New Plays in Manhattan

The Dark Tower (by Alexander Woollcott & George S. Kaufman; Sam H. Harris, producer). The mystery element of this frank but funny melodrama begins in a program note in which an actor billed as Anton Stengel is described as having been a member of Max Reinhardt's companies in both Berlin and Vienna who has been working in Hollywood and is just making his bow on the Broadway stage. Sly Polemist Woollcott (The New Yorker), who relishes a good mystification, must have enjoyed inserting that bit into the humorous murder show he has written with famed Collaborator Kaufman (Of Thee I Sing, et al.).

The play concerns an actress (Margalo Gillmore) who is revisited by her deplorable husband, Stanley Vance (Ernest Milton), a homosexual masochist and the most despicable villain who has set foot on the stage since Simon Legree. Returning from a long disappearance, Vance begins to exert his baleful influence over Miss Gillmore, a spell from which she had just recovered. He makes her tie his shoes, hustle for his breakfast, breaks her spirit. Both her brother (kinetic Basil Sydney) and her manager who loves her (William Harrigan) have good reason to kill Vance. But the job is finally done very adroitly in a room at the Waldorf by a mysterious German-- a part credited to Mr. Stengel of the Reinhardt companies.

Best of three lively character parts with which the authors have enlivened the play is taken by little Porter Hall (The Warrior's Husband). Cast as a very domesticated New York detective, his manner while describing the routine horrors of a policeman's life is excruciatingly bland. "Well," he confesses to the actress's family, "we aren't much worried about this case. We don't care if one crook murders another crook-- especially if they are out of town crooks." He does something for the actress her doctor could not do. He releases her from the obsessing fear that she has killed her husband herself while under his hypnotic influence, restores her self-confidence. In gratitude she promises to read the detective's daughter's play, send them both tickets to her new show.

"Where can I get hold of you?" she asks.

"Oh, police headquarters--it's in the phone book."

Mary of Scotland (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by the Theatre Guild). Nearly 400 years after her birth, any new play or book about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, is news in the hope that it may explain why Mary is still potent to make historians and poets weep. She was Queen of Scotland a few days after birth, Queen of France at 18, true Queen of England according to Catholic Europe. She was tall, slim, dark, with an oval, plump-cheeked face like Film Actress Diana Wynyard's. She had beauty, brains, charm that she never turned off. She had little Scots patriotism, no bigotry, a great gift for hatred and revenge, a warm and grateful heart. The Scots, intent on being Protestants, were suspicious of her. England's Elizabeth feared, hated and envied her. Mary was alone in a country too cold for her.

Author Anderson, who dramatically presented Elizabeth in his Elizabeth, the Queen three years ago, has done better by Mary in Mary of Scotland. Of the story of murder and plotting, cloaks & swords, knife-faced Bothwell, caddish Darnley, crafty young Elizabeth, the snaggle-toothed pack of Scots Lords, he has made a poetic play. Designer Robert Edmond Jones has set it against six harsh, splendid sets. The first scene is of Mary's landing at Leith, a "cold, dour, villainous and dastardly" place. The second in England shows Elizabeth plotting to trick Mary into marrying Tudor-blooded Darnley, a Catholic, thus enraging the Protestant Lords and making it impossible for Mary ever to become Queen of Protestant England.

Author Anderson's plot makes more sense than history: Mary and Bothwell fall in love at once. Mary marries Darnley for mistaken policy, sends Bothwell away. Darnley wrecks himself and Mary by playing in with the Lords, knifes Mary's secretary Rizzio on suspicion of adultery, thus unwittingly giving a spurious confirmation to the lie Elizabeth has spread about her kinswoman. The Lords then murder Darnley, shift the blame to Bothwell when he marries Mary. They defeat Mary and Bothwell in battle. Mary escapes from their jail into Elizabeth's jail and her tragedy waits only on the headsman's sword. Author Anderson entirely whitewashes Mary and Bothwell for the murder of Darnley.

Helen Hayes, back to the stage from suffering in cinemas like Farewell to Arms, White Sister, gives to Mary little but these same brave, little girl accents. When she is on the stage in the last scene with Helen Menken, scrawny and harsh-voiced as Elizabeth, she is just a Hollywood actress. Philip Merivale has the height, the nose and the leanness for Bothwell, the only true man in Scotland, plays his part with praiseworthy capability.

