New Plays in Manhattan

Red Rust demonstrates that whereas few outsiders know what is happening in Russia, the Russians themselves are beginning to find out. A Soviet satire by V. Kirchon and A. Ouspensky, its hero is a great-nosed fellow called Terekhine who uses his prestige as a revolutionary soldier to bully his comrades and preempt their women. When Nina, whose "bourgeois" yearnings for wifehood and maternity have not been stifled by propaganda, tells Terekhine she is pregnant, he curses. When he has persuaded her to have an abortion and she still pesters him, he murders her.

The play ends with Terekhine's crime discovered and his punishment in the offing. He obviously represents the gamut of hypocritical, cruel, supremely selfish obstacles to the Soviet ideal. At one point he rehearses a speech about hunger with his mouth full of bread and beer. But even as Terekhine is apprehended, so the authors seem to imply that the Soviet cause will ultimately be purified. Full of good talk and temperamental skirmishes, the play reveals a sophisticated degree of analysis. It is the first production of the Theatre Guild Studio, experimental offshoot of the Theatre Guild employing its younger members. Herbert J. Biberman, onetime Guild stage manager and product of Professor George Pierce Baker's Yale School of Drama, directed the play and appears to great advantage as the sardonic, vicious Terekhine.

Michael and Mary. A. A. Milne is an inveterate romancer and everything he writes he invests with storybook sweetnesses which delight some people, make others feel bilious. The intrusion of severe ethical concerns into Mr. Milne's pink and downy world would be as incongruous as the speculations of Kant in the mouth of a Fauntleroy. Yet that is what occurs in his newest play.

Michael meets Mary in the British Museum. She has been deserted by a bounder of a husband, is destitute, and consequently profits greatly by the loans which Michael persuades her to accept. Striving toward greater respectability than the law allows them, the two are married, thus laying themselves open to prosecution for bigamy. Of course the wayward husband eventually returns. In an attempt to blackmail Michael, who is by this time a prosperous novelist, the scoundrel's insolence leads to a scuffle and he falls dead of a heart attack. Still seeking the highest moral good, Michael and Mary decide to conceal the truth of the incident from the courts for their son's sake. A decade later, when Michael explains the whole history to the boy and informs him that he is a bastard, the boy offers not the slightest objection.

The play reminds you how absorbing ethical problems may be, even when they arise among such pastel make-believes as Mr. Milne's characters. And though his answers are questionable, Mr. Milne knows how to dramatize his questions. The moral excitements are excellently stirred by Henry Hull and Edith Barrett, while Harry Beresford's vignette of a London bobby is beyond praise.

Inspector Kennedy is described on the program as "an unusual play." You begin to question this description when you observe that the first character scheduled to appear is one Wong, played by a gentleman named Goo Chong. Subsequently a nasty old New Yorker, secretly engaged in the narcotic traffic, is mysteriously slain and Wong, who is every bit as traditional as you expected him to be, meets an identical end. Inspector Kennedy, who discovers the secret shooting aperture and the guilty party, is played by lean, grey-haired William Hodge with interminable silences broken by curt, manly gutterals. There is also a falsely-accused young man who cries out, "Damn this rotten world!"

Half Gods. Marriage, observes Playwright Sidney Howard in this new treatise on contemporary ills, is now producing less and less sympathy and selfdiscipline, more and more nervous frailty and psychiatrical blather. Hope Ferrier has been married eight years and has borne three children to her earnest, successful, rather thick-skinned Stephen. Suddenly she discovers in herself all the feministic symptoms which are so advantageous to talkative women, and decides that she must quit her husband, who now annoys instead of fortifying, and seek a more satisfying mode of life. She even threatens to relinquish her babes.

In the course of her revolt she receives the advice of two doctors. The first, a psychiatrist as polished as his desk, makes various attempts to hoist her subconscious and calls her Freudian pet names. The second, a Teuton of the old school, bluntly informs her that since she has already proven her ability to have healthy offspring her only function in life is to go to her mate and get more. Whether or not the truth lies, as usual, somewhere between the two, Hope eventually returns to her husband with a mystical assurance that her marriage is the central, inescapable, important thing in her life. Or, as Emerson might have amended his phrase: "When the Half Gods [of feminism] go, the Gods [of wisdom] arrive." Meanwhile Stephen, watching the petulant dabbling of his spouse with the doctrines of emancipation, has uttered a pathetic and familiar cry: "This is a hell of an age to be a man!"

Playwright Howard has always written wittily on controversial themes, has emphasized them with dramatic situations. Occasionally in Half Gods his attempts to breathe life into his puppets evoke wheezy results. He is at his best when he keeps his philosophical distance, using characters as vehicles for ideas.

Mayo Methot, as the blonde, cantankerous wife, and Donn Cook, as the stolid, moral, ubiquitous sort of husband who rushes to a bar at the first sign of adversity, both strike telling attitudes and speak clearly. Mr. Howard's dialog does the rest. Both performers are natives of Portland, Ore., with Broadway experience, actress Methot in The Song and Dance Man, Alias, the Deacon, Great Day; Actor Cook in The Rivals, Paris Bound, Gypsy.

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