New Plays in Manhattan

Decision. The suburban tone of this play was accented by a live white cat which pawed the footlights during the first act. So charming was the animal that the audience all but forgot how Nancy Lane's adopted children, and their sudden $750,000 legacy, were about to be filched from her by her wily, citified sister and brother-in-law. Later on, when the cat had slunk away, the audience found nothing to divert it from the incredibly hoary spectacle of the two small, extremely stagey children choosing to remain with kind, gentle Nancy. Not even this situation satisfied Playwright Carl Henkle's taste for the archaic. He also introduced an inarticulate bumpkin who loved Nancy, who found courage to say so just before the final curtain. Margaret Barnstead played Nancy with great earnestness.

Chippies. Among the more uncouth of the year's dramas was this tale of a girl's grim progress from an Ohio village to the bed of a Cleveland beer-runner. Out of a welter of cheap wheezes and smudgy local color comes the 'legger's cryptic decision to marry the girl. Thus made respectable, they return to Ohio, to find the coffin of the girl's tortured mother in the dim sitting room. Cullen Landis played the 'legger without retrieving the general exhibition of bad theatre and worse taste.