New Plays in Manhattan

So Many Paths (by Irving Kaye Davis; Cohn & Scanlon, producers). This year Playwright Davis* has interested himself in the artistic set. Few weeks ago, in a play called All Rights Reserved (TIME, Nov. 19), he pondered the problem of a sober essayist who goes berserk when a book by his wife leads him to believe that she ha's grown promiscuous. So Many Paths concerns an ambitious singer named Clara Kenny (Norma Terns of Mow Boat) An unsuccessful audition drives Clara to such desperation that she flings herself into the arms of a rich protector. He sends her abroad for training. When she returns, Clara makes an operatic sensation. Meantime, her young sweetheart has married her sister. Question: are the roses, champagne, fame and applause worth Clara's sacrifice? Playwright Davis gives a deliberately equivocal dramatic answer. Norma Terris trills one aria competently, does all she can to bring a wooden part in a wooden play to life.

Tomorrow's Harvest (by Hans Rastede & Hyman Adler; Douglas G. Hertz, producer). By means of a weak heart Papa Goerlich, a fireside Hitler, tyrannizes over his cowed German-American family. Nothing must be done to excite him for fear the result might be fatal. It takes Papa Goerlich an unconscionable amount of time to die but he finally does. Tomorrow's Harvest falters on for another act, then it does, too.

Post Road (by Wilbur Daniel Steele & Norma Mitchell; Potter & Haight, producers) starts out as a folksy little drama about some harmless muttonheads who run a roadside boarding house on the highway between New York and Boston. The play is half over before the audience suddenly learns that the guest who said he was a doctor and the young woman who he said was his patient are really a pair of kidnappers and the baby whose delivery the doctor apparently effected, their tiny victim. Authors Steele & Mitchell (Mrs. Steele) are old hands in the theatre. So are Producers Potter & Haight (Double Door, Wednesday's Child). So is Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey, who walked out on Post Road.

*Not to be confused with Playwright Owen Davis who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Icebound (1923), has not repeated his oldtime triumphs often in recent years.

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