New Plays in Manhattan

That Ferguson Family. Christmas week in the theatre is a time of plenty but not always one of jollity. While the holly wreaths hang high, the gloomiest producers, among them Gustav Blum, creep out with their dire presentations. Blum's latest bit of hardware was not so dull as festive critics found it, though not so good as its author, Howard Chenery, tried to make it.

At the head of the Ferguson family was Mom Ferguson, a dowdy, cynical scold. Impelled by her stupid and melancholy faultfinding, her two daughters and son rebelled by getting married. Before they did so, one of the daughters stole dresses in the store where she worked and the son made love to a rural chit over his prize-winning plans for a bridge.

Alan Ward and Thelma Paige played well in this homely love scene and all the other actors, especially Jean Adair as Mom, did their perhaps too level best to make the rustic trifle seem intense.

Falstaff is a comedy, compounded by James Plaisted Webber from Shakespearian scenes and others from his own imagination. In it there are many snatches of tune, lyrics by Brian Hooker, Falstaff's famed expose of "honor" and a false ending in which Prince' Hal bows to Anne Page and promises an annuity to Falstaff. Charles Coburn, blown up to a mountainous size, puffs prodigiously as the lecherous old knight who is robbed in a forest and dumped into the Thames from a laundry basket.

The Red Robe. It is not customary, when the Shuberts produce a good operetta, for the public to howl so loudly with joy as when "Ziggy," the maestro and artist, produces a mediocre one. Thus The Three Musketeers, last spring, an elaborate musicale, provoked more ardent cheers than The Red Robe, last week, which was just as good.

Operettas, of course, are all absurd and The Red Robe, adapted from Stanley Weyman's novel, is no exception. Yet it made a good play 25 years ago, in which William Faversham starred, and now it makes a gay and gaudy minstrel show for Walter Woolf. In the story of Gil de Berault, who was sentenced to death for duelling and paroled by Cardinal Richelieu in time to achieve fortune and a beautiful partner for the final curtain, there is proper material for brocaded dresses, sword play, romantic songs and fustian foolery. All this has been contributed. Helen Gilliland, an English actress, sings when she drops her white glove and on other occasions. For dancing, there are girls very Chester Hale and hearty. Barry Lupino, British clown, is funny without being dirty.

Hello, Daddy! Ever since Betty Starbuck was seen partaking in the frivolities of the Garrick Gaieties, there have been those who regarded her as among the most pleasing of sarcastic heroines; yet she never received her due. She does not receive it now, in Hello Daddy!, though with Billy Taylor and Lew Fields, the publicized star of the show, she does all kinds of things that are engaging. Lew Fields produced the piece; his son, Herbert (Connecticut Yankee) Fields, wrote the book; his daughter, Dorothy (Blackbirds) Fields, wrote the lyrics.

Perhaps Betty Starbuck's most engaging action was the yodeling of "In a Great Big Way," one of the many merry anthems with which Jimmy McHugh decorated the score. Other such were "Let's Sit and Talk About You" and "I Want Plenty of You." Mary Lawlor was observed dancing well to these clever carols. A good quip (out of Manhattan Mary) was revived: "He's a wolf in cheap clothing."

The plot was preposterous. A respectable fellow with a simon-pure and scrawny wife, was pursued by a light lady. She asserted that he was the father of her son, a pimple-faced shoat who, whenever he saw his alleged progenitor, would grunt: "Hello, Daddy!"

Poppa is Poppa Schwitzky, a lazy Hebrew so much entangled in ward politics that he cannot see his way clear to working for a living. His daughter supports his family. When she becomes engaged to a man of wealth, Schwitzky looks around for an occupation. By good luck, he is made an alderman; by bad men, he is made to seem guilty of grafting; by good luck, he gets out of trouble. His son, Herbert, is a schlemiel (good-for-nothing).

Actress Anna Apple, as Mrs. Schwitzky, and Actor Jachial Goldsmith, her husband, are the two whose vernacular rattles most rapidly, almost rapidly enough to make the audience think that the play's humor is human rather than mechanical.

Brothers. Three meddling doctors, representing heredity, environment and kindly hocuspocus, agree to mold the destiny of slum-born twin brothers. They cause one brother to be adopted by a rich, impeccable family. This brother becomes a brilliant lawyer, but takes to dope and murder. The other brother is left in the slums; he becomes a piano-player in a speakeasy, but yearns for something better. As the play wobbles along, the doctors find it necessary to have the brothers change places. The piano-player "makes good" on Park Avenue; the dopey lawyer kills himself. There is also a love theme. Bert Lytell plays both brothers in a sotto voice, as if he were going to break into tears at any moment. Brothers is neither a serious play nor a melodrama.

Potiphar's Wife. The biblical Joseph was morally outraged when Potiphar's blunt wife said, "Lie with me." There was no outrage at all when Diana, Countess of Aylesbrough, jubilantly negligeed, spoke in the same wise to her chauffeur. He, no moralist till the third act, merely said that she did not attract him, kept liveried composure while she avenged the slight by rousing the household and charging him with attempted assault. In one more unlikely courtroom scene with the jury presumably in the first row of the audience, the chauffeur was exonerated, Lady Ayles-brough shamed. To end the play she, at home, telephoned an employment agency for a new chauffeur.