Growing Pains (by Aurania Rouverol; producers, Arthur Lubin & Lee Shubert). To put flesh on this unremarkable play of adolescence, Producer-Director Lubin made news by rounding up a remarkable crew of adolescent semi-amateurs. He corralled Author John Erskine's daughter Anna, Actress Mary Eaton's little brother Charles. Also he got a pretty girl named Georgette McKee whose father works for the Guaranty Trust Co. and another named Jacqueline Rusling whose father keeps store in Bridgeport, and a dozen other youngsters between 15 and 18. Their stage job was to behave as they had behaved in real life the day before yesterday. They twittered on like starlings, discovering a sly pleasure in mocking their past youth. Their beauty, spontaneity and decorum charmed Manhattan audiences. The star of the proceedings was the author's beautiful, blonde, 17-year-old daughter Jean Rouverol.

Author Rouverol (Skidding) has given the youngsters a funny, often callous play about two-dimensional adolescence, in the guaranteed tradition of Booth Tarkington. Present are the malapropisms ("hyperficial"), the big words for little feelings, the emotional roller-coasting from top to bottom to top again in a minute flat, adult poses and childish behavior.

In the patio living room of a house in northern California the boys tell Jean Rouverol that it is time she stopped trying to play with them. Four months later she is trying out high heels and inquiring why it is bad form to tell a boy outright she would like to see him. Junior Durkin, having grown rapidly out of the adolescent stage of wanting "a mother for my children," is captivated by a giggling siren. The Mclntyres give an ice cream and punch party at which both brother and sister find sex arduous. As "something outstanding" to attract his siren's attention, Junior pushes over a traffic cop, goes to jail. Though this experiment is unsuccessful, a new dog and girl console him. Meanwhile his sister, faring better, develops a working compromise between being a pal and a flirt.

She Loves Me Not (adapted by Howard Lindsay from Edward Hope's Saturday Evening Post novel; Dwight Deere Wiman and Tom Weatherly, producers). In 1928 Princeton University permitted Hollywood cameramen, Director Frank Wright Tuttle (Yale 1915) and Actor Charles ("Buddy") Rogers (University of Kansas) to swarm over real Princeton bedrooms, bleachers, dining halls for a "real" college cinema. Nevertheless the resultant Varsity showed the usual Hollywood misconception of U. S. college life.

She Loves Me Not is a satire on both Princeton and Hollywood. Author Edward Hope (Coffey) (Princeton 1920) needs no research or official permission to spoof his own college. Even Adapter-Director Lindsay, who spent one year at Harvard, knew well that Princeton dormitory rooms have no Chippendale furniture, no grand pianos, that no Princeton dean has ever been knocked out by an undergraduate, trussed up and photographed by newsreel men. But so deft and good-tempered are their extravagances that no injury is done.

The plot is farcically fantastic. A Philadelphia nightclub dancer (Polly Walters) reaches Princeton, almost naked in her flight from the scene of a murder. She baby-talks four undergraduates who occupy one dormitory entry into hiding her in their rooms until the police hunt blows over. One of the boys tells his father, a cinema executive, about her. The father and his assistant (Charles D. Brown) decide to exploit the girl and her romantic situation preparatory to signing her for a cinema. In the course of so doing, the dean gets knocked out, the senior (John Beal) who hit him, loses and wins again the dean's daughter (Florence Rice), the tabloids get faked photographs of the dean embracing the dancer, the four boys are expelled, communist sympathizers parade with placards, and the expulsion becomes a national issue. To show all this Director Lindsay uses a stage like a steel beehive presenting six simultaneous scenes. At one point he abandons the theatre entirely to drop a cinema curtain on which is thrown a newsreel of the U. S. Navy and the four Princetonians variously stating their case to the public. One steps forward to say: "We want the world to know that whether on the football field or in life, Princeton men can take it." Through the hip-and-thigh farce that shook Manhattan audiences with glee glimmers human comedy, warm and amiably observed. The Princeton boys are sly and expert parodies of undergraduates. One sings a burlesque of a Triangle Club song with typical undergraduate ingenuities:

Things at the Court of King Arthur

Would not have been so bad

Had Galahad

Had the gal I had

Instead of the gal

That Galahad had.

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