New Plays in Manhattan

Bottled is not, as the title might imply, a noisy melodrama of ginthetic sin. Rather, it is a quiet and delicious little comedy about the descendants of a Kentucky distiller who have inherited his plant but who are unable to profit thereby because of the exigencies of the Volstead law and the severities of their progenitor's robust and thrifty widow. At last, after selling her their shares in the enterprise so that she may continue her proud traffic in bootleg, they go away from the old distillery on various romantic errands. Bottled was written by Anne Collins and Alice Timoney, sisters, southerners, journalists. The members of the cast are exceedingly obscure and clever.*

The Waltz of the Dogs. A boast quite as confident if more sensible than that which Author e. e. cummings attached to the program of him (TIME, April 30) is used to introduce this posthumous play by Leonid Andreyev. "This is not a casual play," wrote Author Andreyev; "The Waltz of the Dogs represents the most hidden cruel meaning of tragedy which renounces the meaning and reason of human existence. . . . This is a responsible work and should be produced with deliberate courage. . . ."

The boast is not entirely unjustified by the acid sorrow of this play which examines the interval in a man's life between his failure in love and his suicide. Drinking with a shifty little crony, talking to a good-natured whore, working with meticulous figures in a bank--all the activities of living assume for him the shrill, bloodcurdling futility of the little drumming dance he plays, from time to time, on the high notes of a piano.

Brilliantly translated by Herman Bernstein and brilliantly acted by three members of the cast--Harold Johnsrud, Jules Artfeld and Antoinette Crawford--the icy despair of The Waltz of the Dogs is indeed produced according to the author's recipe. Its somewhat antiquated use of soliloquy and its droning tragedy, unencumbered by contemporary fashions in plot construction, make it a sour entertainment for play-goers drilled in a less difficult tradition. Its sadness is serious and harsh and not the relaxative kind old women cry for.

Present Arms is a loud and energetic musical comedy that deals, in an offhand way, with the amorous misadventures of a cub marine who tells his girl that he is captain and an alumnus of Yale University. Tough though he is, the lady believes him. Her disgust, when she learns the truth, is not dissipated until the final curtain.

No new-fashioned musical comedy is complete unless it has in it a female baritone and a male chorus whose elfin members are capable of shouting, marching and even hitting one another, though not hard. Present Arms is complete and newfashioned. It has one good song, "You

Took Advantage of Me," and several other competent ones. Joyce Barbour is its most noticeable decoration; Charles King, once of Hit the Deck, plays the pretending private.

The Skull. For those who are in any degree sophisticates, this murder mystery, of which the scene is a "deserted" church overpopulated with skull-headed bats and international criminals, will seem hardly more terrifying than a picture of Daddy Browning saying "Boo!" to an African gander. Those who are more willing shock-absorbers will conceivably shiver at its second-hand devices and be ready to believe that the door-slammings and women-screechings were really all part of a plan for trapping a desperate bad man.

Box Seats presents the struggle of a lady with a shady past to keep her daughter out 01 the shade. After a fine first act in which the lady in question, well played by Joan Storm, fights with the man who has been keeping her and takes a job in a traveling burlesque show, Author Edward Massey gets so many ideas that he has no more time for true writing. He turns for help to a theatrical cliche--the daughter (Patricia Barclay) falls in love with a man who has been her mother's lover. But even the cliche turns out to be effective and Box Seats, always good theatre, is in spots good drama as well.

* Bottled opened in Manhattan a fortnight ago; its mention in TIME was inadvertently delayed.