New Plays in Manhattan

A Play Without a Name. Upon that familiar pattern, the triangle, Austin ("Seventh-Heaven") Strong has superimposed a less readily recognizable, fourth-dimensional figure. It consists of a strong-interlusive plotting of the working of the human brain.

Kenneth MacKenna is a young husband, out to make good in the financial world. To him and to Peggy Wood, his ambitious wife, an appointment to the German office of his firm symbolizes success second only to an appointment to the Shanghai branch. On the day before the appointment is to be announced he resigns his position, feeling that he is not to get the coveted appointment. Next day he tells his wife, is still explaining away when in bursts an old flame. At this point Playwright Strong trephines the husband's skull, lays open the human brain. Centers of nerve control are represented by figures at sets of levers much like those in a railroad switching tower. One normal voice speaks the words that the husband has spoken aloud during the first scene of the play. Another voice, terrifyingly mechanical, intones the husband's unspoken thoughts. The "nerve centers'' also speak their reactions, crying "pain! pain!" when MacKenna stubs his toe.

The brain scene ends and the play continues conventionally up to the inevitable amorous scene between the husband and his old flame. Once again there is a flashback to the cerebral. With no subtlety at all the action of the brain during a complete seduction is described.

Remorsefully the unfaithful husband returns to his wife and upon learning that his firm has rewarded the ambition which she stirred, he penitently confesses and is given absolution.

Peggy Wood (whose fame so transcends that of her own husband, John VanAlstyn Weaver, that he has been facetiously called Mister Peggy Wood) makes a good wife; Katherine Wilson is real as the seductress who "makes" a good husband; Playwright Strong has made a good play.

Once an architect, the author has worked on the piece intermittently, since 1916. Two chairs in the play once belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was the husband of Mr. Strong's grandmother.

Major Barbara might more descriptively have been titled, "A spectacular demonstration of the theory that money makes morals--complete with characters, including: one Millionaire; one Earl's Daughter or Millionaire's Wife; their Son, an imbecile sample of Young England; their two Daughters, one beautiful of face, one a Major in the Salvation Army, who tries to convert her father; two Suitors, a noisy Nitwit and a Professor of Greek who becomes by the odd and engaging circumstances of the plot, heir presumptive to the Millionaire's munition works and who, by the odd and engaging developments of the thesis, is not thereby deprived of the affections of the second daughter." It is not so called, because George Bernard Shaw wrote it in 1905, before he had become addicted to long titles, long whiskers, or the movietone; and before his interest in abstractions had supplanted his excitement about people.

Critic St. John Ervine in the New York World last week related that Bernard Shaw had once assured him that the characters of whom he wrote were interesting to him only as megaphones through which he himself might voice his social speculations; but since it is impossible to have much interest in ideas about human problems without having first an even larger interest in the human beings who are faced with them, Shaw's plays, among them Major Barbara, are interesting for their people rather than their propaganda. Before any writer can portray Rummy Mitchens, a Salvation Army derelict, portrayed on the stage by Alice Cooper Cliffe, or Bill Walker (Percy Waram), he must have eaten humble cake in the mission houses of his trade. And before any writer can despise any human being as thoroughly as Author Shaw despises the son of his mouthpiece millionaire, it is necessary for the writer to have investigated him with the inquisitive sympathy of an artist, rather than the brief, scornful scrutiny of one who needs only a dunce and a trumpet.

The bright, playful people of the Theatre Guild have long gambled luckily on the golden Shaw, and they never succeed better than when they exhibit his sly profundities to their legion of supporters. Winifred Lenihan is Major Barbara, Helen Westley is her sharp-tongued mother. Elliot Cabot is the Greek professor who at one point addresses Millionaire Dudley Digges as Mephistopheles, which Dudley Digges has been in Faust, until quite recently.

Caponsacchi, the Arthur Goodrich-Rose Palmer dramatization of The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning, which Walter Hampden played to cheers last year, he revived last week, as ably as ever.

The Royal Box. The Belmont is the name of a hotel, Belmont is the name of a racetrack, Belmont is the name of a theatre. With the others the Belmont Theatre has much in common: the one caters to transients, guests for a day, a week; the other presents events of speed. Many a speedy transient will have been under the roof of the Belmont Theatre before the season ends. Already the fourth of the season has come, will go. It presents Walker Whiteside in a comedy first written by Alexandre Dumas, rewritten and presented three decades ago by Charles Coghlan, exhumed by Mr. Whiteside for 1928. The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.

