New Plays in Manhattan

Strictly Dishonorable. In a speak-easy whose murals luridly depict the Bay of Naples, a gentle-spoken maid from Mississippi (Muriel Kirkland) is wooed in ripe Neapolitan style by a singer of the Italian nobility (Tullio Carminati). She scarcely objects, for she has just had an altercation with her boorish fiance from West Orange, N. J. (Louis Jean Heydt). Even though the Italian is so indelicate as to offer her a bed in his apartment over the saloon and boldly announces his intentions as "strictly dishonorable," she does not quail.

Upstairs a policeman enters (Edward J. McNamara). He has been sent by the indignant fiance, but is speedily pacified at the mention of liquors. Says the girl: "Why, policemen never drink, do they?" Says the bluecoat: "It just seems like never."

But when she has accepted her host's guest pajamas and is determined to accept his love, the girl falls to weeping. Thereupon the sympathetic tenor tucks her in bed with a large teddy bear, goes elsewhere for the night. In the morning his honorable proposal is accepted.

Superbly played, this saucy fairy tale by Preston Sturges is continuously gay. It is the season's first smash-hit, by a margin of one night over Rope's End (see below).

The Crooks' Convention. What would happen if all the criminals in the world were to become unionized and then go on strike ? Novelist-Playwright Arthur Somers Roche demonstrates in three tedious acts of satire, that virtue would no longer be laudable, police and newsmen would be jobless, numerous industries would totter. His answer is not remarkably trenchant, nor is his playwriting adept.

Rope's End. A malevolent scent pervades the theatre wherein this play is exhibited. Perhaps it really exists. More likely it is imaginary, for the audience observes such diseased events as render the senses unreliable. The play and its players have chilled London for several months with their tale of two Oxford undergraduates (Sebastian Shaw and Ivan Brandt) who divert themselves by strangling a happy classmate and serving dinner on the carven chest which contains his corpse. Among their guests are the father and aunt of the deceased. Also present is Rupert Cadell (Ernest Milton), a cynical, orchidaceous poet whose lurching gait, acquired in the War, is misshapen, horrible.

While he invents witty fantasies on the evening's conversation, Cadell senses the macabre truth behind the feast. He leaves with the other guests. But he returns, sinister and languid, to toy with the nerves of both murderers and audience until he chooses to reveal and confirm his suspicions. One of the slayers is then prostrated with fright. Holding the other at bay with a sword cane, Cadell shrills a police whistle as the curtain falls.

Playwright Patrick Hamilton denies that he was influenced by the history of Leopold and Loeb, acknowledges a debt to Thomas De Quincey's essay "Murder as a Fine Art." The source is immaterial -this crescendo of fear depends on neither history nor scholarship. Mr. Hamilton, like Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, is an artist who makes diabolical fiction seem as real as sticks and stones.

The Sea Gull. Opening its fourth season, Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre presented Anton Tchekov's forlorn, splendid play which brought fame to the Moscow Art Theatre. On the shores of a Russian lake the tragedies were inter twined -where Nina (Josephine Hutchinson) was happy as the sea gulls that lay along the breeze; where Konstantin (Robert Ross) loved her and wrote boyishly lofty plays; where Novelist Trigorin (Jacob Ben-Ami) went to rest and fish. When Nina bothered him with fatuous, youthful admiration, Trigorin took the trouble to describe his craft -the incessant, harrowing compulsion to write, the reflection that people would pause above his grave to remark: "He was charming and talented ... but not as great as Turgenev."

It was inevitable that Trigorin and Nina should love. After the death of their child, he deserted her. Konstantin shot himself.

By any theatrical formula Trigorin would be called a villain. But Tchekov's comparison transcends all formulas. The novelist emerges as the sorrowful exemplar of all great artistry, doomed by its egocentrism and insatiable need for new contacts to chastise itself and sadden others. These things Tchekov knew well, for Trigorin is largely self-portraiture.

The brooding, bearded figure of Jacob Ben-Ami, playing his first Civic Repertory part, evoked all the solemnities of the role. His speech was slow, with the de liberation of men who choose words carefully because they deal in profundities. Incisive, striking, despite the general excellence of her cast, was Eva Le Gallienne as the glum steward's daughter who wanted Konstantin. She and her company illumined their antiquated downtown playhouse, where top price is $1.50, with lustrous, high enterprise.

Philadelphia. Bribery and bullet-proof vests are important in this melodrama which tells things about Philadelphia which everyone suspects, and is rather ponderous in the telling.

Cape Cod Follies. From little-theatrical Dennis, Mass., a new group of youthful troupers have taken their summertime antics to the Broadway stage. Often amateurish, they nevertheless provide several infectious interludes, notably those in which Peggy Ellis plays a piano, Peter Joray imitates Queen Victoria painting gulls at Brighton, Eugene O'Neill is burlesqued with such lines as: "My plays are different, dirty and distinguished. . . . Go to bed mother and stop gazing beyond the horizon at that there dynamo."

Hawk Island. On a gruesome isle off the New England coast a jokester announces that he has killed a man. When the mock victim is actually slain, the deed is attributed to the jokester. This swift, complex variation on the classic "wolf-wolf" theme should appeal to not-too- discriminating mystery addicts.

Fiesta. Written by Michael Gold, editor of the proletarian New Masses, this play tells of an elite Mexican revolutionist who tries to engender ambition in the peons on his ranch. The scheme fails when his bright-eyed little protege, whom he views as symbolic, neglects her lessons, steals away to a fiesta, is there seduced by his dashingly reactionary brother. Often stupidly acted, full of foolish, obscene dialog, it is not an auspicious beginning for the esthetic Provincetown Players, who have moved uptown this season from Greenwich Village to the outskirts of blazing Broadway. Clevelanders visiting Manhattan will not be disappointed, however, in the performance of tall Carl Benton Reid, erstwhile bulwark of Cleveland's Playhouse repertory company.

A Strong Man's House. Strong will -too much Shelley = idealism. This is the equation by which dramatists create moral young men who then proceed to annoy the rest of the cast. Roy Hamerman (Lester Vail) was such an irritant. Aged 23, he fell heir to a vast Midwestern barony which his shrewd father, newly dead of angina pectoris, had acquired by almost feudal extortions and chicanery. Things thus looked bad for his father's trained nurse, a vivid girl (Mary Nash) whose principles were as elastic as those of her late patient. Roy knew she had blackmailed his father. But he was a reformer, and he was also so unfortunate as to love her. "You marry me," he said, "or you'll go to jail."

For a while it seemed the play might be a wise study of what happens to meddle- some people who try to transmute base metals. But in the end the girl, imbued with love, turned saintly and Roy, helped by an upright lawyer, bade fair to rid the city of corruption. Lee Wilson Dodd's play thus becomes folk-drama of the more maudlin sort.

The Street Singer. So successfully did" a gentlemen named Busby Berkeley arrange dance routines for the Brothers Shubert that he ventured producing a show of his own. The result is a great deal of ardent hoofing amid elegantly painted views of Paris. You witness the happy rise of blithe little Queenie Smith from gamine to ballerina. You hear droll Andrew Tombes, disguised as a vendor of French postcards, pass such remarks as this comment on a bald man: "What a tall face!" Evoking many such blandishments, Producer Berkeley qualifies as an expert in pleasant, flowery entertainment.