New Plays

Edgar Allan Poe. For some years there has been a succession of Poe dramas rustling in and out of managers' offices in search of a production. John Barrymore almost accepted one of them last year. Presumably it was a good one, as one hears were several of the others. The one that finally came to light is not a good one; nor is it accurately performed by James Kirkwood.

The poet is taken through early life, an early love affair, down to a tavern in the slums where, down and out, he rumbles out a recitation of "The Raven." Earlier in the evening he has had a duet with his lady on the subject of Annabel Lee. When the surprised auditors heard them burst forth with "O my Annabel, O my Annabel Lee," much in the style of a sticky vaudeville ballad, several tore up their programs and stole sobbing from the theatre.

Caught. This somewhat unnecessary story of a young man who married for money was quietly rejected by most of the critics. It was an unnecessary story because the young man had virtually no redeeming feature. The woman he married was elderly and not particularly attractive. In the background was the girl he really loved. By the end of the second act she was also tired of poverty and about to take an even more elderly lover. Then her young man shot his wife and a few minutes later himself. The acting was only fair.

When You Smile is a middling musical comedy without any noted personalities. Two or three excellent melodies and general dancing help. It is not very funny.

These Charming People. Michael Arlen's second play burst upon Broadway with a vast fanfare of enthusiasm. It was reported a great success in tryout; it employed a brilliant cast. Accordingly when it turned out to be a tawdry, dull and not particularly intelligent adventure, bitterness rose in the spectators' breasts.

The story is not taken from any of the tales in the Armenian's volume of short stories of the same title. As the cinema buys titles and pins them on new plots, so Mr. Arlen borrowed his own title for box-office purposes. His chief female is married to a bald and belligerent publisher. She desires a divorce. Unfortunately the publisher holds her father's note for 10,000 pounds and is rather surly about it. Father discovers that the young man she intends marrying (he has been a general in the War) is the son of the family butler.

Cyril Maude is the star and gives much the same performance as he did in Aren't We All, the delightful comedy which These Charming People vainly tries to reproduce. Mr. Maude has slighter material and therefore acts harder, a somewhat obvious device. Better even than he, was Edna Best. She is a young Englishwoman here for the first time. She is unorthodox, vaguely reminiscent of the music halls, and amazingly important in a steadily unimportant evening.

Jane--Our Stranger. A play adapted by Mary Borden from her own novel of the same title promised to be mature and interesting entertainment. It held out the promise as long as the curtain of the first act. Thereafter it slid bewilderingly away into patches of sincerity and larger patches of absurdity. Probably an unusual overabundance of inefficient acting was chiefly to blame. Certainly it was too good a play to deserve the snickers of the witnesses at critical moments.

The story tells of a hardy American girl thrown in the midst of French society. She marries a Marquis because she loves him. Because she loves him, she does not perceive that his chief attachment is to her yearly million dollars accruing from family railroad holdings in the States. Three years later he breaks the news and departs for Venice with a slim, immoral Princess.

French divorce laws will not permit the wife to have charge of her child without years of litigation. Therefore to defend this child's chance of happiness she adapts herself to France, forgets her husband and becomes a prominent, but no less virtuous, figure in French society. Later the husband wants to come back. She turns him out.

Hay Fever. The second play of the tirelessly productive Noel Coward (he will have six produced here before the season is out) fell heir to an exceptionally disappointing performance in the leading part and is therefore a doubtful entertainment. Laura Hope Crews, who has painted many brilliant portraits in our Theatre, found herself flagrantly out of sympathy with the middle-aged actress around whose home life the piece revolved. She was required to slip from commonplace characterization to frenzied dramatizing of her home troubles. Miss Crews did not slip. She lurched.

The peculiar family of which she was the head had long accustomed themselves to Mother. When trouble tinged the air, it was her custom to go in for frantic histrionicism. Her home was her theatre and life was forever leading up to second-act climaxes. Around her during the particular week-end of the play was a curious assortment of humans, whom the rest of the family had invited without consulting one another. The slings and arrows for a delightful satire were furnished by the playwright. Miss Crews chose heavier weapons and, by overplaying, quite deadened the developments.

