord; last week it, too, quit. The preacher in Rope is not one of its main characters but the evil consequences of his doings supply, in good part, its theme.

Our Betters was written twelve years ago by famed William Somerset Maugham as an indictment of those unfortunate U. S. women who, by purchasing the titles of European nobility and then noisily misconducting themselves, seem less to deserve their elaborate and acquired nomenclature than the simple label slut. To this honking propaganda, a modern audience dares say "Boo!" The play is a rapidly ironic comedy of bad manners. Ina Claire lends it the exciting charm of her acting and her tireless beauty.

Whispering Friends. On the night it opened, the more important play reviewers, foes and friends of its author, famed George M. Cohan, whispered among themselves and decided to attend the revival of Our Betters (see above). What they missed was one more farce about the newly married couple which was, in fact, less of an addition to this smoking room form of drama than a repetition of innumerable predecessors. The girl friend of the rich wife says to her, in effect: "I think your husband married you for money. I will flirt with him and we shall see." Her advances distress the stupid husband; his "pal" gives him this advice: "Your wife's friend is not flirting with you, she is kidding you. Pretend to be taken in and see how far she will go. In the meantime, I will make moves toward your wife." As might be expected, misunderstandings arise. Animated only by the mutations of these the plot flickers on with the irritating and mechanical regularity, of a grindstone twirling slowly to a standstill. At last, the long and impatiently awaited reconciliations are effected.

A Cohan first night has often made a noticeable sputter on Broadway. Hence it annoyed the author of Whispering Friends to find that the critics in whom he had put trust had neglected his play and that the minor critics, sent in their stead, had abused it. The annoyance felt by Author Cohan was expressed in a series of confidently derisive advertisements which he caused to be printed in Manhattan newssheets above his own signature.

A sample:

TO THE THEATRE GOING PUBLIC OF NEW YORK CITY

If you want to get a real line on how surely ninety percent of the so-called dramatic criticism in this town has become a matter of pure personal likes and dislikes go to the Hudson Theatre and see

"WHISPERING FRIENDS"

If you don't agree with me that it is a great little American comedy and the best constructed play in years--then never take my word again.

(Signed) GEORGE M. COHAN

*It was recently reported that Mr. Woollcott had informed his executive editor, Herbert Bayard Swope, that he will not continue his critical duties after his contract with the World expires in May. He plans to vacation in Italy, keep away from Broadway for a sabbatical year to renew his "sanity."