New Plays in Manhattan

The Star-Wagon (by Maxwell Anderson; Guthrie McClintic, producer). In the preface to his verse tragedy Winterset, Playwright Anderson announced his abiding belief in poetry for the stage, but prophesied that it would triumph only when "an age of reason will be followed by an age of faith in things unseen." The Star-Wagon makes at least as much claim: upon ''things unseen" as the ghostly Dutchmen for last season's High Tor, but observers, who found his last four plays marred by turgid dialog and prose which often bore only the typographical mask of verse, welcomed Playwright Anderson's return to colloquial speech.

The Star-Wagon assumes: 1) the past and the present are coexistent, 2) if one could live one's life over again, second thought choices might not bring more happiness, they might bring less. To prove both points the play provides some metaphysical speeches and a time-machine. Stephen Minch (Burgess Meredith), inventor who has made a fortune for his employer, has reached his peak with the invention of a "star-wagon" which will return its driver to any desired point in the past. Nagged by his wife Martha (Lillian Gish) for his resigned poverty and fired by his employer, the inventor throws the switch of the star-wagon, and is instantly transported to the year 1902, when he met and married Martha. Resolved to rectify his mistakes, he says no to his heart, makes a practical match with a rich girl, amasses a fortune. His wife betrays him, associates force him into dishonest stock manipulations, he longs for the sweet girl Martha, drowns his sorrows in drink. When he cannot stand this second choice life any longer, he remembers his time-machine hidden in the attic. Zipped back into his former life, he returns gladly to his poverty, finds happiness with Martha.

First serious offering of the season, the play must be bracketed with Anderson's second best oblations. The Star-Wagon lacks Playwright Anderson's customary magnitude, is bathed in a questionable, tepid philosophy, bumps to a bromidic finale. Reminiscent of sundry other tinkerings with the past (Berkeley Square, Dear Brutus, Merrily We Roll Along, If, One Sunday Afternoon, et al.), it has slight claim to originality.

But Playwright Anderson's 20th play is pleasantly ingenious, its principal characterizations warmly human, its early 20th Century episodes (reminiscent of Ah, Wilderness, Eugene O'Neill's better realized, if less ambitious, comedy) highly entertaining. Director McClintic's staging of an automobile ride, choir rehearsal and picnic in the year 1902 makes the second act a riot of Americana. Burgess Meredith proves himself the most accomplished of young U. S. actors, neatly running the gamut of middle age and youth, inspired duffer and embittered worldling. As the inventor's crony, Russell Collins (The Group Theatre's "Johnny Johnson") gives a compelling exhibition of bluff, whimsical idealism. Lillian Gish portrays girlhood and harassed middle age with charm and feeling, gives the finest performance of her stage career. With its deftly assembled cast enjoying a field day of acting, a kindly audience forgave Playwright Anderson for once again drawing it mild.

A Hero is Born (by Theresa Helburn; produced by the Federal Theatre).

Of the 78 members of the cast (all paid at the flat rate of $23.86 a week) in Director Hallie Flanagan's WPA show, 40 are also understudies; This extraordinary ratio is explained by the fact that successful Federal Theatre actors are absorbed by radio, screen and stage at an encouragingly quickening rate,* that Federal Theatre shows must consequently have plenty of replacements handy. Waiting hopefully to be absorbed, this multitudinous cast last week presented Theresa Helburn's extravaganza--based on the Andrew Lang fable of the prince who would not believe in fairies--with all the artless eagerness of a high school operetta company. In inexpensively riotous medieval costume, amid ludicrously two-dimensional props (plane-surfaced wine goblets, soup tureens, roast fowl), they wage their crusade to overcome the intellectual snobbery of poor Prince Prigio (Ben Starkie), marked at birth by an unkind fairy to be too clever to appreciate the supernatural. Lured from this stuffy intolerance by the lovely Lady Rosalind (Drue Leyton), he comes to discover the usefulness of other fay things like seven-league boots. Jack-the-Giant-Killer's sword, a wishing cap, a cap of invisibility, an elixir of life, a magic carpet. He slays a menacing monster, the Firedrake, wins at last the hand of Rosalind.

