New Plays in Manhattan

The Wingless Victory (by Maxwell Anderson; Katharine Cornell, producer). The great moment in this play comes when Actress-Manager Cornell, as Princess Oparre from the Celebes, turns on her New England husband, his family and all igth-Century Salem. She reminds them of the goodwill with which she came among them, denounces them for the hypocrisy, humiliation and persecution with which they have repaid her. She declares that she is now turning from the Christ of Forgiveness, having found no mercy among His followers. She reviles her tormentors' pale, cruel faces and pale, spiteful lives. Daughter of a hot-blooded race which, when betrayed, goes mad and strikes, she cries out that she loathes herself for having been brought to childbed by one of them, as an eagle might loathe itself for having been crawled upon by a rat.

This high-powered scene, most resounding of the Broadway season and just the sort that any actress would give her false eyelashes to play, ends act II of The Wingless Victory and, in the opinion of most professional observers, in effect prematurely ends the play. How Oparre is made first to leave intolerant Salem, and then to destroy herself and her two half-breed children, is a story which has no surprises for those familiar with the Medea legend, or even readers of Joseph Hergesheimer's almost identical narrative, Java Head (1919). An eager minority of the play's first audience impulsively applauded the more ringing of poetic Playwright Anderson's soliloquies, went home satisfied that they had seen and heard an-other Mary of Scotland, another eloquent Anderson sermon about the depths of human love and human perfidy. Less impressionable people found Playwright Anderson off form this time, deplored his tendency toward purple prolixity wished he might comb the abundant and unruly skeins of his verse a bit more carefully instead of trying to turn out two or three masterpieces a year. Promised within the next month are his High Tor, to be presented by Actress Cornell's husband, Guthrie McClintic, and The Masque of Kings, to be produced by the Theatre Guild.

As for Actress Cornell's performance, spectators found it in her customary grand manner. In a sarong and dark makeup, she was perfectly at home in another of her bravura roles which please her devotees best and which have led her privately to observe that an actress of her stature cannot afford to appear in a good play.

The Women (by Clare Boothe; Max Gordon, producer) is calculated to give the Men two of the most shockingly informative hours of their lives and is so clever that few women would willingly miss it. Its cast of 35 is entirely feminine and its subject is exactly what its title suggests. Halfway through scene i, Playwright Boothe makes a distinction between Women and Females. Mary Haines (Margalo Gillmore), a gracious and home-loving blonde with one husband, two children and a heart filled with anxiety about reaching the shady side of 30, is a woman. Most of the rest of The Women are females, belonging to Manhattan's restaurant and rotogravure set. Disclosed in bathrooms, ladies' rooms, beauty parlors and maternity wards, safe from the eyes and ears of their menfolk, they talk, as men never hear them, about clothes, nail polish, money ("a woman's best protection is a little money of her own"), sex ("I'm just a frozen asset," says the play's lone virgin), nursing babies ("ouch! he's got jaws like a dinosaur").

When Mary Haines discovers through gossipy friends that her husband has become involved with a perfume salesgirl, her sage mother advises her to ignore the whole matter (as she did 30 years before) and keep her husband and her home at the cost of her pride. But the gossipy friends push Mary remorselessly along the Reno trail with all its bitterness.

No. 1 gossip is Sylvia (Ilka Chase), a gabby troublemaker who has her children by Caesarean section, preserves her bosom with applications of icewater and camphor, cheats on her husband and lands in Reno. About half the more prominent members of The Women's, dramatis personae land there with her in Act II. There they meet an indelible character named the Countess de Lage (Margaret Douglass). The Countess has married three fortune-hunters and a Reno cowhand, and she still puts her faith in "l'Amour." Mary Haines, hoping until the last that her husband will call her back, succeeds in sending home the youngest of the Women (Adrienne Marsden) without a divorce. Mary herself is doomed to two bitter years as a divorcee before her chance comes in a laudably natural denouement to turn the tables on the second Mrs. Haines and get back her man, this time for keeps.

Much of the play is brash and bitter. Much of it is moving--notably the scene wherein Mary tries to explain to her little daughter (Charita Bauer) how it is that Mother and Daddy can fall out of love. All of the play has sharp theatrical impact. A vast improvement on the form shown last year in her melodrama Abide With Me, Clare Boothe's The Women was received by first audiences with grateful mirth. Clever of line and deft of pace, The Women is packed with cracks which will doubtless be batted back & forth across Manhattan dinner tables the rest of the season. Samples:

"Why is it that in a taxicab every man behaves like Harpo Marx?"

"Watercress! It's like eating your way across a lawn."