Stolen Fruit. Ann Harding seems to have bad luck with plays. When she did Tarnish, so emphatic was her success that an enviable future was forecast. After a failure or two she went into The Green Hat last spring and was apparently exceptionally competent in the second part to Katherine Cornell. Before the play got around to its New York season, she was offered the lead in this play by an Italian dramatist--Dario Nicodemi. It was a great chance; she took it, and lost. Her losings will not be particularly detrimental to herself. She gives a genuinely attractive performance, which seems to suggest that with severely competent direction she would be a very fine actress. Rollo Peters also helps considerably with his acting opposite her. The play--about a French girl who had a child, came back to find its grave, and through the kind offices of a handsome Count found it alive and well--is rather obvious and only twice deeply interesting.

The Tale of the Wolf. Molnar is again among us, again with a study of a woman wondering about love. Years before she had received a letter from a hero of her heart in which he promises to come back-- whatever he may be, a hero, a millionaire, a soldier. In the second act he does come back in her dream--as all of these. The play reaches difficult heights of fantasy and is romantically amusing. In the last act the hero comes back as a grubby little clerk--which he really is--and her disillusion is complete.

Years ago this play, in a somewhat freer adaptation, was done by Leo Ditrichstein. It was the sense of the opening meeting at The Tale of the Wolf that he had done it better. The current interpretation is competent but not compelling until the last act. It then becomes dull.

Wallace Eddinger and Roland Young make an enormous difference. Two better comedians could scarcely be discovered for the parts of the lover and the husband. Brilliant acting has again been poured, in vast but not sufficient quantities, into a leaky play.

The Crooked Friday. The rude inrush of London plays brings this piece by Monckton Hoffe on its latest wave. It will probably recede quietly and be forgotten. It is a preposterous flight about an abandoned baby, who grew up to be a very successful crook in our own Manhattan. The young man who had saved the abandoned baby turns up to support and love her.

Mary Glynne and Dennis Neilson-Terry--the latter a scion of the Terry notables--came over also to play the leading parts. In such a flimsy vehicle it is scarcely just to judge their talents. Yet, taking all things into consideration, one would risk the guess that in the best of plays they would not seem exceptionally important.

American Born. The return of George M. Cohan is, for the masses, the banner event of an eventful autumn. You will recall how he retired two seasons ago when the actors won their second strike. He said he would never produce or act again. In the off year he wrote American Born and is now producing it and acting in it.

You will also remember that just before his retirement Mr. Cohan appeared in another comedy of his own, The Song and Dance Man. In this tale the Theatre, a tale near his own heart, he became recognized as an exceptionally fine actor. Possibly it was because he was playing George M. Cohan.

He continues to play George M. Cohan in the new piece. Off to England he takes himself as the heir of an extensive English estate. Thirty years before that his mother had been hurried across the threshold and out into the cold world because she married the gardener.

Mr. Cohan's observations upon the peculiarities of English society will probably not be preserved as conspicuous examples of current scholarship. He is content to be amusing at the risk of being obvious. He manages to be both. Since he is himself in the star role the play will probably run for months.

Hamlet. It is curious to remember that when Walter Hampden started to give Hamlet, in special matinees, rather covertly, in 1919, critics were ill-natured about him, using the tone of men forced to give praise against their will. His performance was sonorous and decisive, "gratifying" was perhaps a better word, but common sense rather than inspiration dictated his reading of this "Janus-tongued part" and "Why," the tired reviewers asked with their eyebrows, "do actors have to revive Hamlet?" They could not fool the public-- the public turned out for him, and has kept on turning out, so that last week, in his own theatre, with Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia, he could give Hamlet as it should be given, in the grand manner.

Percy Hammond: "Beautifully 'a lady most deject and wretched,' she intones the bitter honeyed lines as if they were her own, and Ophelia's, not alone Shakespeare's. Listen to her sing 'sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh' and you will renew your faith in elocution."

Alexander Woollcott: "There were people on hand who palpably had not been out after dark since August Daly died."

The Call of Life. Eva Le Gallienne and Katherine Alexander are both actresses skillful enough to do a lot for a poor play, but though they shook, prodded, cajoled and finally laughed at this Schnitzler drama about a colonel who kills his wife, a soldier who kills himself, and a girl who takes to picking flowers in a field, for all their earnestness it folded its hands and died.