New Plays in Manhattan

The Web (by Frederick Herendeen; Charles H. Abramson and Jess Smith, producers). In a lonely house in Florida's Everglades a demented professor (William Ingersoll) grows a gigantic spider. He is assisted by a Japanese butler (Harold deBecker) who wants the formula to grow big Japanese. Into this setting presently appear all the characters requisite for mystery melodrama: two escaped murderers, two pursuing officers, a golden-hearted lad of the swamps who doubts his fitness to marry the professor's niece because his father "has snake's blood in his veins," a reporter for the Associated Press, an eloquent thunderstorm. The spider runs amok, hangs the two convicts from the rafters, drains them of blood, but not before one of them has annoyed the heroine by locking her in the spider's closet. The prison warden (Frank Shannon) points a suspicious finger at first one person, then another. The Japanese butler makes bright remarks in a Gallic accent. The swamp lad's father is buried in offstage quicksands, thereby purifying the Hollins blood.

Long before the spider has been assassinated with a gas bomb the mystery of The Web has been punctured by several large, jagged holes and the cast, following pointed suggestions from the audience, has decided to make the rest as funny as possible. As Playwright Herendeen probably told himself when he wrote it, there is no reason why The Web should not do well as a cinema.

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