New Plays

New Plays

So This Is Politics. This comedy of a small city campaign for Mayor has obviously been offered to catch the Democratic National Convention trade. It should succeed fairly well in its purpose, unless the delegates after each performance at Madison Square Garden are too abysmally satiated with modern statesmanship to see it exposed on the stage.

Its underlying sentiment is that women who enter politics expecting to remain undefiled guardian angels will find themselves tarred with the same brush as the hitherto ruling sex. Conveying this thought is a young wife who is virtually dragged by the heels into running for Mayor by enthusiastic women friends, who feel that the town's politics need dusting off. In endeavoring to wage a clean campaign she commits most of the sins known to professional office-seekers. The author has very astutely led her to lie, cheat and practically embezzle, while bit by bit her ideals are chipped away.

She loses her rebellious husband in the shuffle. Her feminine friends within her own party cattily try to dig their claws into her. She mortgages her home up to the hilt, although the woman treasurer of her party has blandly decided that there will be no campaign expenses whatsoever. In the end it is a rough and ready politician of the practical school, skilled in all the ruses and handshaking diplomacy of the Old Guard, who saves her from defeat by the naive expedient of voting a large number of dead men.

It is this boss, outlawed by the respectable element, who proves the only consistent person. He reunites husband and wife and gives the mortgage another chance. William Courtleigh made this rugged character seem real, despite the sanctity of his enforced halo. His was the most vivid personality in the play, and patrons went out smacking their lips over his aphorism: "A political platform is like a streetcar platform--it's not to stand on, but to get in on."

Marjorie Gateson, playing her first leading role in a non-musical production, proved adequate to the emotional demands made upon her, though in the last act, when she seemed facing ruin, the author made her draw too long a face over it.

The Locked Door. The time-honored thought is again illustrated in this comedy that what is freely given is just as freely thrown away. The framework of society is represented in other familiar patterns here, but it has all been freshened up with a new lick of paint. It is rather surprising to find that so much material that has seen service before is still worthy to be taken from the lumber room.

This has all the earmarks of a bedroom farce, except that there is no three-cornered affair revolving around a fourposter. It is a four-dimensional comedy. A wealthy young playwright tries to reconcile a middle-aged married couple who have tumbled, from a broken-down machine, still fighting, into his woodland lodge. The wife has caught her husband kissing another woman, and his future looks black. The dramatist, himself but newly a benedick, seeks to explain away the husband's philandering symptoms with all the brashness of the recently conjugated. He points out that the husband still loves his wife, that the other woman merely appeals to him through the fascination of the locked door. He can kiss his wife freely at any hour of the day or night.

The playwright's bride, fearful that he may develop such symptoms himself, decides to cure him by giving him the absent treatment. She and the other wife lock their husbands outside their doors for the night. Whereupon innuendoes begin to fall thick and fast upon the stage. The treatment works, though it hardens into artificiality toward the end. The playwright is purged of his romantic impulses to be a lover toward his wife and to forget that he is a husband-- whenever it suits his convenience.

The author, Martin Lawton, who is said to be a rabbi in private life, belabors his point with the diligence of the pulpit at times. Despite this he shows considerable dexterity and aptitude in bringing his characters through risque situations with nothing more incriminating than a loud guffaw. When both wives exchange bedrooms unknown to their husbands, who subsequently wander into the wrong rooms, the writer's innate sense of naturalness, prevents him from forcing this situation to the screeching point of farce. Florence Shirley, Eleanor Woodruff, Charles Trowbridge and Reginald Mason, in a capable cast, keep the human foibles from becoming idiotic foolishness.