New Plays in Manhattan

Two Seconds. In the two seconds before his brain is paralyzed in the electric chair Elliott Lester's murderer reviews his life, thereby cutting 58 seconds from the record established by Maxwell Bodenheim in a novel (Sixty Seconds) in 1929. Nineteen scenes pass through his mind; at the end of them he is dead. The unfortunate killer is one John Allen (Edward Pawley), steel worker atop a skyscraper. He looks down pityingly on the "flies" beneath. Then he descends, marries a taxi-dancer (Blyth Daly), becomes a fly himself. Up high again, he resents things said about his wife by his good friend Bud Clark (Preston Foster) and in an argument Bud falls to his death. John loses his nerve, cannot climb, lives on money another man gives his wife. Then he wins $262, repays her, kills her to cleanse his soul. As he is on his way up the skyscraper again the Law overtakes him.

Edward Pawley's acting, Cleon Throck-morton's fast-moving sets, Egon Brecher's wise direction, the novelty of the idea for the stage make Two Seconds interesting, sometimes impressive. The electrocution in the prolog gives the subsequent action some of the grim inevitableness of last season's The Last Mile.

The Guest Room brings to the stage one of the most consistently detestable females it has ever seen. Charlotte ("Aunt Lottie") Powers (Helen Lowell) is an aging, shapeless creature with tiny bird-like eyes and more nose than chin. She lives in guest rooms, directs households, antagonizes servants, soon becomes mistress of any house in which she lives. Hints that she leave she studiously ignores; when told she must go, she breaks down and cries. Mrs. Fairley got rid of her by dying, Mrs. Martin (Beverly Sitgreaves) by leaving, Janet Simms (Joan Kenyon) by foisting her off on an unsuspecting friend, after Aunt Lottie had driven Bill Simms (Otto Hulett) first to South America and then to the Y. M. C. A.

Three acts of Aunt Lottie are too much. Her voice, like the screech of a truck's brakes, has not only the rest of the cast but the entire audience squirming with the desire to get hands on her throat. But no one who has ever possessed an Aunt Lottie will say she is an exaggeration. Able Actress Lowell, with able support, even makes plausible the few moments when she is pitiable. Brisk if undistinguished dialog helps the play; a farcical ending hurts it. It is a fine play for everyone's Aunt Lottie to see.

The Left Bank might have been a good satire if Elmer Rice (Street Scene) had not let his characters talk him into taking them too seriously. John Shelby (Horace Braham), a young American writer living in Paris, is always on the point of writing something good; meanwhile he complains bitterly of the hackwork he must do to keep himself and his wife (Katherine Alexander) alive in a third-rate hotel room on the Boulevard Montparnasse and to keep his son in an "advanced" school in England, where he is being "cured" of a mother-fixation. The U. S., he declares, is "a spiritual vacuum, a cultural desert." Claire Shelby wants to go back "where her roots are"; more important, she wants to have her child. To stay in the next room come two old friends, Waldo Lynde (Donald MacDonald) and his promiscuous wife Susie (Millicent Green). Waldo is satisfied with life as a U. S. lawyer, thinks "we must go the way the world is going, not where it came from." Susie seduces John. takes him away to the Riviera; Claire and Waldo, left behind, avoid the inevitable until the simultaneous invasion of Claire's room by an evil-minded sister-in-law (Merle Maddern) and a band of orgiasts. John and Susie return, and after a great deal of discussion the logical procedure suggests itself: Claire and Waldo go away to get Claire's son, Susie leads the unresisting John into the next room.

The Left Bank is saved from banality by fine, quiet performances by Katherine Alexander as Claire and Donald MacDonald as Waldo. For humor the play depends on 1) the pseudo-Gallic antics of the hotel servant (Alfred A. Hesse); 2) inconvenient plumbing; 3) the wallpaper.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.