New Plays in Manhattan

Meteor. The eyeballs of Alfred Lunt appear to contract with mad fixity of vision as he seethes through the part of Raphael Lord, adventurer and egoist extraordinary. Having hobnobbed with Central American banditti and other peculiar and remote persons, Lord appears at a New England college, drawn by the writings of one of its dead professors, but leaves almost immediately, enraged with the pedantic stagnation of the place and bearing away with him the vivid daughter (Lynn Fontanne) of the great teacher. Having learned of the weak heart of her other suitor, a mighty footballer, Raphael has spurred the athlete's rage and brought about his death.

His subsequent career begins like the dream of every oil prospector. With intuitions and talent for analysis so acute that he really believes it to be second sight, he makes millions. Simultaneously the other things that he has valued escape him. Leisure and its cultural by-products are first to go. His ruthlessness compels awe but defeats friendship--when the liquid, lovely costume of his wife is much admired by guests, he exclaims: "I made her buy it!" At length his boasted gift of prophecy fails and while the newsboys hawk the story of his downfall, his wife comes to him, offering her humble adoration to meet the new humility which she expects him to have found. But the man's egoism is pounding within him--he casts her aside as he prepares again to assail his rivals, a savage, solitary, tragic figure with nothing left but his will-to-power.

Playwright S. N. Behrman. whose frolicsome plays (The Second Man, Serena Blandish) were admirable, does not use ponderous syllables to transmit his new solemnity. His idiom is rapid, keen, unfailingly dramatic. For Alfred Lunt he has provided another personal success with perhaps the most picaresque role of his career. For the Theatre Guild, smarting from the rebuffs given Karl and Anna and The Game of Love and Death, he has made the season happier.

Death Takes a Holiday. Evening shadows drift across the estate of Duke Lambert, though there are no clouds to cause them. Darkly they invade the great hall of the castle, where a shrouded figure in their midst disturbs the midnight ruminations of the duke. The visitor is Death, come to arrange a three-day holiday for himself in the guise of a human being. The trembling noble can scarcely refuse to be a secretive host, and so it happens that Death appears among the other ducal guests as His Serene Highness, Prince Sirki of Vitalba Alexandri.

While Death takes his holiday the flowers in the courtyard cease to wilt and venerable Baron Cesarea makes extravagant and unusual gestures toward the ladies. As for Prince Sirki, he experiences the earthly pleasures which he had anticipated, and a bitterness which he could not have foreseen. For he falls in love with the virginal, tender Grazia and learns of compulsions and sentiments which make him long to remain forever human. On his last evening there is crisis. The girl walks complacently with him into the gardens; the others, who have been told of Prince Sirki's identity by their desperate host, wait forlorn and fearful while what they regard as the dread communion takes place. At length the pair return, and when Sirki tries to frighten Grazia back to mundanity by revealing himself in his habitual cerements, she alone of all the company shows no fear of Death. So he takes her to his realm.

Adapted by Walter Ferris from the Italian of Alberto Casella, this play, displaying the same metaphysically romantic tendency as Berkeley Square (TIME, Nov. 18), neglects the acid philosophizing suggested by its theme for a poetry which is often affecting but tends to become mere rhetorical conversation. Philip Merivale plays with distinction as the sinister vacationist whose entrance provokes more ideas than the play develops. As his eager consort, Rose Hobart would obviously appeal to any reaper, however grim.

Born in Manhattan 24 years ago, Rose Hobart has taken her mother's maiden name. Her father was Paul Kefer, French musician. Her parents separated; when Rose was 12 she went traveling with Chautauqua. She has since supported her mother and sister, making her first stage appearance when 15 (Cappy Ricks), acting with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre, and in Liliom, The Vortex, Crashing Thru, A Primer for Lovers. She cooks and dressmakes excellently, likes earrings, is a divorcee.

Woof Woof. Topical excitement is supposedly furnished this musicomedy by a whippet race with real, live dogs right on the stage. But since the sportsmen who attend these events get most of their fun from betting, the thrills of the stage contest are questionable. Louise Brown's dancing is a more positive pleasure--one of the very few in an incongruous diversion which mixes up such obvious ballads as "My Sweetie's Sweet On Me" with a ballet danced to Claude Achille Debussy's gossamer "Clair de Lune."

Seven concerns a squadron of U, S. aviators and their successive deaths over the Western Front. Last to survive are the captain and a stripling from Harvard. Because the Harvardian's nerves are shattered, a highborn and loving Frenchwoman offers him the solace of her bed. In the morning the youth learns that the understanding captain has gone alone on a dangerous exploit and follows furiously after him. Because the play is earnest it may keep your attention, but because Playwright Frank J. Collins mixes burlesque and bathos, exhibits all manner of ineptitudes, you are bound to be uncomfortable.

Revival

Richelieu. Walter Hampden is now to be observed in this ancient, reverberating play by the late great victim of romantic elephantiasis, Sir Edward (The Last Days of Pompeii) Bulwer-Lytton. It must be a magnificent experience for Mr. Hampden. For every maneuver of eyebrow, every musical tremor of voice, every curdling glance which he can devise, the late Bulwer-Lytton provides an accompaniment bombastically in keeping. Some of his phrases are still tenaciously clinging to the English tongue 91 years after their invention. You will remember the almost continually misquoted, "In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as 'fail.' " And at another point the wily Cardinal makes a remark which, paradoxically, seems almost unbearably bromidic: "The pen is mightier than the sword." Mr. Hampden is surrounded by a competent group of swashbucklers, courtiers, gamesters, conspirators and Ladies of the Court.

Babes in Toyland. The thrilling call of massed trumpets which begins the march from this opera by the late great Victor Herbert suggests much more significant affairs than the parade of toy soldiers which follows it. Perhaps it was because he knew the serious splendors of the childish imagination that Composer Herbert wrote some of his most glamorous music to accompany the deeds of such characters as Bo-Peep, Jill, Curly Locks, Tommy Tucker and Simple Simon. Milton Aborn's revivalists (TIME, Oct. 7 et seq.), treat this tonal poetry creditably.

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