The Show Is On ("conceived" by Vincente Minnelli; Shuberts, producers) is the sort of thing youthful Conceiver Minnelli must have dreamed of doing when he was indefatigably designing costumes and painting sets for the ponderous weekly stage shows at Manhattan's giant Radio City Music Hall. The Show Is On is a superior sequel to his At Home Abroad (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935). In it Mr. Minnelli has the nation's eight greatest show-song writing teams working for him. Spectators are still trying to remember how the Rodgers & Hart tune goes when the band begins playing an even better one by George & Ira Gershwin. There is Gracie Barrie to keep the good songs ringing clear, Buxom Mitzi Mayfair to strut the hot numbers, Paul Haakon to leap through the smooth ones. There is Bert Lahr, the most emphatic comedian on the revue stage, as a noisy Hollywood actor trying to chisel out of paying his income tax and as an over-manly baritone in a hickory shirt bellowing, "What do you chop when you chop a tree!" while occasionally getting an untimely handful of chips thrown in his face from the wings.

The aforementioned performers could carry a Grade B musical show by themselves. What puts The Show Is On definitely in the Grade A class is the addi tion of another pair of entertainers, Reginald Gardiner and Beatrice Lillie.

Actor Gardiner last year conquered Broadway by imitating--with a few simple but compelling gestures, an appropriate word or sound and the expression of his amazingly mobile face--such improbable objects as a French train, a dirigible, ugly wall paper. To these sensitively communicated ideographs, Mimic Gardiner has now added a lighthouse (by revolving his body and then suddenly opening his eyes and mouth very wide and hissing slightly when he faces the audience) and a buoy (by crouching, wobbling drunkenly, looking seasick and giving off a bilious bell sound).

Actress Lillie's cool impersonations of women in various outrageous situations are probably employed to greater effect in this show than in any other in her long and hilarious professional lifetime. Any Lillie fan who misses her splendid pre-War number. "Buy Yourself A Balloon," sung while uncomfortably suspended over the audience in an electrically lighted quarter-moon, will be missing the high point of this comedienne's career. She is also pretty funny as a noisy first nighter, a haughty Theatre Guild box-office clerk, a strip tease artist. Best tunes: Now (Vernon Duke & Ted Fetter), Little Old Lady (Hoagy Carmichael & Stanley Adams).

"Aged 26" (by Anne Crawford Flexner; Richard Aldrich. producer). Robert Harris is a young British actor of engaging manner and appearance who for 30 months in London played The Wind and the Rain's male lead. That emotional medical student was not unlike the John Keats impersonated by Actor Harris in "Aged 26." His performance in this wistful wisp of a play indicates that, if dramatists insist on writing plays about romantic poets, the naive, modest, impetuous sort of charm which seems to be the peculiar distillation of certain young British actors is just what such plays need to be palatable. There are no melodramatic fireworks in "Aged 26." Mr. Harris does not indulge in agonies of poetic creation on the stage, or in windy declamations or wild rantings. He simply portrays an imaginative, otherworldly young man suffering from frustrated love and the foretaste of early death.

"Aged 26" opens in the Fleet Street reading room of Messrs. Taylor & Hessey. Flanked by his loyal publisher, Mr. Taylor (Matthew Boulton) and his devoted friend, Charles Armitage Brown (Kenneth MacKenna), Keats replies with dignity to the gibes of his foppish critics on the London quarterlies, meets Shelley and Byron, attracts their friendship instantly, encounters Fanny Brawne (Linda Watkins) for the first time. Assiduously nursing his sick brother, harassed by poverty and already failing in health himself, Keats appeals to his guardian to reconstrue his grandfather's will so that he can have his share at once instead of waiting until all four grandchildren attain their majority. The guardian refuses. After Tom dies, the poet goes to live with Brown, who picks up the odes he leaves scattered about, lays them away in a drawer. One called On a Grecian Urn is crumpled up in the coal scuttle. Fanny, who lives next door, responds to his love. During one of his coughing spells, the first spot of blood appears on the poet's handkerchief and old Dr. Sawrey orders him to Italy. A ruse engineered by Brown gets Mrs. Brawne out of the way so that John and Fanny may have one night together before he sails for the land in which he is to die six months later, aged 26.

All Editions (by Charles Washburn & Clyde North; Juliana Morgan, producer) contains an undertaker who wants to find a fearfully ugly man, ready & willing to die. on whom he can perform beautifying post-mortem surgery which will attract attention to his art. He finds a perfect specimen, an old carnival man named Rhinoceros who looks somewhat like the late Lon Chaney's Quasimodo. Rhinoceros is ill and willing to die for $500, which is to be given to the girl who has taken care of him. Rhinoceros feigns death by hypnotizing himself but escapes in time from the undertaker's operating table.

Unfortunately this grisly business has not been put into a good horror play but into what purports to be a merry farce-comedy about high-pressure pressagentry. Author Charles Washburn is a Manhattan theatrical pressagent. Producer Juliana Morgan is Mrs. Oscar W. Ehrhorn, wife of a Federal referee in bankruptcy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.