New Plays

Odd Man Out is a play that sets out to be sophisticated and arrives only at tedium. Most of the lines are like firecrackers that end, not in a snap, but in a sultry hiss. Probably much of this inefficiency is due to the acting. Alma Tell is sorely put to it to play a fascinating and experienced woman of the world. Such a woman must have a certain cutting edge. Miss Tell provides a round performance. A. E. Anson manages much better as a lean and saturnine seducer. The others do not matter.

This woman has a husband who loves her and yet laughs at her domestic defections. He is suddenly reported dead. An earnest young man offers marriage and a rich continental suggests a Mediterranean trip on his yacht to console her. The husband reappears, agrees to his wife's departure first with the young man, then with the old one, finally receives her happily back into his arms.

Bachelors' Brides. The spring training school for aspiring producers and authors has graduated another pupil. Though a trifle brighter than his usual run of mates, he is by no means professional or mature.

If you set the title down in large letters and ponder over it, you will probably ferret out the significance. It is a story of an English bachelor with a past. The past is about to become all there is of his bachelorhood. He is marrying a U. S. heiress on the morrow. Only he does not know she is an heiress and she does not know he is an earl. Neither does she know about a married woman in London and the daughter of the local innkeeper. Both these importunate females arrive on the scene in time to break the engagement late in the second act. There follows a crazy dream, expressionistic in interpretation, in which the fiancee glides around in an angel's outfit while the fiance wrestles with his past.

All this is supposed to be very funny, and now and then it attains its end. The rest of the time it jogs contentedly along in the rut deepened by many farces. The acting is generally second rate.