New Plays in Manhattan

After All is the work of John van Druten, whose Young Woodley, produced in 1925, was finally allowed to run in London three years after its U.S. presentation. After All is not another Young Woodley. It is the sort of play in which a number of worried English folk go about "facing it." In the case of After All the situations to be faced are a daughter's going off and living with an architect for two years before he marries her; and her brother's unhappy marriage with a poisonous Bohemian. The parents, particularly the mother, accept their woe with a good deal of self-conscious martyrdom. Spectators, aware that Playwright van Druten has done a faithful job of domestic reporting, leave After All with a tendency to remark: "What of it?" Margaret Perry, a pretty girl with eyes that turn up at the corners, easily turns in the best performance and if the actors had something to do or say in the last act the whole affair might have turned out differently. Dwight Deere Wiman, whose cruiser Moanin' Low commemorates his (and William A. Brady Jr.'s) highly successful production of the first Little Show, is the producer.

Bloody Laughter is strong theatrical brew. It was written by Ernst Toller who has spent a good deal of his time in various German jails since the War for being an incorrigible Red. His Man and The Masses was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1924.

Using the stage as a soap box, Playwright Toller now harangues through the character of Egon Hinkemann (Maurice Schwartz). Before he marched off to fight for the Fatherland, Egon was a strapping fellow with a beautiful wife (Helen MacKellar). He returns from the fray an emasculated wreck, "no man at all." To make a living he astonishes side show crowds by biting the heads off guinea pigs. "They want blood!" says his manager. They get it.

Meanwhile things are going badly in the Hinkemann home. Egon constantly hears imaginary laughter ringing in his ears, pitiless, mocking laughter at his infirmity. His best friend seduces, impregnates his wife. She commits suicide. Egon finds himself a piece of rope and walks off the stage to become another victim, Herr Toller would have you believe, of mankind's most savage enemy--War.

Bloody Laughter is frankly intended for theatregoers with strong stomachs. Its characters wrangle, shout, spit in each other's faces. It is loaded to the muzzle with propaganda. Praise is due Actor Schwartz, usually to be seen in Manhattan's Yiddish Art Theatre, for the articulate vitality with which he plays a part that could easily have been just noisy.

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