New Plays

Beware of Widows. Madge Kennedy has once more demonstrated her right to be known as a superlatively attractive person. Alexander Woollcott went so far in his commentary on the comedy as to call her the most charming person in Manhattan. As such she makes this play worthwhile. Shorn of her amazing personality it would be a slender, an insufficient venture.

Owen Davis is the author and it is not one of his best plays. He tells the story of a wilful and penetrating widow in love with a handsome and promiscuous doctor. Her efforts through the evening are centred on breaking his engagements to two other women and securing him for herself. All this occurs on a houseboat, which is wrecked just before the third act, to further her ambition.

Miss Kennedy is permitted to become slightly intoxicated in the second act in hilarious memory of her famous scene in Fair and Warmer. It is regrettable that the resemblance to that extraordinary rumpus stops short at that. Some day someone will write another Fair and Warmer for Miss Kennedy and then the whole city will turn out with trumpets.

Just Beyond. It seems scarcely necessary to complain about this venture. It was a story of drought in Australia and closed after seven performances.

The Devil to Pay. The artistic and intermittently successful Stagers have picked a particularly dull piece for their second try of the season (their first was A Man's Man, one of the best in town). They took a play from the Dutch dramatist, Herman Heijermans, a play that has been exceptionally successful in Holland.

The play is primarily a picture of an ill-natured old woman, and for many months it was held by the Theatre Guild as a vehicle for their favorite actress, Helen Westley. Margaret Wycherly plays the part in the present production with quavers and acidity admirably suited to the crone. Whitford Kane is somewhat less successful as the old taxidermist, who is a greybeard Pollyanna. There is also a girl who is deceived by a strutting young musician and a serenely suffering mother. All these combine in what might have been an excellent study of mediocre domesticity had it not been so wearisome with words.

Morals. From Germany the Actors' Theatre has drawn a creaky old satire of reformers and produced it with a fine cast in the high hope that it will divert a metropolitan public already much diverted by public moralists. The play employs the not unfamiliar device of staining the moralist with the very ink which he was bent on blotting from the city.

All deeply tangled in the net of one Madame de Hauteville, the Society for the Suppression of Vice in a provincial German town was about to be laughed out of existence by the delighted newspapers. Incited by one of the Society's members, the police had made a raid and discovered evidence incriminating the very executive committee of the puritans.

Edwin Nicander as the Society's president seemed a trifle overanxious on the opening night. The notable event of the evening was the advent of one Marian Warring-Manley, who has apparently never before acted professionally, in the considerable and exceedingly well played role of the shrewd and maculate Madame.