Angel Like Lindbergh

(See front cover) The audience was still on its feet and applauding long after the critics had left, traffic was hopelessly dammed in 44th Street because Mayor James John Walker refused to leave the theatre and get into tiis motor when Playwright Philip Jerome Quinn Barry's eleventh play concluded its Manhattan premiere one night last week. A new Barry play is always a social event. This one, The Animal Kingdom, gave evidence of being one of the season's theatrical events as well.

The Story. Tom Collier (Leslie Howard) left Harvard after two years, took up and gave up the study of law, got into the publishing business. He caused his irascible and wealthy father a great deal of trouble, particularly when he went to live with a chirrupy little magazine illustrator named Daisy Sage (Frances Fuller). When Daisy goes abroad to study art, Tom falls under the spell of a luscious blonde siren (Lora Baxter) who lures the dazzled young man into marriage, to the anguish of Daisy and to the disgust of Tom's Bohemian cronies and of Regan, Tom's redheaded, ex-prizefighting butler.

By fleeting implication, Mr. Barry would have you believe that Tom's marriage undermines his integrity. He takes to issuing cheap books, stops seeing the old crowd. Just as the World, the Flesh, the Devil and his pomps are about to submerge Tom forever, almost inexplicably he rebels. For this rebellion Playwright Barry has contrived a convincing scene and setting.

The lights in Tom's living room are lowered. A small table for two has been set intimately, with a small rosy lamp and a bottle of bubbly. Never has the siren been more seductive than now, when she tries to woo her husband out of his dark mood, a mood which is running to ironic quotations. "Waiter," he orders his butler, "waiter, another small bottle, please. Regan, dost thou know who made thee?"

Leaving her door invitingly ajar, Mrs. Collier retires. Butler Regan packs his bag, prepares to leave the house, as if he feared the lightning were about to strike it. Unknown to the siren, Tom Collier is about to leave, too. Months before he had said: "Any good man who leaves his work for the world, leaves it for a whore." On the mantel he places a check. Then he claps his hat on his head, stalks toward the door. "I am going back to my wife," decides Tom, meaning, as is by this time clear, Daisy.

The Playwright. An author's characters are often a gallery of surreptitious, fragmentary self-portraits. The world he provides for them to live in is often not unlike his own world, transformed as though seen through a refracting glass. Last to deny this would be Playwright Barry, whose Adrian Terry of In A Garden (1925) lost his wife because he could not cease making dramatic copy of her.

If one tries to interpret the character of Philip Barry through the iconography of the people and situations he has created, a marked spiritual conflict suggests itself. Richard Winslow of The Youngest (1924) --written two years after Mr. Barry was turned out of Professor Baker's 47 Work-shop--and Johnny Case of Holiday (1928) are two Barry heroes with much in common: they hate the world of affairs, view big business with distrust. But another Richard, the composer who almost runs off with the well-to-do hero's wife in Paris Bound (1927), is moved to remark: "I used to curse into my beard whenever I passed a house like this. I used to spit on the pavement whenever a decent-looking motorcar passed me. I don't any more because I've found two among you whom I know to be of absolutely first importance in all ways I value."

It is not without significance that two-minded Playwright Barry, when in the U. S., lives in smart Mt. Kisco, a Manhattan suburb alive with stockbrokers. One of his closest cronies is his classmate Robert A. Lovett of Brown Bros. Harriman & Co , banking house. And although no one loves the free life more than Playwright Barry, paradoxically he drives as shrewd a bargain for his work as Edgar Wallace.

There are other artistic disparities for Playwright Barry. On the one hand (Paris Bound) he excoriates what he calls the Art Boys; on the other (The Animal Kingdom) he does not conceal an admiration for people who are perilously near being Art Boys themselves. Stated and restated in his work, the problem for Philip Barry would appear to be the very one faced by Tom Collier, who suddenly found the World considerably too much with him: which way to jump?

Mr. Barry is a product of what was called the Yale Literary Renaissance, a microscopic affair which began vigorously with Stephen Vincent Benet, John Farrar, Thornton Wilder et al. but was soon washed from the campus in an ocean of afternoon tea. The War took Philip Barry to the U. S. Embassy at London because weak eyes kept him out of military service. The desire to write plays took him back to the 47 Workshop. The need to make a living temporarily shunted him into the advertising business (McCann-Erickson, Inc.). When he heard that The Youngest, his first professionally produced play, was to be presented on Broadway he was on his way to Europe, with very little money, on his honeymoon. The bride was Ellen Semple, daughter of the late Lorenzo Semple, law partner of Coudert Brothers.

Not only has Playwright Barry concerned himself so far with writing about only one group of characters--the domestic equivalent of These Charming People --but these are the only kind which attract him. To play in his two ultrasocialite comedies, Paris Bound and Holiday, was chosen the Barrys' friend Hope Williams, a smart young woman who had never set foot on the professional boards before. And his good friend Donald Ogden Stewart acted the funniest role Playwright Barry has created to date: Nick, the easy-going gentleman in Holiday who extemporized on the invention of the bottle.

It is possible that Mr. Barry prefers to leave certain of his earlier plays out of consideration in any appraisal of his work. Not to be omitted, surely, is Tomorrow and Tomorrow, produced last year and regarded at that time as his best, or Hotel Universe, a metaphysical diversion, or White Wings, a theatrical fantasy which gathers more and more admirers as the years roll on. Up to last week the Barry theatrical score stood: four hits (Holiday, Paris Bound, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, You and I); four runs--though some were brief (In A Garden, White Wings, Hotel Universe, The Youngest); two errors (Cock Robin, John).

That Mr. Barry's score is so high is largely because of his peerless tragicomic technique. It came with plenty of hard work, is unequalled among his contemporaries. It also came from a sort of dramatic fearlessness. He is not afraid to make his characters do or say anything. Lines at which many a playwright would blush and discard, Mr. Barry twists off with lyric brilliance. Through his sparkling glasses, the world about him appears or is made to appear subtly unreal, fantastic, wistful. And yet he can be caught eschewing this very unreality, this wistfulness which is his capital stock in trade.

In Paris Bound one of his characters outlines a fantastic ballet in which an angel named Mike is detected, through a microscope, dancing on the head of a pin. Here again is evidence of conflicting Barry emotions. Like a little boy caught playing with girls, Playwright Barry shyly slips in the following dialog:

Mary--I love it. But watch out that your angel doesn't go whimsical on you.

Richard--Not a chance.

Mary--That's the danger, though.

Richard--This angel is a real guy. He's superb, this angel. He's a kind of Lindbergh.

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