New Play in Manhattan

Yellow Jack (by Sidney Howard and Paul de Kruif; Guthrie McClintic. producer). After the Spanish-American War, in which more U. S. soldiers were killed by yellow fever than in battle, the War Department sent a medical commission to Cuba to find, if possible, the cause and cure of this deadly tropical disease. The commission was headed by Dr. Walter Reed. With him was Dr. James Carroll. In Cuba they found Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, European-trained microbiologist, and Cuban Dr. Aristides Agramonte.

Limited in its experiments by the fact that animals are immune to yellow fever, the commission was forced to consider the theory of an eccentric Scottish medic history. who had an unsubstantiated notion that yellow fever was transmitted from human to human by mosquitoes. The commissioners tested Dr. Carlos Finlay's theory on themselves. Dr. Carroll caught yellow jack from one of the Finlay mosquitoes. Dr. Lazear died of it. Even then their experiments were scientifically incomplete. Dr. Reed called for four soldiers to volunteer as human guinea pigs. Two of them got bites from Finlay mosquitoes. The other two were placed in insanitary surroundings where, if the disease could be transmitted by contagion, they were sure to catch it. When only the two soldiers who were bitten by mosquitoes contracted yellow jack, it amounted to Science's first important victory over yellow fever, the beginning of the final extermination of that plague. The history of the Yellow Fever Commission made one of the most exciting chapters in Paul de Kruif's brilliant Microbe Hunters.* In the theatre, Sidney Howard retells it in 29 scenes played without an intermission against an "essentialist"' setting devised by Jo Mielziner. The background of the stage, a flight of stairs surmounted by a sort of cage to represent a laboratory, does not change. A few essential props--a bed, the back flap of a tent, a hospital cot--indicate scenes where necessary. That the most genuinely heroic human activities do not always make the most stirring dramas is a fact which does not greatly injure the effect of Yellow Jack, which remains an honest interesting chronicle about men who did not think of themselves as heroes. John Miltern (Reed), Robert Keith (Lazear), Barton MacLane (Carroll) and some 40 other actors perform it with fervent sincerity. With Men in White, They Shall Not Die, Ah, Wilderness and Tobacco Road, Yellow Jack should be a leading candidate for this year's Pulitzer Prize when the committee meets this spring.

Sidney Howard had graduated from the University of California, studied under George Pierce Baker at Harvard, driven an ambulance during the War, edited Life, written five plays and married Actress Clare Eames before he turned out his first success in 1924. Prior to the opening of They Knew What They Wanted, Playwright Howard, to be on the safe side, got a $50-a-week job on the New York World. He was supposed to start work the day after the opening. He was still abed when Editor Swope telephoned: "I see by the morning papers you don't need a job. You're fired." They Knew What They Wanted won the Pulitzer Prize, and established Sidney Howard as one of the half dozen ablest playwrights in the U. S.

Any discussion of U. S. playwrighting begins with Eugene O'Neill. Bunched close together below him are Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson and Sidney Howard. Like them, Howard does not write a hit at every sitting. Since They Knew What They Wanted, only three (Alien Corn, The Silver Cord, The Late Christopher Bean} of his ten plays have been financially successful. Unlike O'Neill, Anderson or Barry, Playwright Howard is not above working in Hollywood, where he has never written a failure. His adaptation of Bulldog Drummond for Producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1929 made Ronald Colman an important star. His adaptation of Arrowsmith won the Cinema Academy prize in 1932. His script of his favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov (which was never produced because Producer Goldwyn lost a copyright battle with UFA), was considered even better.

Divorced from Actress Eames (who died in 1930), Sidney Howard married "Polly" Damrosch, daughter of famed Conductor Walter Damrosch, in 1931. Two years ago they moved to California in a Buick. A thin, high-shouldered man, whose thick glasses and birdlike carriage give him a slightly alarmed appearance, Sidney Howard has a two-room flat in Hollywood, a more capacious apartment in Manhattan. For work he dresses in a tweed coat, grey flannel trousers, sneakers. He smokes cigarets steadily and rubs his chin while dictating, by fits and starts, faster than most stenographers can take it.

Less solemn than O'Neill, more solid than Barry, Sidney Howard is a better theatrical craftsman than either. He shares with Shakespeare and most mediocre dramatists a willingness to take his material where he finds it. Many of his plays, mostly failures, have been translated adaptations (S. S. Tenacity, Casanova, Olympia). He wrote in collaboration with Edward Sheldon (Bewitched} and Charles MacArthur (Salvation}. Like Yellow Jack, Dodsworth, which opened last fortnight with equally enthusiastic reviews and made Sidney Howard the most successful dramatist of the season, was an adaptation. At work last week on a novel about his father--like his father-in-law a musician--Playwright Howard took time out to write a preface for Yellow Jack when it is published next month. Excerpts:

"I have of recent years become convinced that a simple presentation of real characters and of facts as such . . . might conceivably result in a play's being as interesting as the morning paper. ... I first heard the story of this play from my father. ... I first thought of using it for a play when I read it again in Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. . . . Paul de Kruif and I were long ago associated as contributors to Hearst's International Magazine when he was writing a series of articles on problems of medicine and I, God save us!, was writing a series on the evils of dope in the underworld.

"When I finally settled down to completing the manuscript I did not bother de Kruif. ... I undertook a series of expeditions in search of first hand material. My first objective naturally was Dr. Aristides Agramonte, the single surviving member of the Reed Commission. I wrote him. ... On the morning after I had written, the New York Times published the announcement of his death. . . . "The play is to be considered a celebration rather than a representation. I have called it 'Yellow Jack -- a History.' The subtitle is pretentious and I have used it in the hope that it will prevent people from telling me that it is not a play. . . ."

*Hairourt, Brace, 19:26.

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