New Play in Manhattan

Prologue to Glory (by E. P. Conkle; produced by the Federal Theatre) is Lincoln in the days before he grew a beard; a very youthful Lincoln (Stephen Courtleigh) keeping store at New Salem, Ill., launching himself in politics, courting the half-legendary Ann Rutledge (Ann Rutledge*) ; a half-legendary Lincoln, licking the leader of the Clary Grove gang in a wrestling match, debating ("Resolved, that the bee is more valuable to society than the ant"), joking, yarn-spinning, walking through a snowstorm to pay back a customer he had accidentally shortchanged; a shy, gangling Lincoln confessing his love for the girl

Wedded to him not through union,

But through separation

who died at 19 of the "milk-sick" (malarial fever).

In moments of engaging freshness, Prologue to Glory at times lays bare Midwestern pioneer life. As Abe, Stephen Courtleigh gives a winning performance. The weakness of the play is that the story of Lincoln's youth is not dramatic, that youngster Lincoln is sentimentalized and a trifle Boy Scoutish, without a trace of oldster Lincoln's gnarled, life-roughened, racy side. Prologue to Glory is all clean backwoods fun and quiet pathos. Long after its current Federal Theatre production has subsided, it should bob up in many a high school as an irreproachable senior class play. Playwright Ellworth Prouty Conkle is 38, teaches speech at the University of Iowa. He has destroyed a "bushel basketful" of plays, had one other (200 Were Chosen) produced in Manhattan. In 1936 he made academic history when he obtained his Ph.D., not for academic work, but for writing plays.

*A great-grandniece of the character she por-trays.

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