New Plays in Manhattan

The Joyous Season (by Philip Barry; Arthur Hopkins, producer) is a solemn and sometimes sprightly investigation of the spiritual life of a family of shell-backed Bostonians. The Parleys live in a dingily magnificent mansion of Beacon Street. Their farm on the Merrimac River and the possibility that existence may contain more for them than security on a "careful, calm, contented four percent" are two of the things that they remember when the maverick of the family, Sister Christina (Lillian Gish), arrives from the nunnery to spend Christmas. Before Christina arrives, the Parleys are worried mainly because they think she may decide to claim, by their father's will, their town house instead of the farm. By the time Christina has enlightened Theresa Farley (Jane Wyatt) about the cause of squabbles with a husband who teaches law at Cambridge; implied that her oldest brother (Moffat Johnston) might be wise to marry his secretary; consoled her smallest sister for a lost love; made wise responses to a brother who has lost faith in Communism and to another who bitterly pretends to be contented, the Parleys have greater things to think about.

When Irish-Catholic playwrights experience the tug of pious inspiration, the results are likely to be more ennobling than entertaining. The Joyous Season, like Eugene O'Neill's Days Without End, is a serious and ambitious drama, celebrating Faith. It achieves its purpose smoothly but without that wit which, in plays condoning uncomfortable sophistication, gave Playwright Barry his authority. Handsomely produced by Arthur Hopkins, softly performed in a Robert Edmond Jones drawing-room, it provides Lillian Gish with a role which she acts as gracefully as the easier one her chipper sister has in By Your Leave (see below).

By Your Leave (by Gladys Hurlbut and Emma Wells--Richard Aldrich and Alfred de Liagre Jr., producers) is considerably more entertaining than most of the little comedies about a suburban husband and wife who have grown bored with each other. When shy little Henry Smith (Howard Lindsay) suggests to Ellen Smith (Dorothy Gish) that they separate for a week, he hopes to encounter adventure. Instead he encounters a wench whose Junior League manners lead him to believe that, like the Smiths' governess and cook, she is a depression product, too good for her position. Ellen Smith encounters a pleasant Scotch explorer with a deep burr, who, while he seduces her, teaches her the proper way to brew tea. When the Smiths reassemble, Ellen wears a wise smile but Henry's relief at being home outweighs his curiosity.

Richard Aldrich (Harvard '25) and Alfred de Liagre Jr. (Yale '26) are two of Broadway's least experienced managers but in By Your Leave, as in Three Cornered Moon which they produced last year, they showed good casting sense. Dorothy Gish looks younger than she is (36). Howard Lindsay, who dramatized the season's successful comedy, She Loves Me Not, has not acted since he played the scenario writer in Dulcy (1921). Kenneth MacKenna, who is currently being divorced by Kay Francis, sounds Scotch and specializes in Scottish roles, but his real name is Leo Mielziner Jr. His brother Jo designed the set of a spacious country living room that helps to make By Your Leave a comfortably familiar knickknack.

Mackerel Skies (by John Haggart; George Bushar and John Tuerk, producers). What has happened before the play begins: Elsa (Violet Kemble Cooper), hot-blooded Austrian noblewoman, marries a prince, has a daughter (Carol Stone) by a peasant (Tom Powers), exhausts the prince's fortune in pursuit of a singing career, deserts prince & peasant to marry a Manhattan broker, fails dismally as a diva. What happens during the play: Grown to adolescence, the daughter displays a voice inherited not from her noble mother but from her peasant father who reappears as a wheat tycoon to oppose Elsa's jealous opposition to the girl's studying abroad. So fixed that he can "wipe out" the broker husband at will, the peasant-tycoon takes command of the situation and the daughter has a brilliant Metropolitan debut.

Only member of the cast at ease amid this furore is Carol Stone, 17, third daughter of Fred Stone. Theatregoers took instant notice of her ability, childish prettiness and pleasantly mature figure last season when she appeared as a minor role replacement in Spring in Autumn. Unlike Sisters Dorothy and Paula, who emulate the capering and caroling of Father Fred, she means to stick to straight drama.

No More Ladies (by A. E. Thomas; Lee Shubert, producer). Nimbly written around the tried & seldom true formula of a philandering husband who is brought to his senses by a dose of his own medicine, this comedy is compact of witty lines and stale quips, hilarious situations and brummagem tricks. There is the sly, wise grandmother in frumpy clothes (Lucille Watson) who speaks a pure nightclub patois and gets tipsy. There is the joke about flowers with celebrated names planted in the same bed. Some one even gets a chance to remark that Adolf Hitler is "all swelled up with no place to burst." But with adroit acting, shrewd direction, ingratiating sets, the whole comes out a packet of high entertainment.

After two somnolent years in Hollywood as an unobtrusive background for cinema celebrities, blond Melvyn Douglas returns to do a lifelike job as sleek, rich Sheridan Warren. He and capricious Marcia Townsend (Ruth Weston) decide, with explicit misgivings, to get married. Before long he is up to his old tricks with a nightclub charmer, ingenuously informs his wife of the fact. Marcia vindictively arranges a weekend party composed of 1) the nightclub charmer; 2) an ex-mistress of Warren's whom he has fobbed off on a fortune-hunting Briton; 3) the Briton; 4) the ex-mistress's ex-husband, with whom Marcia, as a finishing touch, stays away overnight. Warren first thinks of divorce, then of mending his ways.

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