The Wild Duck. Before Shaw, Ibsen was the mightiest of modern playwrights. He learned about life in an apothecary's shop and looked down at it later with savage Nordic melancholy. In The Wild Duck he wrote about a man who was the enemy of most people because he told the truth, even when truth-telling was tantamount to telling tales. Gregers Werle, the son of a rich Norwegian mine-owner, suspected that his libertine father had disposed of an old mistress by marrying her to Hialmar Ekdal, the son of a man whom the libertine had ruined. Gregers Werle tattles to Hialmar Ekdal, who is much too little a fool to disbelieve him. Knowing that his adolescent daughter is really the child of another man, he snubs her love for him, wherefore she kills herself.

A deeply tragic play, The Wild Duck is revived beautifully by the Actors' Theatre (which produced it five years ago), with Blanche Yurka as the placid wife of Hialmar Edkal and Dallas Anderson as her husband. Ralph Roeder is Gregers Werle who drops the final curtain by announcing that his true mission in life is ". . . to be thirteenth at table."

The Sacred Flame. A young man, crippled, paralyzed and impotent as a result of an airplane crash during the War, worships his wife for five years from a wheelchair. He knows he is doomed to be an invalid for life; his only happiness is seeing his beautiful wife and believing that she remains faithful, to him. In the sixth year, the young man dies in the night. His nurse bluntly informs the family that he was murdered (with an overdose of a sleeping drug). There are three possible murderers: his wife, his brother, his mother.

Motives: his wife is with child by his brother; his mother has observed this. Thus--out of love or pity for the invalid--mother, brother or wife would have reason to spare the invalid the pain of disillusion. Suffice it to say here that love was the motive; and you can easily pick the murderer.

The nurse is the most important character in the play. Her idea of DUTY is a strange mixture of hate for the invalid's wife, love for the invalid, horror of sexual irregularity. Of her, the mother says: "I cannot help feeling sorry for a girl who has so much virtue and so little charm."

The three women in the play are cast almost perfectly. Clare Eames, as the nurse, is tremendously moving, though once or twice a little over-hating. Casha Pringle, as the wife, is a small-faced, tense English girl, who, when she removed her opera wrap in the first act, revealed a figure which caused the audience to gasp with approval. Mary Jerrold, as the mother, is wise and charming.

The play is from the pen of no less a person than William Somerset (Of Human Bondage) Maugham. Melodramatic in outline, declamatory in some lines, slow in the first act, it remains not a profound play, but a sensitive, skillful one.

The Jealous Moon. Jane Cowl, indisputably among the more decorative of Manhattan's heroines, put herself to the perhaps necessary task of writing a play that would deserve embellishments by her upon the stage. The play was romantically sweet, about Pierrot, Columbine and Scaramouche. A designer of dolls, dreaming in far from Freudian fashion of their unfortunate intrigues, found advices in it for his own and on waking up for the epilogue, promised to be true to Judy. Jane Cowl was Judy and, in the doll-designer's dream, she played the part of Columbine.

Few stars can write their own plays, though Noel Coward in This Year of Grace, Mae West in Diamond Lit and George M. Cohan, in past years, have been able to do so. Jane Cowl remains a better actress than a playwright. The Jealous Moon is so sweet that it excites a mental toothache.

Rainbow. The movements and the moods of Laurence Stallings are mysterious to contemplate. He wrote Plumes, a good and savage book. He wrote, with Maxwell Anderson, What Price Glory, a strong though over-rated play. Then he played with the moving pictures and the result was The Big Parade. When in Manhattan, he lives at odd hours in an inconspicuous apartment house and it was during his odd hours in the apartment house that he wrote, with Oscar Hammerstein II, Rainbow, a musical play which contains a mule and a catchy song called "I Like You As You Are.''

Due to the behavior of the mule and the inefficiency of scene-shifters, the opening of Rainbow was a long affair, and not so auspicious as it should have been. The story, which had an epic air, concerned a buckskin buccaneer who broke jail and joined the California gold rush, gathering women on the way. His maneuvers led him to pleasing spots, where gaming tables were and where prospectors plied their toothpicks or sang unruly songs.

'T Want a Man," growled Libby Holman, and, although she frowned as she intoned her need, no one could understand why it was not instantly gratified; Louise Brown pretended charmingly to be a Colonel's daughter. While its colours were a little too bright, the Rainbow was a pleasant thing to see and, because of its rowdy theme, a good omen for future minstrelsies.