New Plays in Manhattan

A Sleeping Clergyman (by James Bridie; Theatre Guild, producer). James Bridie is a Glasgow physician named Mavor who writes his plays under a pseudonym because he fears Scottish patients might distrust a doctor who was also a dramatist. A Sleeping Clergyman is likely to arouse in Manhattan theatregoers a mild distrust of playwrights who are also physicians. In it, Author Bridie investigates three generations of a Glasgow family to demonstrate his theory that drunkards, murderers and trollops should be allowed to breed. He does so with such exhaustive Hibernian conscientiousness that the result sometimes seems more like a diagnosis than a play.

To speak of the Camerons as a family may be misleading for none of them is married. Charles Cameron I (Glenn Anders) gets his girl (Ruth Gordon) into trouble and dies of tuberculosis before he can marry her. She dies giving birth to Wilhelmina Cameron who grows up in the household of her maternal uncle Dr. William Marshall (Ernest Thesiger). No sooner does she reach the age of consent than Wilhelmina (Ruth Gordon) becomes pregnant by her guardian's apprentice and murders him when he tries to stop her marriage to another man. After giving birth to twins, she jumps off a cliff. The twins (Glenn Anders and Ruth Gordon) are the specimens with which Author Bridie tries to prove his thesis. They are erratic in their youth, but the girl grows up to be a sardonic secretary to the League of Nations and the boy does even better. A taste for liquor and two bastards on his distaff side do not prevent Charles Cameron II from becoming what his grandfather started out to be, a distinguished scientist, who, in 1936, invents a great serum against the plague.

The suspicion that Author Bridie is more scientist than writer is increased by a title which derives from the play's vague prolog. While a cleric, possibly the symbol of Religion's disinclination to interest itself in lively problems, dozes in a Glasgow club, two doctors indulge in shoptalk which the play unfolds. But if A Sleeping Clergyman fails to justify completely the anticipations of last week's audiences, it may have been largely because the Theatre Guild in the last 16 years has set itself a standard far higher than that of any other Manhattan producer. Its first contribution to the current season, honest and interesting if not always exciting, contains particularly good acting by Ruth Gordon and Ernest Thesiger; a brief but crisp characterization by the Guilds perennial shrew, Helen Westley, returned from Hollywood successes; a wild exhibit of deathbed histrionics by Glenn Anders. In the first scene he seems intent on convincing his audience that he has not tuberculosis but the galloping shakes. Order Please (by Edward Childs Carpenter; George Bushar & John Tuerk, producers). This ludicrous concoction concerns itself with the adventures of a naive Wyoming rancher (James Bell) in a Manhattan hotel. He finds a dead man in the room next to his. When the body vanishes no one will believe his story because he has been seen downing four Martinis. While he shields from scandal an ornate lady with a foreign accent (Tala Birell) and solves the mystery with the help of a coat button, he is taken firmly in hand by a motherly little telephone girl (Vivienne Osborne).

Brightest spot in this nonsense: an SOS call to the hotel switchboard from a guest whose towels have all fallen into the tub while he is taking a bath.

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