New Plays in Manhattan

Machinal. It is related that Sophie Treadwell, author of Machinal and in private life the wife of Sports-Columnist W. O. McGeehan, witnessed the murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; that brooding upon it, she was able to select from the gaudy tangle a single thread on which to build her tragedy. Thus in Machinal a young woman marries, to escape the routine of work in an office, a gross and chuckling businessman. She bears him a child which she hates as she fears its father; then, in a speakeasy, she meets a man with whom she falls in love. He tells her how, in Mexico, he killed a native by hitting him on the head with a bottle full of pebbles. When he has gone away, the woman does this to her husband and to explain his death she tells the story of "two big, dark-looking men." In court she confesses her crime and in prison is killed for having committed it.

This commonplace story of a girl who is lonely in the world and frightened by its machinery is related on the stage by means of episodic scenes. The girl is beautifully played by an actress new to the Manhattan stage, Zita Johann, whom the expert Arthur Hopkins has discovered among the ranks of road players and raised, as he raised Barbara Stanwyck and Pauline Lord, to stardom. George Stillwell plays the woman's husband with a touch of burlesque that throws the role out of drawing with the true characters opposed to it. The sets, designed by Robert Edmond Jones, are changed against a cyclorama.

Machinal is not a play which keeps its audience always excited and interested. It slips sometimes into banality. Some scenes are ineffective. But Machinal does something far more important than provide entertainment. Sometimes it stretches taut the bare thread of its narrative, and like An American Tragedy it has moments which are so true that they are tragic. In these moments the disorderly processional of those who are born in pain to death in sorrow comes abruptly to have a frightening and enormous significance.

Good Boy. In the effort to bring novelty to the musical show, Arthur Hammerstein sliced up his stage in the most extraordinary manner, running treadmills from wing to wing so that sets could be switched without new backdrops, and so that his actors, trotting briskly along to keep pace with the changing scenery, had a little bit the look of squirrels in a cage or the race horses in the last act of The Girl from Kentucky.

A consistent favorite on the track was Eddie Buzzell in the part of a youngster who came from the country to Manhattan where, by the simple trick of owning a doll which suggested a good number in a musical show, he made a fortune and won the heroine, impersonated by the spry and pretty Barbara Newberry. Aside from the mechanical innovations, the most noteworthy ingredient of Good Boy was Charles Butterworth, cast in the role of a cynical farm-lout. This curious and doleful personage often put his hands above his head and remarked, "Oh, the pity of it."

The only noticeable song in the show, "I Wanna Be Loved by You," kept bubbling out of Helen Kane. Helen Kane puts a teasing twist in her delivery of "But-dut-de-dut" or "Vo-do-de-o," which she practiced first in a single act in vaudeville, later in Shubert musical comedy and most recently in Publix Theatres, with the inexpert assistance of Paul Ash.

Heavy Traffic. Many are the theatregoers who demand, for their lightest entertainment, an exposition, bright with epigrams, not of mirthful innocence but of adultery. Thus the theme of Arthur Richman's ill-illumined comedy of the Park Avenue elite is haughty but it's vice. The lady of his piece is married to an urbane cuckold who regards benignantly her indiscretions with a pianist and financier. When he grows tired of her promiscuous activities, she evades his attempt to catch her. At the end, however, trapped with poetic justice, she falls prey to the advances of his private detective.

Arthur Richman's comedy is ill-illumined insomuch as it fails to provide the electric brilliance of witty, speeches which must accompany such efforts. Its sophisticated persons light their cigarets with the elan that should precede an epigram; then they blow the smoke out as if they were at home. The company is distinguished: A. E. Matthews, the hero of a thousand stage affairs, is the detective who telephones to the cuckold, assuring him that in a week at latest he will have grounds for a New York State divorce. The cavorting adulteress is Mary Boland.

The Phantom Lover. Whether, as written by Georg Kaiser, this might have been a flip and stinging comedy or an exciting allegory illustrated with melancholy symbols, no one could determine. It was clumsily translated and five out of six of its players staggered about the stage with moans and agonies, glaring, and thumping the furniture with their heavy hands. A feeble-minded virgin, seeing a young lieutenant looking at the rings in a jeweler's window, became enamored. When she sat next him in church, she regarded this as a marriage ceremony. When he occupied an adjoining chair at the opera, she called it a consummation. But when someone came down the passage past her door that night, she thought something more would be in order; so she grabbed a man who turned out to be, not her lieutenant, but the butcher's boy, creeping to a kitchen rendezvous. Soon the balmy girl became a mother. Her uncle dragged the lieutenant toward her, stressing the necessity for nuptials. Unable to agree, the lieutenant began by protesting his innocence of even the preliminaries of fatherhood; but eventually, finding some obscure charm in the lady's dementia, he claimed the bastard as his own, embraced the mad mademoiselle and then, kicking an epigram across the stage, killed the butcher's boy with his sword. The butcher's boy was played with mischievous skill by Romney Brent.