New Plays in Manhattan

The Lady of the Orchids. Item: a bedroom at 3:30 a. m. Item: a bed with ermine covers and a plethora of pillows. Item: Peggy Hopkins Joyce in a "creation" better known as a nightgown. Total: a bad French bad bedroom farce.

Mima. David Belasco is the grand old man of the U.S. theatre. To prove this, he wears a turn-around collar and permits himself to be photographed frequently with a benign facial expression. Like Flo Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan and certain other producers, he is never publicly designated as ridiculous. For the last few weeks, articles have appeared in news-sheets telling how "the Dean of the American Stage is working day and night, transforming his theatre into a veritable Hades," how "Belasco's version of Ferenc Molnar's Mima costs $300,000 to present," and lastly how this "lavish production will be Belasco's swan song." So a typical Belasco audience, in limousines, came to see Lenore Ulric in a play which contained devils, scenes of passionate affection and a huge machine for producing evil on the earth.

The machine was the invention of one of the devils; it contained three cylinders, which, when opened, disclosed a marionette called Mima working her wiles on a simple forester. The diabolical mechanic who had designed this dynamo was displaying its efficiency to a Satanic investigation committee which sat in the orchestra pit to watch. Mima took the forester away from his wife with waggles of her physique; she made him commit the sins of the calendar and other more intimate ones, as blackmail and pandery. At last, it was the intention of the devil that the forester should show that he had lost even the virtue of mercy by killing Mima for her crimes. The forester refused to do this, restrained by the little grain of goodness that remains in mortals, however debased they may be grown. The devil's machine, a failure, tottered and crumpled all over the stage and Janos, the forester, escaped through it, back to his wife who was waiting dinner for him. Interesting and incredible, the play was chiefly remarkable for the stage devices it contained; stage devices, since the invention of the cinema, are less potent than they used to be to evoke illusions and it was in displaying his unique skill in their construction that Producer Belasco really sang his swan song.

His skill in making actors out of individuals like Jack Dempsey or even Lenore Ulric is a less rare but more valuable one. When he watched Lenore Ulric display her manikinetic tricks to Satan's jury, Producer Belasco must have smiled to himself, for it was he, not "Dr. Magister," who taught her how to do them. A little girl from Minnesota who had played in stock in Milwaukee, she came to Manhattan and played in The Mark of the Beast. After that, Belasco got her and has had her ever since. Tiger Rose, in 1917, made her very famous; in Kiki, one of the Dean's most profitable ventures, she was a little "midin-ette." Later, she was a part Negress in Lulu Belle. Never married, her engagement has been reported with discouraging frequency; she eats lemons between meals to discourage hoarseness but her voice, nonetheless, is the voice of a dulcet raven. Her father was an army hospital steward and Lenore Ulric was born in New Ulm, Minn., in 1894.

Wings Over Europe. "Up and atom," the scientists cry and in this play with its vaguely beautiful title Poet Robert Nichols and Stage-technician Maurice Browne have imagined a youthful researcher, the nephew of a Prime Minister, to have discovered how to control the tiny secret stars that whirl in thumbnail welkins. Perhaps the most encouraging trait of humanity is the ingenuity which it exhibits in making such discoveries; and perhaps the most discouraging trait in humanity is the lack of ingenuity which it exhibits in making use of them. The young atomist, accordingly, tells the British Cabinet about his findings, and its members, absolutely unable to think of anything to do about it, offer to put him in jail.

The young man, however, by knowing the secret of the atom, appears to have gained the ability to destroy the entire world at a moment's notice. After two acts of argument, this is the necessity with which he is faced, and the Cabinet sits, engaged in nervous little pastimes, waiting for doom, while a clock ticks and the audience remembers happily that it is all a play. Then one member of the Cabinet gets the bright idea of murdering the scientist.

In pointing their sad morals, the authors have found it unnecessary to call any women to their aid; there are none in the cast and Helen Westley, the charming war-horse of the Theatre Guild, is therefore not called upon to add Wings Over Europe to Major Barbara and Strange Interlude, her present assignments. The male actors are uniformly as good as Guild casts should be, acting the preposterous caricatures of the Cabinet members. Alexander Kirkland is Lightfoot, the worker of wonders.

Though Wings Over Europe, by virtue of its lack of sex-appeal and the Wells-Vernian circumstances of its conversational plot, is a freak play, it is also of the kind called "profound." This means that its excitements are cerebral and that spectators, leaving the theatre in their cabs, will be aroused to the point of shouting each other down with explanations of its meanings and with speculations as to what each one would have done, had he or she been the luckless Lightfoot.

Sign of the Leopard. "I cannot disturb Mr. Wallace--he has just started a new play." With these words, the secretary of Edgar Wallace endeavored to discourage a telephonic caller who immediately replied, "Very well--I will hold the wire until he finishes it." Such is the reputation for alacrity in composition of the playwright-novelist-journalist who keeps London and England in a perpetual state of horror at his inventions. In the U. S., his horrid fancies occasion less alarm. In this, what with switching backward and forward, after the fashion cf the cinema, in time sequence, and supplying comparatively comic snitches here and there, Author Wallace's sprig of grue was sufficiently funny, novel and grisly to provoke the intended reactions among Manhattan susceptibles. In it, moreover, Nina Gore, daughter of blind onetime (1907-12) U. S. Senator from Oklahoma Thomas Pryor Gore, made a one-line stage debut; Flora Sheffield exhibited a girlish physique as the heroine and Campbell Gullan, with a tykish burr, played the newspaper sleuth.