New Plays in Manhattan

Nice Women.

William A. Grew is the playwright who prepared this gallimaufry of old notions. The ancient, familiar ingredients are many in number, confused in arrangement. The Girard family wants to marry Daughter Geraldine to her diamond-studded admirer, Mark Chandler. He happens to be the boss of both Father Girard and of William Wells, a callow underling whom Daughter Geraldine really loves. If Daughter Geraldine marries the importunate Chandler, it will mean limousines and regal delicacies for all. But if she marries the struggling Wells, according to her ambitious mother and young sister, the frustrate Chandler will immediately oust his successful rival and possibly Father Girard. Young Sister Elizabeth talks about sex right out in the open and vents a precocious materialism. She and her mother so belabor gentle Geraldine that she, cowed, consents to marry Chandler. But beforehand, with an abandon quite inconsistent with her chill softness, she gives herself to the disconsolate Wells. This she blurts out at a Christmas feast given by Chandler for practically the entire cast. Does Chandler react as" one might have expected from Mother Girard's warnings? He does not. He is happy in the happiness of the lovers. But by this time the audience has been prepared for his magnanimity by seeing him spurn a splendidly groomed and golden mistress (Verree Teasdale) for the less lustrous Geraldine, a noble act described in the play as a "virgin complex." The audience is likewise not surprised when, deprived of Geraldine, he goes honeymooning with her sister Elizabeth, the clever virgin. The veteran Robert Warwick is properly apparelled and deep-voiced as Chandler. A small, piquant brunette named Sylvia Sidney makes the wisecracking Elizabeth thoroughly fresh and annoying.

Adam's Apple is ever so vaguely reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Even as Wilde's Algernon Moncrieff invented his mythical friend Bunbury for a social convenience, so Playwright Test Dalton's stockmarketeer invents an opulent "Uncle John" as an excuse to escape from his wife of nights. When a burglar is caught by the wife and poses as "Uncle John" there is a great deal of embarrassment all around, no small part of which is genuine, shared by actors and audience for a play both flat and flimsy.