New Play in Manhattan

The Velvet Giove (by Rosemary Casey; produced by Guthrie McClintic) describes a most politely conducted battle. The opponents are a mother-general (Grace George) and a bishop (John Williams), and their battlefield is a convent. They are at odds over a young professor in the convent college whose Christian ideas about the obligations of wealth seem Communistic to a few moneybags in the diocese. The moneybags want the professor fired, and the bishop--whose causes they endow--agrees. As the professor's chief defender, the mother-general adopts the defense of beating the bishop at his own game. She sees to it that, if he fires the professor, he will lose far more financial support than he gains.

Considerably more worldly than otherworldly in approach, The Velvet Glove is neatly dotted with church figures (including Walter Hampden as a monsignor), pleasantly dusted with conventual and clerical badinage. It is the brighter for the deft warfare between John Williams and Grace George, who with all the airiness of a butterfly can impose the sting of a bee. But the play, a theatrical ladyfinger from the start, gets milder, thinner and crumblier as it proceeds.

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