New Plays in Manhattan

Borderland (by Crane Wilbur; Philip Gerton, producer). Crane Wilbur is an actor of considerable talent. He is now employed by the road company of Mourning Becomes Electro. That he is no great playwright is revealed by the raveled theme of Borderland, a melodrama which takes place in the hunting lodge of two bad brothers named Cordovan. The Cordovan boys have asked a pretty girl and her novelist fiance up for a houseparty. The novelist is an amateur spiritualist and during a seance, which he promotes for the amusement of his hosts, he throttles one of the Cordovans. The brother recovers, but not long after he is found throttled again, this time fatally and with the novelist's red cravat. The novelist is placed in an insane asylum. Not until six months later does it develop that the surviving Cordovan boy really choked his brother to death for love of the girl and because he envied his brother his money--a simple tale told simply dreadfully.

We Are No Longer Children (by Leopold Marchand; William A. Brady Jr., producer). French but not Proustian is this theatrical recherche du temps perdu. The lost time is the period when Jean and Roberte were youthful lovers. The searchers are Jean and Roberte who meet some years after their idyllic affair has concluded and after each has settled down to comfortably affluent matrimony. The pair, capably acted by Geoffrey Kerr (pronounced "car") and his wife June Walker, try to recapture the old elusive spark by a trip to Dieppe, where they spent a holiday years before.

Dieppe is chilly and Jean not only catches a cold but commits the worse offense against romance of accidentally calling Roberte by his wife's name. They run into an old ally who, in the bright bold days of adolescence, was going to write immortal drama. Alas, he too is not so hot-blooded as he once was. He has married a department store, finds it hard to condone his onetime friends' behavior. Jean and Roberte give up their pursuit, end their trip, fail to recapture the unrecapturable.

Tender, and tenderly performed, We Are No Longer Children has a wanness about it that might be set to better advantage within the covers of a pale, slim book. The story does not seem hardy enough to be executed in three dimensions on the stage, even by such an able team as Kerr & Walker.

Bloodstream (by Frederick Schlick; Sidney Harmon, producer). Here is a play without mystery, message or mission which sets out to fulfill one of the theatre's prime purposes--furnishing excitement. Scene of Bloodstream is a prison-run coal mine. There,1,000 feet below daylight, toil blues-singing Crusoe, solemn Moth Anderson, strapping Juke Taylor who would as soon murder as eat, and Gypsy Kale, alias God. These Negroes and one white prisoner, the Irishman Knox, are at the mercy of an incredibly sadistic warden named Davis. And spiritually Warden Davis is at the mercy of the fanatical colored God. God and the muscular Juke are the only two prisoners whom the warden is afraid to whip.

When the Irishman is goaded into cracking the warden on the head with a lump of coal, and when his loyal blackamoor friends become implicated with him, God decides that the time has at last come to destroy the world, since "everything has got to die--even race horses." He sets off his "magic wand." a stick of dynamite, and that soon concludes the play.

Too True to Be Good (by George Bernard Shaw; Theatre Guild, producer). That Mr. George Bernard Shaw has subtitled his 30th play "a collection of stage sermons by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature" is evidence that he would sooner be called a meat-eater than a dramatist. In his 40 years in the theatre he has never more completely discarded the trappings of conventional dramaturgy than in Too True to Be Good, which begins with the lament of a mumps baccilus who has infected a rich young lady (Miss Hope Williams) and become in turn infected. No ordinary patient, Miss Williams has for a nurse Miss Beatrice Lillie. who introduces into the sick room a gentlemanly thief (Hugh Sinclair). He persuades Mis's Williams to announce that "a girl's future is not with her mother," and together this trio escapes to the liberty of a desert British colony. There, in company of a landscape-painting Colonel, a Bunyanesque sergeant and Private Meek, the Man of Action, the exiles discover that they are all profoundly unhappy, drifting with the whole world into a yawning and terrible abyss. From this horrible fate the aged playwright appears to have no means of averting mankind. One by one he sets up and knocks down most of the principal facets of contemporary thought and most contemporary institutions. His only personal conviction, apparently, is a belief in vegetarianism. But if the Sage of Adelphi Terrace has not got his tongue once more in his cheek, Too True to Be Good concludes on a sincere, melancholy and unique Shavian note--the hopeless wail of the thief: "I must preach, and preach, and preach! No matter what the hour of the day. . . . No matter if I have nothing to say. . . ."

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