New Plays in Manhattan

Remote Control. Effective plays may be fashioned about Love and Death and Vanity because these are common concern of the race. So is Radio, which can cause as much turmoil as any of the other three. Consider the malefactions at Chicago's station WPH. An ominous spiritualist called Dr. Workman was broadcasting questions with ghost-given answers. The studio was plunged in darkness, for only so could he connect with his wise phantoms. Whereupon an ugly bevy of Chicago's finest gunmen entered, stripped the jewelry from some debutantes who were about to advertise a Junior League extravaganza.

This greatly annoyed Radio-Announcer Walter Brokenchild (Walter N. Greaza), a likeable, unctuous-voiced fellow, supposed to be a satire on real Radio-Announcer Norman Brokenshire of Manhattan's Station WABC. In competition with the police, he set out to apprehend the thieves. Next evening, during his dark seance, Dr. Workman was murdered. Announcer Brokenchild's efforts at detection were misinterpreted; he nearly went to jail as a colleague of the insidious "Ghost Gang."

The melodrama is by Clyde North, Albert C. Fuller, Jack T. Nelson. With its loudspeakers in the audience, mechanically realistic set and smart cast, it should succeed.

Houseparty. To one who thinks of a college fraternity houseparty as an interlude of innocuous kissing in dark alcoves, light tippling in sequestered nooks and lavatories, and a ceaseless round of hot-and-bothersome dancing, this play will be a surprise. To men of Williams College it may even be shocking. For at the house-party herein represented a murder is done, and the locale of the deed is a chapter house on the pleasant campus at Williamston, Mass.

A town girl, invited by reason of her convenient residence and morals, accuses a sophomore, falsely, of having gotten her with child. When she threatens blackmail, they scuffle. She falls, strikes her head against a fraternity andiron. Her opponent then hides the body in a closet and begins a futile, agonizing pantomime of ease. Brought to trial between the acts, he is acquitted. His brotherly friends prevent him from suicide, dispel his remorse.

Co-Author Roy Hargrave, who plays the unfortunate hero, is a sometime Williams man (1926), an adept at neurotic portraiture. He makes a terrifying thing of the sophomore's plight. Otherwise the play is often ill-designed; its dialog smacks of college magazines rather than colleges. The other coauthor, a Williams alumnus (1923), is Kenneth P. Britton.

Scarlet Pages. A lamentable victim of bad drama is Elsie Ferguson, surely one of the most genteel and talented of players. In recent years she has several times displayed her auburn sightliness (The Moon Flower, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, The House of Women), only to learn that the chords of life which she interpreted were dissonances. In Scarlet Pages she appears as a capable woman lawyer to whom appeals a cabaret girl who has killed her father because of his incestuous attempts.

Lawyer Ferguson accepts the case. There follows a courtroom scene which includes a motley of witnesses scurrying from the audience, a detonating district attorney who is Lawyer Ferguson's out-of-court wooer. The defendant, played by Claire Luce, longtime Follies girl, with a naturalness compounded of peroxide and tears, tells her indelicate story. The scene quivers with hysteria, the drama has thus far been sordidly exciting.

Then you suddenly learn that the defendant is in reality the long-abandoned daughter of Lawyer Ferguson, the result of a girlhood amour; that the murdered man was only the girl's stepfather.

This pathetic device is unfortunate, for Elsie Ferguson's plangent voice and person together with the felicity of her fellow players had begun to dignify the Play.

Murder on the Second Floor. English languor is all very well in the library or over the buns, but it is hardly suitable to a house of crime. In this importation from London a great calm pervades the phrenetic happenings in a Bloomsbury lodging house. The police officers act as though they were investigating the loss of some false teeth rather than a case of throat-slitting. The murdered man might have been stabbed by his East Indian partner in the dope business, by the housemaid whom he had seduced, or by the landlord whose wife he had loved. When you find out you admit the ingenuity of the plot but you are probably too sleepy to care. In a mediocre cast, Drusilla Wills is memorable as a crack-voiced, voluble little spinster who answers police queries with such information as: "I had a most curious dream. I was on a bicycling tour with the President of the United States."