New Plays in Manhattan

Before You're 25. "If a man isn't a socialist sometime before he's 25," says Playwright Kenyon Nicholson, "he has no heart. If he is a socialist after he's 25 he has no head." In this Nicholson play, Clement Corbin, son of a wealthy Chicagoan, has a heart, a radical magazine called The Torch, a baby born en route through Indiana, the baby's mother, no marriage certificate. He is a determined socialist. How his family and would-be wife combine to make him marry and drop The Torch for a furniture house-organ, is developed in somewhat strained comedy. In searching for laughs Playwright Nicholson has lost the convincing humanity which characterized The Barker. Eric Dressier, Mildred McCoy play the leads.

The Love Duel. It would save a great deal of translating if English-writing dramatists could learn of the debonair didos that presumably occur in Vienna and Budapest after the curtains are drawn. But to most English-writing dramatists sex remains the cue for either a problem play or an Oriental extravaganza. Therefore central Europe is combed for playwrights akin to the gently libidinous Ferenc Molnar. One of the latest combings is Lili Hatvany, authoress of The Love Duel.

The play itself would cause no exultation. But Ethel Barrymore acts the part of the jaded lovelady of Budapest who meets a sleek male counterpart. Ensues a mutual struggle against sentiment. Even in Budapest it is difficult not to care for the person with whom one has an affair, so after the child is born, a tremulous surrender to the exigencies and joys of affection occurs high in a Swiss chalet. This cycle of repression and catharsis is endowed with the mysteries of personality and feeling by Actress Barrymore, statuesquely assisted by Louis Calhern.

The Camel Through the Needle's

Eye by Czech Surgeon-Playwright Frantisek Langer is the last production of the eleventh Theatre Guild season. It is a success story in the mid-European idiom. Alik is the silent, dawdling son of a millionaire. All that he subsequently becomes, his redemption from a life of complete inertia, he owes to a girl, Susi. Naturally, since Alik is Continental, Susi is not his wife. Possessing the shrewdness of the slums, she manages, when Alik's father ousts her from Alik's modernistic chambers, to take Alik away with her, to make him work. Together they found a model dairy in Prague. Dispelling U. S. qualms, their marriage looms.

Elliot Cabot and Miriam Hopkins play the lovers. But their ardors are scarcely as exciting as the tart philosophizing of old Mrs. Pesta, a female shard, played by Helen Westley of the Guild Board of Directors. Director Westley has acted in 37 of the Guild's 70 productions. As the mother of Susi she makes the first act so brilliant that the last two are inevitably the worse for her longer absence from the stage.

Fifteen years ago three men sat in a bookshop. They argued as to whether Lord Dunsany's play The Glittering Gate was easy to act. Finding a copy of it on a shelf, they made the simplest test. Robert Edmond Jones shaped scenery from wrapping paper. Philip Moeller and Edward Goodman gestured, intoned romantic lines. Helen Westley, who happened in, was audience. From this beginning came the Washington Square Players and eventually the Theatre Guild.* Starting officially in 1919, the Guildsmen planned two plays for their first season. They estimated they would need $2,000. They got $675--revenue from advance subscriptions taken by 135 sanguine friends and acquaintances. Most of the sum was invested in Jacinto Bena-vente's Bonds of Interest, a dismal failure. With the residue the Guildsmen painted new scenery on the back of the old and gave St. John Ervine's John Ferguson. This time their success was tumultuous. The play ran for 156 performances, then toured. Last fortnight the Guildsmen celebrated a prosperous tenth anniversary. In Manhattan was a subscription list of 32,000, the Guild's own handsome playhouse (to build it a $500,000 bond issue was offered and over-subscribed), and four other theatres which the Guild habitually leases. A gradual expansion policy, including tours through small towns and seasons in cities other than New York, has built up large, supplementary subscription lists: Chicago, 7,000; Boston and Philadelphia, 5,000 each; Baltimore, 3,500; Cleveland, 2,000. Last fortnight's anniversary news was the addition of Washington, Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, as Guild cities. Among plays to be offered are: Caprice, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Wings Over Europe, R. U. R., Strange Interlude, Marco Millions, Volpone. A rotational system among the actors will assure each circuit city of the best Guild talent.* No matter what players tread the Guild's stage, stardom is avoided. Names are not posted in lights outside the theatre or in large type in the programs. There are no solo bows, no bows at all until the end of the play, when the entire cast ap pears. Emphasis is on the play, with known and unknown actors striving and sharing alike except as to salary. The result of these policies, maintained by hard work and patience, has been the discovery of the fact that the U. S., including the hinterland, will clap hands for fine drama as loudly as it does for good circuses, jazz bands, leg shows. Rockbound is about a salty family caught in the fishnets of circumstance on the Maine coast. Maw and Paw Higgins derive no poetic ecstacies from their native rocks and waves, but they are fairly well adjusted until Maw's long-lost illegitimate daughter returns and begins to yearn for her halfbrother. Events then seethe through Paw's discovery of Maw's sins to one of those scenes in which dire offstage happenings--a girl about to leap from the rocks--are described by frenzied actors who unaccountably remain on the stage. The dank chronicle was written by Michael Kallesser and Amy Wales.

*The Guild is now supervised by a Board of Directors: Theresa Helburn, executive director; Philip Moeller, producing director; Lee Simonson, scenic director: Maurice Wertheim, investment advisor; Lawrence Langner, play reader; Helen Westley. *Guild players, past and present: Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Dudley Digges, Margalo Gillmore, Richard Bennett, Arnold Daly, James K. Hackett, Eva Le Gallienne, Jacob Ben-Ami, Roland Young, Henry Travers, Blanche Yurka, Laura Hope Crews, Frieda Inescort.