New Plays in Manhattan

"Chinese" O'Neill. At this play tender members of the audience will do well to plug their ears with cotton. Toward the end of the second act, the muscular "Chinese" O'Neill, soldier of fortune extraordinary, finds himself and his English friends, including the dashing Hon. Nancy Beresford, trapped within a rickety Chinese inn by crawling yellow men. O'Neill begins blasting away with a machine gun. The ladies have horse pistols. Several other characters have miscellaneous shooting irons. But despite this artillery the Chinamen triumph, enter with a cabinet in which is contained the corpse of the Hon. Nancy's cowardly fiance, Gerson St. George.

Gerson is no great loss to the race. But in the last act, prisoned in the lacquered mansion of the dread Chang Kai Chang, the Hon. Nancy and "Chinese" O'Neill nearly meet their doom. At the last moment the adventurous Celt obtains a Colt, takes a pot shot at the munition-laden ships of Chang Kai Chang--"Master of the China Sea." He does not miss. He embraces the Hon. Nancy during a thunderous holocaust which signals the utter destruction of all their enemies.

Opposed to these loud Occidentals who fill the theatre with the smell of gunpowder are a batch of Orientals who rattle slates, employ green strangling cords, talk occasionally like old Southern gentlemen. Douglass R. Dumbrille, late of The Three Musketeers, is an inimitable O'Neill.

A Night in Venice. With this revue the Brothers Shubert administer their customary antidote to city summer and complete a trilogy which was begun in past summers with A Night in Paris and continued with A Night in Spain. Again the Shuberts have felt no great obligation to their chosen title--the Venice pictured would be far less familiar to a gondolier than it would to an oldtime Keith vaudeville subscriber. There are some tricornered hats, languid rhythms, a Benvenuto Cellini fantasy, but by far the most electric portions of the entertainment occur in modern two-a-day tempo and setting.

Ted Healy, for instance, an engaging, bald-headed young man, is assisted in his swift antics by a trio of abject, greasy nondescripts whose entrance prompts Mr. Healy to remark: "The pool rooms are empty." This group becomes embroiled with a wrestling bear which seems more human than any of them except Mr. Healy. Later the wrestlers try a fearsome barber-shop ballad to the accompaniment of Mr. Healy's orchestra. These scenes are blunt, vulgar, hilarious. A plump-cheeked brunette, Betsy Rees, might well be given more time.

Stepping Out, by Elmer Harris, is billed serenely as a "new and modern comedy," a nice distinction which, regrettably, is wasted. A farce dealing in less clean than lavatory fashion with the awkward infidelities of two married satyrs among Hollywood lupanars, Stepping Out is neither new nor modern. When, in fact, the pretty specimens with whom Tubby Smith and Tom Martin have been misconducting themselves appear to demand blackmail, Tubby produces for the emergency a wisecrack which, though good, resembles many that have been heard before. "I thought you were nice girls," he complains, "not good, but nice."

Such, however, are the exigencies of dirty, marital farce that both Tubby and his pal evade divorces. Repentant, though still sly, coached by a tedious solicitor, they clamber into bed with their unwilling wives, one of them in full view of the audience and to the sounds of offstage thunder. From the precarious hilarity of this crisis the play dwindles, among funny sayings and fetid moralisms, to a close which has been designed mainly for the entertainment and surprise of summer visitors to Manhattan.

It is quite impossible to toss bouquets to either the cast or the author. Elmer Harris (The Great Necker), was quite obviously intent only upon obeying in a fashion as vulgar as possible the signals of Charles Dillingham, a manager whose desire was for a hit-and-run play.