This dull play achieved two distinctions. It had a curtain line first written by Oscar Wilde, and it opened Manhattan's latest theatre, the Craig, which is within speaking distance of elevated railways and trolleys on Seventh Avenue. '

The Houseboat on the Styx. Thirty years ago, John Kendrick Bangs wrote stories about a yachting party near Hell. Producer Ned Jakobs thought that these stories deserve to be perpetuated on the stage, with song-&-dancing. That is the purpose of The Houseboat on the Styx, that and moneymaking. Adam, Barnum, Captain Kidd. Sherlock Holmes and Cleopatra; Mrs. Noah, Sappho, Charon, Josephine and Sir Walter Raleigh--all the Bangsian characters come on deck to sing somewhat Gilbertian songs and utter up-to-the-hour Times Squarese. Blanche Ring as Queen Elizabeth shouts, when someone offers her a drink: "Swine!" "No," is the answer, " 'sapplejack." Its first evening, The Houseboat on the Styx mounted at moments to hilarity. Its songs, while not entirely novel, were cheering.

One Way Street. Broadway is an interesting avenue because on its bright pavements each evening many thousands of mediocre human beings flock together, drawn by a picturesque, gregarious invitation. In degree no more clever or sinister than the main street of a village, it has lately been advertised more widely than ever before by columnists, playwrights and criminals. One Way Street celebrates the murder of a golden-haired drug-peddler, one of Broadway's ,least notable miscreants, by an alien rustic whose sister had learned to punch herself with dope.

Before the author of the murder is ascertained there are gruesome scenes of crime solution. Riff-raff from the pleasure caves, also a butler and a financier, are grilled by policemen. Not alone because of the alacrity with which the criminal's name is hit upon, the ceremonies of detection seem patterned upon the ways of the theatre rather than the ways of life. One Way Street is a melodramatic stereotype and its most exciting moment occurs when the audience sees, dangling brightly from- the end of a trunk, the shining hair of the murdered drug-girl.

Ruth Draper's Monologues are by now sufficiently famed not to need exposition. She appeared in Manhattan last week in a series of character sketches. With no more props than could be put in a pigeonhole, she managed to make herself into a series of totally different and exceedingly interesting people. She was a lady taking an Italian lesson; she was a Cockney girl on the Thames embankment; she was a Philadelphia matron at a children's party; she was a Polish actress, having scenes with her director; she was an English horsewoman, mouthing at her breakfast; she was a U. S. tourist in an Italian-church; she was a Dalmatian peasant girl, standing in the hallway of a U. S. hospital, asking about her husband who was hurt. Then she was Ruth Draper again, standing on the stage and bowing to the applause.

Seeing her bow was strange. After her chameleon magic, it was hard to believe that she was real at all, that her own personality existed outside of the many personalities which it is her ability to inhabit. Under the control of an illusion still, you felt that maybe this was another imitation, that Ruth Draper was really; someone else inside of this small, alert, bowing actress.

Miss Draper's grandfather was Charles A. Dana, famed editor and publisher of the New York Sun. Her parents, her father especially, was too correct and well-settled in social Philadelphia to approve of her eccentric plans to go upon the stage. But she somehow progressed from entertaining her friends with mimicries to playing to paying houses. She has never played to an audience that disliked her; and she has played in the six or seven languages which she speaks. She detests publicity and does not, in her quiet demeanor, display traces of the exhibitionism which inspires all acting. She writes her own monologues.

The King and Queen of England, on the recommendation of the Prince of Wales, invited her to perform at Windsor Castle two years ago. Last spring, Miss Draper was presented at the Court of St. James's, an honor no British actress has ever received, and an episode which added one more brief, unpredictable mis-en-scene to the abrupt series in which Ruth Draper's life, and all other lives, is told.

Back Seat Drivers is a farce in which two women try to manage their husbands' finances. They get involved in crockery and their husbands have to catch thieves. Spots of this are funny, in a modest way.

Cyrano de Bergerac's verses were bright, rousing, full of Gascon gallantries. His rapier was rapid. But his nose was freakishly long, disfiguring. Therefore he felt frustrated in his love affair with Roxanne, and Edmond Rostand's famed heroic comedy turns into tragedy. Cyrano has made theatrical history in the versions of Constant Coquelin and Richard Mansfield. In the. U. S., of late years, Walter Hampden has honored both himself and the role. On Christmas night he revived Cyrano, scored again. Ingeborg Torrup was a new, petite, luscious Roxanne.

That Hampden's Cyrano has become an institution in the U. S. theatre is due largely to the abilities of his art director, Claude Bragdon. Claude Bragdon's fame lies principally outside the theatre; largely in fact, it exists in the fourth dimension for it washe who translated Ouspensky's Tertium Organum and wrote, among other works, Four Dimensional Vistas. When Einstein came to the U. S., Bragdon was one of the first named as belonging to that hypothetical "ten" who understood the master's theory of relativity. Especially was Claude Bragdon interested in mathematical metaphysics as applied to esthetics, for by profession he is an architect. Among his buildings is the New York Central Railroad Station at Rochester, N. Y., in which town he lives.

Nine years ago, he began to arrange the scenery, lighting and costumes for Hampden's plays and he has done them all ever since. He began on Hamlet; in Cyrano he achieved his masterpiece, as Hampden achieves his. Claude Bragdon is now 62, twice-married, a theosophist, Buddhesque of countenance, a rare person.