New Plays in Manhattan

The Silver Tassie. The Irish Theatre, [nc., whose roster includes Scans, Culinans, MacGuffins, Ennises, Miceals, Patricks, Liams and Unas, whose sponsors include Llewellyn Powys, Donn Byrne's widow and Otto Hermann Kahn, have taken over the tiny but gallant Greenwich Village Theatre where for their first production of the season they present a haunting, chaotic play by famed Sean 0'Casey of Dublin, author of Juno and the Paycock (TIME, March 29, 1926). Through its symbolism and its brogue you discern the simple story of an Irish footballer who went to war and returned paralyzed below the waist. He then had to roll himself about in a wheel chair while his erstwhile love cuddled another boy. In the meantime a profound and troublous scene has occurred. Avoiding the acute battlefront description of such books as All Quiet on the Western Front, such plays as Journey's End, Playwright O'Casey reveals a group of infantrymen encamped in a ruined apse behind the lines. There they sing songs of war--not bawdy ditties or rousing marches, but strange and awesome chants. This lyricism, now solo, now antiphonal, now choral, is a poetic, formalized utterance. The diction is abominable--words can only be guessed at--but the import of these Gaelic spirituals can be felt. Mystic and throbbing, they express the soldiers' gruesome mission and man's revolt from the ghastliness he has made for himself.

The rest is frequently moving realism, always hampered by bad locution. But what you will remember is the ghostly burthen of fear and futility borne by the voices of shadowy warriors.

Ladies of the Jury. What theatregoer with a nose for situations would not tingle at the comic possibilities of women doing jury duty? In the first act of this play, in which a murder trial begins, Mrs. Fiske is to be observed as a lorgnetted, matronly juror.

Her misapprehension of court procedure, her harassing interruptions and questions, so acutely demonstrate the feminine at its silliest that men in the audience writhe in remembrance, everybody laughs, high comedy is anticipated.

But in the last two acts, acted in the jury room, the spirit languishes. For Mrs. Fiske's absurd first-act character becomes a smart, dominating woman, and what was almost wicked satire becomes burlesque. The jury is shown in impromptu sleeping regalia. Two lovers are interrupted at their devotions by the snores of a red-headed Irishwoman. There are two crusty moralists, a conventionally exploited Scotsman, a maundering poet--all the stencils of farce, with a brace of beauties thrown in for good measure.

Mrs. Fiske's rapid, casual delivery's, as ever, expert and sometimes unintelligible. Of the tricks of emphasis and accent she is still past-mistress. In this disappointing play she is accompanied by another oldtimer, Wilton Lackaye, who made mesmerist Svengali famous (Trilby, 1895), who returns, after a three-year illness, to do an excellent bit as the exasperated Judge.

Minnie Maddern Fiske, 64, was bora in New Orleans, daughter of Thomas W. Davey, theatrical manager. Aged 3, she appeared in Richard III; aged 15, she was starred with her own company. She has played Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Becky Sharp, Salvation Nell, many an Ibsen heroine. In 1890 she married theatrical director Harrison Grey Fiske who still stages her productions. Eight years ago she gave up tragic, wearing parts, but later rallied to play Ibsen's Ghosts. She wears no real furs or feathers, eats no flesh. In 1925 she said: "Society is so organized as to make it seem necessary for thousands of shouting, cursing men to stand knee-deep in blood, dealing ferocious blows right and left upon millions of shrieking animals in order that we may be fed. . . . The steel trap has no place in anything even remotely describing itself as civilization and to abolish it we shall rely upon the modern woman."

Stripped is a romance, including an imaginary kingdom and its Prince, stalwartly interpreted by Lionel Atwill. In the search for the stolen crown jewels it seems for a while that a woman suspect may be forcibly denuded, but those who anticipate this violence will be disappointed.

Week End. Austin Parker, Saturday Evening Post writer, conceived this first offering of Bela Blau, Inc., prosperous and principled new producers (TIME, May 13). Among his characters he included a drunkard who, as played with strange understanding by Hugh O'Connell, is one of the season's great. Inebriates are of course familiar to the stage, but the antics of most of them seem like distorted mummery beside Mr. O'Connell's gentle and imaginative euphoria. As a chubby, post-War wastrel at a houseparty in Barbizon (just outside Paris) he may be found continuing his perennial search for a champagne in which the bubbles go down instead of up, and ever so politely inquiring, "Did you ever feel as though you had a live trout inside you?" Most of the stories he tells are ridiculous, dipsomanianecdotes but one, which begins like the rest, has such sorrowful innuendo that you soon stop laughing.

This delightful, unfortunate fellow, brooding over the misery which he causes his wife (Vivienne Osborne), finally shoots himself. By that time she is leaning toward a virile magazine writer (Warren Williams) and their host and hostess have settled a domestic tiff which also involved the drunkard's buxom spouse. These people are all members of the so-called "lost generation," and their varied plights are sincerely described even though the host and the writer continually hark back to their Wartime comradeship with enthusiasm of the "You old rhinoceros!" variety.

Maggie the Magnificent. Playwright George Kelly (The Show-Off, Daisy Mayme, Craig's Wife) lays his ear close to door-cracks, screws his eye to keyholes; his realism is at least audibly and visually authentic. But in this play about a girl who is too good for her boarding-house-keeper mother, the life-like groans and gossip of the characters cease to be either strong or amusing. You realize that the author, depending too much on a species of talking photography, has taken a formless, tedious picture. Slapped in the face by her harridan parent, the girl finally leaves the house and goes to a mansion where she serves as social secretary. The mother, broken by this departure, mumbles to a visitor: "I don't know what in God's name people want to come and see other people for." This mordant comment is one of several reminders that Playwright Kelly can do better things than develop negatives.

Button, Button. "Button" Woodhouse (Lynne Overman) is the lunatic of his family and he is used to make the not very original point that the sane are perhaps madder than the mad. Taken into the house of relatives, "Button" encounters a brother who has sacrificed life to golf, a sister-in-law who studies dreams and astrology, a garrulous lady who collects hooked rugs, and her gawking daughter who writes poetry about the smell of horses. When one act's substance has been stretched to make three acts of mild farce, "Button" goes contentedly back to his asylum.

The Booster is a butcher who helps his son succeed as a doctor by applying his own high-pressure methods, such as bargain days for kidney troubles. Said Critic Arthur Ruhl (oldtime War correspondent) of the New York Herald Tribune: ". . . The injured lady turned on him a withering eye, and just as she stalked out, flung at him the devastating phrase: 'Assorted pink peanuts!' That was possibly the high point of last evening's entertainment."