New Plays in Manhattan

Uncle Vanya. One sure way of cementing a friendship is to discover that you and your acquaintance are both devoted readers of the works of the late Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, that you have, both covered the 350-odd short stories, the six full-length plays. Of the six, four have been produced in Manhattan since autumn: The Sea Gull, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and, last week, Uncle Vanya. Presented with artistic piety by Producer Jed Harris, Uncle Vanya was ecstatically received by confirmed Chekhovians. In addition, cinemagoers had the opportunity of beholding birdlike Cinemactress Lillian Gish in the flesh.

Genuine Chekhovians acquire an appetite for an atmosphere of twilit melancholy through which bewildered stoics make their weary way, ceaselessly confronted with frustration and despair. Nobody gets what he wants in Uncle Vanya. Michael Astrov, acted by Osgood Perkins (late editor of the Chicago Herald & Examiner in The Front Page), distinctly wants Lillian Gish, the second wife of an aged, selfish pedagog. With admirable restraint, her husband's brother-in-law, "Uncle Vanya" (Walter Connolly), also pursues Miss Gish as she floats about the stage attired in the costume of a pastel Gibson Girl. And although both Miss Gish and her step-daughter Sonia love Dr. Astrov, no entente more cordial than a handclasp is ever consummated.

Stagecraftsmen who believe that it takes a series of seductions to convince an audience that their characters are in love with each other should witness Uncle Vanya. For although Playwright Chekhov alters the relations of his nine characters not one whit during the entire play, when the bells of their carriages tinkle away offstage, taking Miss Gish back to Moscow and Dr. Astrov back to his practice, the audience is well aware that it has witnessed a subtle, intense, ably handled series of human emotions.

Audiences were full of praise for Jo Mielziner for his glowering 19th Century interiors; and for the delicate reticence of Miss Gish's acting. Not since 1913 has Cinemactress Gish been on Broadway. At that time she inhabited the same boarding house as Cinemactress Mary Pickford, who got her a small part in David Belasco's A Good Little Devil. Soon afterward David Wark Griffith took her in charge, well-nigh beatified her during the next 15 years as the virginal, wide-eyed heroine of The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, The White Sister, et al. Soon to be seen is her first audible cinema, One Romantic Night, adapted from Playwright Ferenc Molnar's The Swan.

Hotel Universe, though written by Philip Barry and produced by the Theatre Guild, is certainly an artistic and probably a commercial failure. An elaborate inquiry into the frustrations of persons of unimportance, its action takes place entirely upon the terrace of a villa near Toulon. There is no intermission, a condition which perhaps contributed to the embarrassment of Manhattan firstnight critics in their efforts to render in a phrase the play's "meaning."

The terrace, gold walls against a blue curtain of sky, slightly resembles the island on which Shakespeare's less readily perplexed but equally worldly expatriates of The Tempest encountered magic after storm. Owned by a physicist named Stephen Field, it is the scene of a party given by his daughter Ann to six friends. They are: Pat Farley, with whom Ann is in love; Tom Ames and his wife, Hope, who loves their children; Norman Rose; Alice Kendall, who loves Rose; and Lily Malone, an actress whose acid witticisms to her companions are in the best manner of earlier Barry plays (Holiday, Paris Bound). They are devoting themselves to cocktails and the effort to change the conversation from suicide, suggested by the recent spectacle of a young man tossing himself off a high cliff.

The enchantment of the terrace operates suddenly to make these people's glib and pessimistic gaieties, when turned to a parody of the past, rekindle its most significant moments. Each of Ann Fields guests experiences a return in time to whatever instant of inadequacy, ecstasy, awakening or fear has been controlling a present in which death is the only feasible probability. Influenced by airs less gracious than Prospero's--airs which Stephen Field describes, in loose poetry, as blowing from alien estates in time across those in which men live--each character imagines the eccentric scientist as a salient figure from the past. To Pat Farley he is the father of a girl he has loved in England. As a fur merchant he listens to Norman Rose defining a Jewish boy's life ambition. Tom Ames identifies the old man with a Catholic priest, to whom he makes a muddled confession. He is Lily Malone's father, making her practice dance steps while he tipples and curses. Suddenly free from the enchantment of the terrace--and by it re-leased from the necromancy of remembrance and regret--the gloomy guests stroll away, gay once more, while Ann Field and Pat Farley stand together on the stage, staring at Stephen Field, an old man in a pongee suit who has died from a heart attack sitting in his wicker chair.

The relation which the events of Hotel Universe bear to reality is genuine but insufficiently obvious for the purposes of drama. Moreover, the brilliantly perceived perplexities of the preciously unhappy subjects are frequently made ridiculous by the fact that it was only possible for Author Barry to express them in the cliches that dramateurs have been taught to find funny when issuing from the mouths of tired businessmen or sophomores in college. Nor has the cast of Hotel Universe, with the exceptions of Katherine Alexander as Ann Field, Glenn Anders as Pat Farley, Ruth Gordon as Lily Malone and Phyllis Povah as Hope Ames, managed to master its extraordinary moods with the customary skill of Guild performers. The only completely successful detail of Hotel Universe is the setting, by Lee Simonson, of a terrace touched by the light of a July evening on the Mediterranean, a pavilion for illusion and despair.

Virtue's Bed. An attractive girl, described by her friends as intelligent, is shanghaied into a North African sporting house. Stating repeatedly that the doors of hell swing both ways, she deserts her profession on receiving an inheritance and an English estate. In England she takes up the life of a country dowager.

At a dinner party she describes her past. When her disgruntled guests start making off, she accuses them of committing more opprobrious acts by choice than those which circumstance required her to perform.

Lady Clara enjoyed a long and profitable run in London under the name of Clara Gibbings. When it was presented by Lee & J. J. Shubert last week in Manhattan. audiences detected a trite & true strain in its structure. Florence Nas, Viking her first appearance of the season, is cast as a young woman who, having passed most of her life in the environs of a saloon, suddenly discovers that she is the daughter of the Earl of Drumoor. In the best Peg o' My Heart tradition, Miss Nash goes to claim her just due, falls in love with the Earl's dissolute nephew, is properly awed by a standard English butler, Returns to her own people.

Three Little Girls. Shubert operetta, often grandiose, has seldom achieved a more epic aspect than in Three Little Girls. Their complex annals are pursued through the suburbs of Vienna and three successive generations, on and off a revolving stage, generally in three-four time. First, Hendrik Norgard and Beate-Marie von Rankenau are prevented from marrying each other by meddling relatives; his son and her daughter suffer similar interference. Finally, pursuing the family tradition, their unrelated grandchildren succeed in getting married.

This tuneful morality, celebrating the virtue of perseverance, is enhanced by Natalie Hall, Bettina Hall and Martha Lorber as three sisters in the second generation, but not by such gags as: "Going to the Barber of Seville?" "No, I always shave myself."

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