New Plays in Manhattan

Journey's End. The theatre's ways are sometimes stranger than its plots. Some months ago the Kingston Rowing Club, a London suburban organization, found the Thames too cold for paddling and decided to put on a play by way of diversion. The club's personnel is wholly masculine, so something special had to be written for the occasion. The members turned to R. C. Sherriff, one of their number, who had had "experience" in the Surrey Amateur Dramatic Society.

Sherriff, 32, dark, slender, taciturn, was an insurance broker. He knew little of playwriting but he said he would try. The only drama he knew was the War. He had enlisted at 17 and emerged a second lieutenant. He sat down and wrote the story of a dugout in which he had lived. The play was produced. Friends said it was good. At their urging he sent it off to the London managers. One by one they turned it down.

Finally, however, the script fell into the hands of the London Stage Society, a semiprofessional organization not unlike Manhattan's Theatre Guild but more like Cleveland's Playhouse. The Stagers produced it one Sunday evening at the Arts Theatre, where Maurice Browne, playwright and producer, saw it. A few weeks later he produced it in London's West End. That was in late January. Today Journey's End is London's outstanding success.

Shortly after its opening, Producer Gilbert Miller attended a performance. When the final curtain descended he proceeded not to the street but to the producer's office. It was 3 a.m. when he finally left. It had taken him all that time to negotiate successfully for the U.S. rights. He at once placed an English company in rehearsal, played it a week in a theatre in London, sailed with it for the U.S. The company rehearsed all the way over on the boat. The players reached New York early last week, rested a day, made their debut in Great Neck, L.I., and, the following night, opened on Broadway.

Thus the story of Journey's End. The plot itself is not nearly so involved. It is a simple war story of ten men in a dugout during 36 hours that precede a German attack. Their reactions form the basis of the play. They snarl, they laugh, they fight, they cower, they die. Standing out among them is one who hopes for death. He has drowned cowardice with whiskey. He has nothing for which to live. On the eve of the attack there is sent to his company the brother of the girl he loves -the last person in the world he wants to see him. In the end it is the youngster, eager for life, who dies. The other goes out to face the attack.

It deals with elemental emotions, this play, with a simplicity that is devastating. It is as fine a series of psychological studies as one will find outside a casebook. And it has the added benefit of perfect interpretation. Its British cast leaves nothing to be asked. Particularly effective are Jack Hawkins, Leon Quartermaine, Colin Keith-Johnson, Derek Williams and Victor Stanlev.

The Lady From the Sea. Miss Blanche Yurka is entitled to one of the awards of the season for her loyalty to Henrik Ibsen. In a year which has been marked by the presentation of a great number of dull modern plays, theatre-goers have not been allowed to forget Ibsen's searching studies. Her selection of this strange, borderland work is not altogether fortunate. It is not so easy of interpretation as The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, her other offerings, nor is its principal character so suited to Miss Yurka.

Ibsen himself seems to have walked a tightrope in conceiving its plot. It is, in its own terms, the story of a woman unable to forget the hypnotic eyes of a suitor. But beneath this there is a story told in symbols, a story of the lure of the great mystery of the sea. To blend these two moods is a task requiring great skill. Miss Yurka and her Actors' Theater company meet the demands at times and at others they fail to do so.

Buckaroo. "With a cast of 60," the billboards announce proudly. That may be the trouble. Getting a cast of 60 on and off the stage is a task in itself. By the time it is accomplished in this play little time is left for the plot.

The authors (there are three of them) have chosen a splendid background for drama. They tell their story in the "wings" of a rodeo that has brought its troupe of cowboys and cowgirls into Chicago for a week. There is plenty of color here and an opportunity to deal with the elemental emotions of simple folk. The idea of a clash between these softhearted, hard-boiled plainsmen and the unscrupulous racketeers of the second city of the land is excellent. The elaborations and the compromises are what hurt.

Of the large cast two members stand out: Nydia Westman, as a flip but honest showgirl, and Clyde Dilson, as a suave but unpleasant Chicago gunman. There is also a knife-thrower who knows his business and a bucking broncho that isn't afraid of a first-night audience.

The Jitney Players. If you spend your summers in New England you may possibly have seen a troupe of mummers trundle into town of a hot summer's night, in motor trucks, unpack their scenery and their costumes and set up a show shop on a tennis court or a golf course. The Jitney Players have been touring in that fashion for six years.

Last week their trucks carried them into Manhattan and they did their unpacking at the little Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. There they gave as their first week's bill Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough. It was too amateurish to compete with the more polished Broadway offerings -except as novelty.