New Plays in Manhattan

Caprice. "Life is so much easier," says the dyspeptic but incorrigibly playful Albert Von Echardt, "when you have a great many ties to choose from." He communicated this illuminating morsel of information to his bastard son, poetic and bumptious youth of 16, whom he was meeting for the first time. Albert had in fact been unaware of his child's existence until its mother, a somewhat charming though intensely idealistic creature, whom he had once betrayed and since forgotten, visited him. The purpose of her visit was to ask that Robert be permitted to live with his father and learn the ways of the world--in which there could have been no better tutor than Albert. Lamentably, however, Robert stuttered with uncouth passion to his father's mistress, who was intrigued but not delighted by his arrival in company with his mother. When he became aware of his father's relations with lisa Von Ilsa, Robert clutched his mother and they went back to the country together. Albert Von Echardt was sorry to lose his son but he was glad to retain the beautiful, the charming lisa. Hers was the last entrance onto the stage; she mixed Albert a drink of bicarbonate of soda, while he sat playing the piano, and she handed it to him with a look at once teasing, gay, quizzical and tender; as he turned to take his medicine, his eyebrows rose with gratitude and the curtain fell. There are those plays so delicately, so truly funny that one forgets to laugh until a perhaps clumsy joke, inserted for no other purpose, ignites the fuse of amusement that a superlative dialog has laid. Caprice is such a play. "You are the most abandoned woman I have ever known," says Albert to lisa, and she replies, "Abandoned? No one has ever abandoned me!" It is a college quip which serves less as a cause than an excuse for laughter. Caprice is the comedy of an artist, not a farceur, though it contains moments of mediocre farce. The author is a Viennese, Geza Sil-Vara, and it is his first play (adapted by Director Moeller) to be presented in the U. S. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne stroke the velvet and stir the smooth cream of Caprice, Lynn Fontanne wearing wigs, dresses by Jeanne Lanvin, hats with small, Mercurial wings attached to them.

The Theatre Guild has made mistakes in selecting plays, but as long as Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, the busiest and perhaps the best Manhattan mimes, have anything to do with it, it will possess an element of perfection. These two made their reputation with the Guild, and they married each other after meeting during the rehearsals of Clarence, nine years ago. Alfred Lunt went to college in Waukesha, Wis. His wife's name is Lynn Lily Louise Lunt. The Street Wolf is a young agent provocateur whose looks lure not-unwilling chippies to a Greenwich Village brothel. It goes on to tell about bordellos, approaches incestuous situations until one sighs for the pure, clear air of Rabelais. Worst of all, it is banally written.

Lady Dedlock. It is hard to make plays out of Dickens. Nonetheless, famed Margaret Anglin thought quite correctly that Bleak House contained the material for a drama and she ordered Paul Kester to trim it into shape. This he tried hard to do; and Actress Anglin played his piece in the provinces, gradually improving it. Last week she thought it was fit for Broadway, and played it there.

It is the story of a great lady, married to a respectable lord, and trying (out of noble motives) to conceal a long-past love affair. She is unaware that her illicit child still lives to commemorate her indiscretions.

Only her husband's solicitor knows this and when it appears that the bastard, now grown into a beautiful girl, is about to marry a handsome member of the Dedlock clan, he croaks his intention of squealing. He has gained his information by the aid of Hortense, a maid, who has good sense and a bad temper.

When Lawyer Tulkinghorn, starting to make good his threats, does not pay for her spying, Hortense shoots him. Lady Dedlock is suspected and dies on her lover's grave; the marriage bells ring in the last act.

There are fine scenes, fine moments in the play. The third act set, a huge room which suggests the wide staircases and the servants' hall behind it, has a dark, archaic grandeur.

Margaret Anglin gives a fine performance, both as Hortense and Lady Dedlock; Mr. Tulkinghorn (John Ivancowich) is a snooping, grim figure; and a little woolly dog amuses everyone by bouncing about the stage. As drama, Lady Dedlock is heavy rather than strong, it contains too much.