New Plays in Manhattan

Many A Slip. One of the most effective wiles employed by theatrical ladies is the bogus pregnancy. The ingenue of It's A Wise Child (TIME, Aug. 19) uses it to rid herself of a repulsive fiance. The heroine of Many A Slip adopts it, upon the advice of her mother, to provoke just the opposite effect--a proposal of marriage from a cynical and recalcitrant swain. Once she gets him, she learns that babies do not always come with husbands and is highly embarrassed by the arrival of toy trains, mechanical bunnies, other anticipatory gewgaws. And when her husband learns the truth he makes it very clear that he objects to such fetal fooling. But, child or no child, she manages to keep him.

The play is properly farcical, although Playwrights Edith Fitzgerald and Robert Riskin have occasionally blundered into trying to make it something more. Its progress is rendered exceedingly pleasant by Sylvia Sidney, who has long lashes and a figure, as the fraudulent heroine. Dorothy Sands is trig and smart as her young-seeming mother. When asked by a stranger if she knows her own daughter, she replies: "Certainly, we were girls together."

Dishonored Lady. Every well-informed criminologist remembers the case of Madeleine Smith of Glasgow who poisoned her lover because he was trying to impede her marriage to a moneyed man. This incident has been used by Margaret Ayer Barnes and Edward Sheldon as the basis of a new play in which appears Katharine Cornell. Madeleine Smith was real, and the playwrights have sought to impart a like reality to their heroine. She lives in a sedate, tapestried mansion in Manhattan's Washington Square, has a dignified father, a smart dress shop on Madison Avenue, a generous and platonic gentleman friend named Larry Brennan. Her suitor is a rich and personable Englishman. Her lover is a Latin cabaret dancer. She goes to his rooms in the night, succumbs for the last time to his tender voice and hands, and in the early dawn, when he is less persuasive, poisons him with strychnine filched from her father's medicine chest. It is all scrupulously planned to give the realistic, factual impression that such things can be. That is the trouble with it.

For this is a play which might better have been deliberately and devilishly unreal. The case of Madeleine Smith, if it could be faithfully transferred to the stage, might provide an exciting study in various violent phases of psychology. But it suggests to the imagination a stained and elegant fiction about a creature of the shade, sinuous and fascinating. Katharine Cornell conveys enough of this quality to indicate what might have been possible. Her high cheek bones are blanched, yellowish, sickly, as she reminds her boyish suitor that she lay with the dancer before killing him. When she tears the telephone from the hands of the lover, twisting in his death agony, she is horrifying. But for the most part the play wavers between melodrama which would be stupid without Miss Cornell and realism which defeats her attempts to give the story a malevolent lustre.

The Boundary Line is a psychological melange by Dana Burnet about a poet, his wife, a farmer, a lawyer The wife wishes to build a fence around the poet's properties. The farmer objects on the ground that he has a right of way. The poet is willing to accede to the farmer's objection. But the wife hires the lawyer, goes to court, defeats the farmer, who later dies of apoplexy. Finding his marriage torn asunder, the poet departs along the road while his wife seeks solace with the lawyer.

If this were a better play it would be more easily and forcibly discernible that the fence is a symbol for an orthodox snugness within which the conventional wife tries to inclose her imaginative, vaulting husband. But Playwright Burnet's dramatic sense is by no means as lucid as his psychology, and his taste is woeful. The theme is obscured in a plot stuffed with nonessentials. Otto Kruger acts the poet valiantly despite dialog which makes him speak like a moonstruck sixth-former.

Rebound. Hope Williams is a boyish young woman with a shambling gait and a sarcastic monotone. She belongs to the Manhattan Junior League and appears professionally in plays by very clever young men about people who are also apparent Junior Leaguers. Last season it was the more-than-clever Philip Barry's Holiday. This season it is clever Donald Ogden Stewart's Rebound, in which a young couple get married after they have each been disappointed in love. During a month of honeymooning in Paris the bride conceives a great love for her husband, whereas he gives every indication of still preferring the girl who has jilted him. They play together in Paris and continue in the suburbs of Manhattan. Hope Williams, as the distraught bride, pleads for her husband's love without avail. Then she recalls something her father, a wise old expatriate, had said in Paris: "Love is a compromise in which people sometimes lose grace." This stimulates her to assert her individuality, eliminate the pleading, and thus regain her spouse's devotion.

During the first two acts Hope Williams is called upon to do little but deliver Mr. Stewart's prolific witticisms, patterned after the jibes which people make at each other when they are slightly tired. She makes them with self-assurance which a more expert player would know how to conceal. They are very good jibes and she is not essential to their success. In the last act, when the scene demands emotional pliancy, you realize that while she has a definite, tart personality, she is not an actress. Robert Williams, as the boy who had once refused her affection, returns to confess his weak, desperate love, to fall sobbing on his knees before her. His performance in this difficult bit is splendidly impetuous and poignant--Hope Williams remains wooden.

She cannot, however, be said to spoil this act, for the playwright has already done so--the husband's quick about-face to his wife when she has but mentioned her new philosophy of love is anything but the strong solution which you expect from a playwright who charges his characters and their destinies with conviction. Playwright Stewart plays a small part himself, merely by the process of speaking a little louder than usual. This is nicely informal, but, in combination with Hope Williams' amateurism, it makes little progress toward the high comedy of which he seems potentially capable.

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