New Plays in Manhattan

Girl Trouble concerns a shy youth who loves one girl, is pursued by another, loved by a third, and tormented by his relatives. With a disturbing lack of comic inspiration, the play proceeds until the right girl wins.

The Grey Fox, billboards announced, was Niccolo Machiavelli, but audiences found to their disappointment that this Machiavelli, played by Henry Hull, written by one Lemist Esler (Yale Drama School product), and directed by William A. Brady Jr., was not, as history has imagined him, a murderous medieval wardheeler but on the contrary, a single-hearted patriot whose love-life was unfortunate. An overwritten text and an overdressed cast somehow made it seem improbable, uninteresting.

Animal Crackers. Zeppo Marx has good stage manners though he is otherwise without importance; Chico Marx plays the piano well and can, to some extent, imitate an Italian; Groucho Marx is garrulous and mad; but Harpo Marx has a wild and silent face, his desires are mysterious and he can play the harp. The four Marx brothers cavort together in Animal Crackers.

George S. Kaufman's book is far from being good and the plot of the show is too foolish to mention. There are songs and dancing, the former less remarkable than the latter. But Harpo, when he is through playing the harp, peers like a prisoner through the strings of his instrument; he pursues a girl quietly wherever she goes; his are light fingers as well as light touch and he picks pockets with dexterous greed; on meeting a new person, he offers his leg to be held and he whistles strangely, in his own way.

Gods of the Lightning. When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for the murder of a paymaster, there were many people who thought they were unjustly punished. "Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs." said these people, "and they will not be forgotten." Thereafter, little was heard concerning Sacco and Vanzetti; it appeared that one of the most exciting episodes of U. S. jurisprudence was not even to arouse the enthusiasm of artists capable of crying in a prosperous wilderness. Then, last week. Maxwell Anderson (coauthor of What Price Glory) and Harold Hickerson (piano-theory teacher at the New York Conservatory of Musical Art) aided by Director-Producer Hamilton McFadden and a seasoned cast, delivered a play which caused youthful Marxians to applaud for five minutes after the first night curtain, aided in their bravos by seasoned play-goers who knew they had seen a good play.

The gloomy tale is retold with vindictive emphasis. The names of the anarchists are Macready and Capraro; Macready is engaged to marry the lovely and emotional daughter of a restauranteur who himself confesses in court to the murder for which Macready and Capraro are electrocuted, out of sight of the audience. In the courtroom scene, far more exciting than its actual model, Macready asks pertinent questions and Capraro is full of idealistic gentleness.

The play is partly preachment but it is so exciting that even Otto Kahn, you may be certain, would wish to set his teeth in the ear of the suave, knavish judge and in that of the dirty district attorney. The minor parts are badly taken; but Charles Bickford, as the flaring Macready, Horace Braham, as the less truculent, beseeching Capraro, and Sylvia Sidney, as the well-gowned and eventually hysterical fiancee of the former make you, as one shrill memuer of the audience remarked, wish to "go to Boston and kill a few people."

Jealousy is played by a cast of two persons (Fay Bainter, John Halliday) and a telephone. Its one set is a neatly furnished studio; offstage noises are confined to round knocks upon a resonant downstairs door. Jealousy, which Eugene Walter derived from the French of Louis Verneuil, will be a popular play among little theatre addicts who have no cash.

Jealousy avoids being entirely a tour de force because its theme is one in which suggestion is more powerful than presentation. Maurice Theulot suspects his wife, Valerie, of intrigues with an old lecher, Lambertier.

Maurice murders Lambertier; Valerie admits the adultery which she has lied about before and committed for reasons which are the weakest element in the play. Maurice then gives himself up to the police to save an innocent man from execution. Valerie, by explaining the true circumstances, will save her husband.

So skilfully do Fay Bainter and John Halliday play their parts that the anger, folly, fatigue, cowardice, love, lies and bravery of Maurice and Valerie Theulot burn brightly, with unsteady continuity, like candles in a room of woven draughts.

Exceeding Small is the way in which the mills of God grind, as stated by Friedrich Von Logau in a much misquoted German poem.* In this play, the first offering of the Actors' Theatre this season, the mills ground a girl, Gert, and a boy, Ed. Ed, who earned $20 a week, married Gert. On his wedding night, he discovered that he had a weak heart and would soon die. The idea of suicide came to him like an inspiration or the thought of a journey. Gert did not wish to live any longer either; so Ed closed the window and opened the gas-jet.

The title would, as a matter of fact, apply to the play better if it were not a quotation. Author Caroline Francke is writing, not about the vengeance of romantic deities upon heroes, but about tiny people and their puny, terrible grief. So honestly does she do this and so honestly, if not brilliantly, do Eric Dressier and Ruth Easton, as well as the minor members of the cast, interpret her observations that the sorrows of small characters assume their true enormity and depth. There are moments of murmur about wage-slaves and capitalists which injure but do not destroy the sometimes strained, but plausible and exciting, sadness of Exceeding Small.

*Though the mills of God grind slowly,

Yet they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience He stands waiting,

With exactness grinds He all."--Retribution.