New Plays in Manhattan

Ada Beats the Drum. Ever since Henry James discovered that the stupid exploits of U. S. citizens in Europe made good literary material, perennially there has cropped out some work in which appears a gruff but indulgent father, a silly mother and a romantic daughter, all making the Grand Tour for the first time. Ada Beats the Drum is concerned with the antics of Mr. & Mrs. Hubbard (of Keokuk, Iowa) abroad. Having rented a villa in the south of France, Mother Hubbard (Mary Boland) encourages her husband, without much trouble, to frequent the local bars in the hope that he will bring home cultured "foreigners." But Mr. Hubbard's barroom friendships are consistently formed with other Americans and Mrs. Hubbard finally strikes a bargain with the village priest: if he will introduce her to some natives, she will give his parish some money. Natives introduced include a Spanish painter who constantly kisses Actress Boland's hand; an English poetess and her Slavic, piano-playing paramour. After the painter compromises Actress Boland, a trap-drummer from Champaign, Ill., woos and wins Daughter; and after Citizen Hubbard has become thoroughly sick of the whole business, the Hubbards head for the homeland. Actress Boland, struggling with French maids and telephones, plagued by a Coca-Cola-guzzling husband, turns in a businesslike, applausible performance. Lost Sheep. If a Methodist minister should unwittingly rent a house which had but recently been evacuated by a procuress and six employes, the situation might contain much potential coarse merriment. Playwright Belford Forrest, having conceived of such a plan, made sure that his preacher was sufficiently naive to suspect nothing for at least three acts of a play which he called Lost Sheep. Rev. William Wampus, awaiting the completion of a new parish house, moves with his wife (Marie Cecilia ["Cissie"] Loftus) and three comely daughters to a recently abandoned bordello in Higher Hempstead, Middlesex, England. So that the play's double meanings will not elude even the dullest playgoer, Mrs. Wampus continually addresses her daughters as "her girls," and the daughters further the effect by referring to her as "madame." Complications set in as soon as the young men of the neighborhood, believing that nothing more untoward has occurred than a change of management, begin calling on the telephone for "Mabel" and dropping in informally while inebriated. At the end of two hours of unclean fun, the youngest daughter is betrothed to the local vicar's son--whose first appearance in the house was as a customer--and the situation has been clarified to the satisfaction of all. Acting honors were shared by Ferdinand Gottschalk, 61--longtime mummer, playwright (Nanette, The Love Letter)--as Preacher Wampus, and Actress Loftus, 53, onetime variety actress, music hall singer, who once trouped with Sir Henry Irving, Madame Modjeska, Edward H. Sothern, William Faversham. Part of Lost Sheep's revenue or deficit will go into or come out of the pocket of Musicomedian Jack Donahue, a backer of the entertainment.

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