New Plays in Manhattan

Subway Express. If a police inspector be summoned aboard a subway train and told that a man has been shot dead, it may well give him pause. If a medical examiner gets on a few stations down the line and declares that the killing resulted not from shooting but from electrocution a few moments beforehand, the inspector may well be dumbfounded. If the car lights are suddenly extinguished and a likely witness is riddled with bullets, the inspector may even be pardoned for surrendering his badge.

Inspector Hannen (Edward Ellis) faced all these dilemmas, together with a car full of yelping women, emotional Italians, contradictory evidence. He kept everyone there, including the corpse of Stock-broker Edward Tracy (Jack Lee), which sat upright in grisly electrified rigidity and a Panama hat throughout most of the play. Inspector Hannen questioned the late Mr. Tracy's lovely wife (Dorothy Peterson) and his partner (Edward Pawley), who was also Mrs. Tracy's lover. After the dark murder of a clerk (J. Hammond Dailey) in the firm of the deceased, the Inspector ordered the motorman to retrace his course. Then he discovered how it was possible for a man to be electrocuted in a subway car designed to insulate its passengers from any possible contact with the third rail.

The solution is ingenious, will appeal to those who like a blend of mystery and mechanics. The technically expert setting shows the interior of one of Manhattan's Interborough Rapid Transit cars which whizzes past lights and stations. Co-Playwrights Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison have contrived an exciting addition to the season's many slaughters.

Many Waters. It is a favorite axiom of dramatists that you never can tell what anguish has moulded the calm faces on the avenues. Monckton Hoffe, a British playwright, has for some time been demonstrating this fact in London with Many Waters, which permits you to live through the years with a little architect, James Barcaldine, and his pleasant wife. So tranquil are the Barcaldines that a theatrical impresario cites them as the sort of people who like twinkling artificial entertainment because their own lives are so fatuously real.

The Barcaldine history is then exposed in a series of flashbacks--an accidental meeting at an exposition in the century's early years, a wedding in a registry office with two charwomen as witnesses. Years later their only daughter gives herself to a married man who lives in the flat below and dies in childbirth. Barcaldine faces a bankruptcy court. But always there are subtle filaments which bind man and wife --"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."

This sentiment seldom cloys because Ernest Truex gives the most serious, tender performance of his career and Marda Vanne as the wife never forgets restraint. Certain episodes exhibit flagrancies of aste. But when the daughter (Maisie Darrel) confesses her troubles to a stalwart boy who wants her love (Robert Douglas), the scene trembles with tragedy and gallantry. And a parody of court procedure is introduced which provides peerless comic relief.

See Naples and Die. Elmer Rice, who wrote the Pulitzer Prizewinning Street Scene, has forsaken the rubber plants of Manhattan's slums for the bougainvillaea blooms on the Bay of Naples. Simultaneously he has turned from tragedy to a species of comedy bloated with wisecracks. There are so many of them in this fantasy that the senses reel and rebel.

A U. S. debutante weds a decadent Russian prince to prevent him from selling her sister's love letters to the newspapers. This noxious noble makes no intimate demands--in fact he promises to release her as soon as a substantial share of her fortune is transferred to his name. But once married, he conceives a fine Slavic lust for his wife, and when she flees to the coast he follows and plans to kidnap her. At the hotel are a group of those international freaks for whom the Mediterranean shores provide so ample a platform. A bad English painter announces that he does not like running water fixtures because "You can't stand up in the basin." A pudgy, bromidic U. S. matron, played to perfection by Beatrice Herford, declares that "When Mr. Evans and I first settled in Columbus, I cried my heart out for Akron." Two chess players silently cudgel their brains throughout the play. When one of them happens to make a move, a tart debutante says "Is that allowed." And her lover from the U. S. replies, "I think they're only amateurs." It is of course this providential fellow who is largely instrumental in saving her from her husband's stratagems. That oily gentleman is accidentally shot by one of the chess players, who prove to be appointed assassins of a Rumanian general.

Through the maze of plot and verbiage, Claudette Colbert treads smartly on her renowned legs. Pedro De Cordoba makes an admirable Russ. And Roger Pryor, whose boyish wit is so perpetual, is none other than the son of famed Bandsman Arthur Pryor. But Playwright Rice's comedy would, paradoxically, be funnier if his characters were less amusing.

The Big Shot (formerly Nigger Rich). The heroism of Mike Kelly (Eric Dressler) did not survive the War. Arrogant, selfish, he lived idly on a pension in a humble club for ex-service men. Happening to win a great sum at the racetracks, he quickly snubbed his cronies and his naive lady friend (Elvia Enders) and hired a pea-green suite at the Ritz. When he bundled with a courtesan (Helen Flint), her jealous Wall Street man sent him penniless into the streets with a piece of financial misinformation. Kelly returned to the club, found a letter telling of further fortunes acquired from a deceased aunt. Again he abandoned his fellow warriors. It subsequently developed that one of them had faked the letter to expose his character.

Playwright John McGowan's pretentious playboy is conceived with sympathy. His humdrum amour is distressingly real. But long portions of the play are static, leaden.

The Love Expert is a tedious account of a puzzled maiden who sought advice from a newspaper sob-sister. When that oracle paid a call, she brought with her a reporter who solved all the girl's perplexities. Only good line: "Women don't really change their minds. Their minds simply get tired resting on one side, and turn over."

Mountain Fury explains the malevolence which exists in the Alleghenies between the hill proletariat and the dale aristocracy. Naturally a dale-boy loves a hill-girl, to the accompaniment of baying hounds, tempests, a forest fire, murder, suicide, theft, and the bemused mumblings of a woodland lunatic.

George White's Scandals. A decade has passed since Producer White offered the first of his popular saturnalias. Still fired with ambition, he has inserted a song (Continued on p. 78)

(Continued from p. 40) Bigger and Better Than Ever in his anniversary Scandals. The tune is piffle; the sentiment is mere braggadocio. But he should again succeed, for he still knows how to polish the fleshpots. Once his girlish regiment sprawls on a beach, clad for maximum suntan. When costumes are more voluminous, engaging apertures are cut in them. Entrancing is a lady who stands vastly denuded, symbolic of the American Indian, and looks remarkably like Helen Wills.

Yellow-haired Frances Williams sings the show's best song, Bottoms Up, in her slithering, urgent voice. To this ditty Producer White dances a strenuous routine (successor to his Charleston, Black Bottom). The carnivals of Europe have inspired huge, mechanical grotesques which loom now and then behind the players -- a shaggy Beast rolls its head and eyes while Beauty pirouettes; an enormous dummy jazz band swoops and sways. Meanwhile Willie Howard talks Jewish, and the Abbott dancers from Chicago tap dance on their toes. Ousted from the bed of a married woman, a clown exclaims : "Believe it or not, I'm a stowaway."

In his finale, Producer White and several members of his cast, dressed in rubber garments, descend into a large pool of water, emerge soaked and smiling.

Note

"The play . . . glorifies . . . an abject code of morals." With this comment did Mayor Malcolm E. Nichols of Boston recently forbid the Theatre Guild to present Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude in his city. Once again Bostonians applauded or flayed their potent, often-evidenced municipal censorship.

Last week the Theatre Guild announced it would play Strange Interlude seven miles away, in Quincy, Mass. Bostonians could easily motor, trolley. The Boston "purification" question might be brought to a head.