Margaret Wycherly (Jane Clegg, Back to Methuselah, The Thirteenth Chair, Tobacco Road) took the role of the queen as a favor to Playwright Helburn. Drue Leyton left cinema for the stage after seven Charlie Chans. A. Lehman Engel's score is diverting, has one catchy candidate for the swing bands, Woe Is Me. Most amusing moment: the stately gavotte of lords and ladies of the court, breaking into the Big Apple.

Tactful, efficient Theresa Helburn helped found the Theatre Guild in 1919. has guided it since as executive director, casting director, member of the board of managers, play picker, bargainer, catalytic agent for clashing temperaments and healer of injured dignities. Theatrewise about others' works, she has written several plays of her own but never succeeded in catching Broadway's fancy. Nearest she came to it was with Crops and Croppers, which ran for 20 performances in 1918.

Manhattan-born, educated at private schools, Bryn Mawr, the Sorbonne, student in Harvard's "47" Workshop, she wrote poetry and theatre criticism before joining with the sponsors of the old Washington Square Players in forming the Theatre Guild. Intimates like George Bernard Shaw and her educator husband, John Baker Opdycke, call her Terry. Her favorite outside activity is the Hollywood-supported Bureau of New Plays, which in a year and a half has found no new plays worth producing. Blunt-featured, crinkly-eyed, Miss Helburn turned actress pro tern in 1936, playing Queen Elizabeth in Bryn Mawr's May Day fete.

French Without Tears (by Terence Rattigan; Gilbert Miller, producer). Producer Miller is a portly New Yorker whose proper background, he says, is a London club. From London and the Continent, also, Producer Miller draws most of his shows (Victoria Regina, Tovarich, et al.) He likes them better when they are foreign and he is not bothered dickering with the U. S. Dramatists' Guild, which is adamant about the minimum terms its members shall accept.

Producer Miller's first importation this year is Author Rattigan's first successful play of any year. It is buoyant, imponderably slight. Its setting is the living room of M. Maingot's villa in the south of France, whither a group of young Englishmen have come to learn French in preparation for the ''diplomatic'' and to have their lives complicated by a predatory lass, lithely represented by Penelope Dudley Ward. The play is joyously, if inexpertly, served by the younger characters of its cast (Philip Friend, Cyril Raymond, Hubert Gregg, Jacqueline Porel), Veterans Frank Lawton and Marcel Vallee (M. Maingot) contributing most of the stage craftsmanship, and Guy Middleton a generous measure of what-ho.

Author Rattigan is 25. Three years ago his diplomat father, Frank Rattigan, C. M. G., gave him a year in which to prove himself better suited for playwriting than for the diplomatic service. Son Terence wrote six plays, collected five rejection slips. In November 1935, two weeks before Tyro Rattigan's year was up, French Without Tears was accepted, staged last year in London where it is still running. Paramount Pictures bought the screen rights for $50,000.

Katie Roche (by Teresa Deevy; Abbey Theatre Players, producers). While a second-string company keeps Dublin audiences happy and the Irish Free State satisfied that its subsidy is not being wasted, the renowned Abbey Theatre Players last week began an extended season in the U. S. Less sanctified since the competitive rise of the lively Dublin Gate Theatre, the Abbey is still a criterion for rounded ensemble playing.

Opening with Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy, a U. S. premiere, the Manhattan repertory includes standbys like O'Casey's Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock, Synge's Playboy of the Western World, new items like Cormac O'Daly's The Silver Jubilee, George Shiels's The Passing Day.

Katie Roche was a somewhat inauspicious choice for the opener. A thin play, its characterizations were so unclarified that even the expert Abbeyites seemed uncertain in them. Katie (Eileen Crowe), a young country girl born the wrong side of an aristocratic blanket, is an open-hearted flirt with illusions of grandeur. Rejecting Yokel Michael (Arthur Shields), she marries middleaged, blue-blooded Bachelor Stanislaus Gregg (F. J. McCormick). Crisis of this ill-matched marriage comes when Stanislaus finds artless Katie and naive Michael together, decides to transfer his wife permanently to the less tempting air of Dublin.

Only the Irish can get a laugh out of comedy so oblique.

-*Notable example: Gloria Dickson, lifted to Hollywood fame in They Won't Forget (TIME, July 26).

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