New Plays in Manhattan

Carnival. The salesmen's smoker was an orgy. The smalltown boys had plenty of liquor on their breaths, carnival girls on their laps. A cooch dancer came out and began her undulations. Through her Oriental veil, Bobbie Spencer recognized Helen, the blonde witch whom he loved and had persuaded that very afternoon to quit the show business. Maddened, sickish, he tried to drag her away. Showman Blackie intervened. When Bobbie lunged at him, Blackie drew a gun and fired.

On a later evening the wounded, lovelorn Bobbie returned to the carnival tents. Then the tarnished little dancer who had the misfortune to return his love also had the courage to save him from herself. She had failed to disgust him by her appearance at the smoker. This time she went up for a parachute jump, came down dead. At last Bobbie could go away from the clamor of grind-organs and bawling voices.

Anne Forrest (recovered from her motor crash of last fortnight) facilely creates the calcimined aura of a midway strumpet and Norman Foster's Bobbie is sufficiently naif. But the emotions and events of William R. Doyle's drama are all obvious and hackneyed. Simplicity without beauty makes for mediocrity.

Marry the Man. Playwright Jean Archibald's comedy has a sexy headstart in its subject, companionate marriage, but it soon loses ground and does not come in a winner. Mollie Jeffries thinks that she and her Gregory will always enjoy a paradoxical combination of freedom and affection. But Gregory nobly yearns for the stabilizing responsibilities of true matrimony. Therefore he announces his forthcoming marriage to a fictitious woman. Mollie is shocked, furious, broken. But while the chimes are ringing for Gregory's marriage he appears in a top hat, gaily tells Mollie of his ruse and whisks her to the altar.

The goldilock delicacy of Vivian Martin, oldtime cinema ingenue, fails to redeem the bromides which she has to deliver in her cracked little voice. All three acts are set in a modernistic cottage, so turbulently red and orange that it resembles the fac,ade of a Coney Island rollercoaster. This play had a run of 18 weeks in Chicago as Companionate Marriage.

The Come-On Man. In the last five minutes of this play's inaction, one supposed detective turned out to be a crook and two supposed crooks turned out to be detectives. The entire cast, however, remained journeyman actors with but little chance to be anything else. Playwright Herbert Ashton Jr. and his father were the pseudo-crooks.

Messin' Around is another Negro musical show with an assortment of prancing and harmonics common to what has unfortunately become the type. There are two female pugilists who bash each other with seemingly unfeigned zeal, but they scarcely constitute an entertainment quorum.