New Plays in Manhattan

him. "(WARNING: him isn't a comedy or a tragedy or a farce or a melodrama or a revue or an operetta or a moving picture or any other convenient excuse for 'going to the theatre'--in fact, it's a PLAY, so let it PLAY; and because you are here, let it PLAY with you. Let it dart off and beckon to you from the distance, let it tiptoe back and snap its fingers under your nose, let it sweep up at you from below or pounce down on you from above, let it creep cautiously behind you and tap you on the back of the neck, let it go all around and over and under you and inside you and through you. Relax, and give this PLAY a chance to strut its stuff--relax, don't worry because it's not like something else--relax, stop wondering what it's all 'about'--like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this PLAY isn't 'about,' it simply is. Don't try to despise it, let it try to despise you. Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU)."

With this fanfare printed on the program, it was not unnatural to expect that him would be a totally tasteless bread pudding of the theatre, containing not even a raison d'etre. Such was what some of the critics who attended its initial performance discovered it to be: not quite sure whether the play had been successful in its attempt to understand them, they wrote scornful words which the box-office at least could not fail to find intelligible. Others, undeceived by the play's pretenses, by its dreary smut, by its fairly frequent lapses into complete and trite absurdity, by long stretches in which author e. e. cummings had obviously fallen into the immature fallacy of trying to tell all about Life in a single paragraph, found partially concealed in its three spasmodic acts many specimens of acute and mordant understanding as well as a fair quantity of ribald wit.

him is a sometimes startlingly successful effort to tell about the complicated agonies that go on inside of a character called Him and a girl called Me. When the focus on this effort is lessened, people on the stage sing "Frankie and Johnny" with splendid effect; homosexuals make their most blatant appearance on the Manhattan stage; three old ladies called "weirds" talk about a pet hippopotamus, saying "It's toasted but it died." On the whole, him is an interesting, well acted and ambitious failure. Author e. e. cummings (his own lower cases) is also the author of a bitter and unwholesome book about the War, The Enormous Room, and of many poems, some of them good, some of them bad.

Forbidden Roads. This was brought from Spain and played by able U. S. actors; its purpose to elucidate, for sly and shifty playgoers, that shining abstract, Honor.

This was accomplished and vigorously, too, by presenting the case of a husband whose wife is about to deceive him. The husband prisons his wife and banishes her paramour, so that his son's name may never be smirched by her evil doings. The son, when he grows to lusty manhood, follows his father's footsteps into a similar domestic snare; he, too, when his mother tells him the story of her extra-marital spasm, sends away the lover and insists on honor for his son's sake. His wife refuses to adopt this course; for so doing, her mother-in-law kills her. The thoughtful content of this problem melodrama is not, obviously, of great value; but the actors use their bellows loudly and they make the play exciting.

The Greenwich Village Follies. The first of the summertime frolics arrived with much blaring of saxophones and baring of legs. Nothing that a revue should have was missing, nor were several items that a revue should not have. Major inclusions:

Dr. Rockwell, who bounces his rubber teeth on the floor and gives little talks through his nose.

Carlos and Valeria, a battery of acrobatic dancers, Carlos catching.

Grace La Rue, Blossom Seeley, Evelyn Law, Bobby Watson, Grace Brinkley, dancing and singing, backed by a large and dexterous chorus.

Comparatively comic parody of popular plays (The Trials and Tribulations of Mary Dugan, The Violent House, etc.).

An unfortunate song about "Life is a Play and we all Play a Part."

There is no logic included in The Greenwich Village Follies; it should be popular on warm nights, among light-minded playgoers.

The Breaks. There is always a breath of country air in the production of J. C. (Father) and Elliott (Son) Nugent. They write their plays, one would suppose, while sitting on the front porch, and then read the script to the neighbors. Although the plot of their latest contribution hangs upon a surgical operation which is highly sophisticated if scientifically vague, the play retains a rural placidity. Perhaps this is because Father Nugent, a portly but very mildly sinister figure, acts his leading role.

He is Jed Willis, a mean, unmarried, sturdy and unscrupulous cotton farmer; because he wants a son, he proposes to his hired girl. Her rough and ready steady, Jim Dolf (Elliott Nugent), has a fight with Farmer Willis, in the course of which he inflicts the injury that makes necessary a sawbone's attention. When this has been supplied, Mr. Willis marries little Amy and discovers that he is incapable of begetting any child. With pathos that comes close to bathos, he allows the hired girl to fly away with her true sweetie; he will marry a rawboned backwoodswoman, because she wants him to; "She don't know what she's getting!" is his sardonic curtain line for this compact, severe, if somewhat unconvincing little play.