New Plays in Manhattan

Lost Horizons (by Harry Segall and John Hayden; Laurence Rivers, Inc., producers). What a hotel was to Grand Hotel, what a dinner was to Dinner at Eight, Heroine Janet Evans (Jane Wyatt) is to Lost Horizons. In this play the dramatic assembly of heterogeneous people and events begins after she commits suicide because her lover deserts her. In the next scene Janet Evans arrives in a lobby next to Heaven and begins to read the histories of the lives which would have been bound up with hers if she had stayed on earth: a disheartened Kansas City playwright; a female derelict whose seducer has abandoned her in Montreal; a cardsharp and the banker's daughter he is scheming to marry; a young socialite condemned for murder; a Manhattan play-boy and his mistress. Only in Act II, when she comes to read the projection of her own life as she should have lived it. does her role in their miscellaneous affairs become apparent.

She would have helped the playwright by appearing in his play. At a party after the opening night in Atlantic City, the brother of the Montreal derelict would have recognized in the cardsharp the villain responsible for his sister's disappearance. The playboy would have fallen in love with Janet Evans and this, by a roundabout chain of circumstances, would have saved the life of the convicted murderer. So carried away is Janet Evans by these glimpses into her discarded future that she is horrified when the Kansas City playwright, who would have been her husband, walks into Heaven's reading room and fails to recognize her.

The patness of Lost Horizons' plot is impaired by the complicated temporal sequence of its 20 scenes, the over-intricate arrangement of the characters. But if Lost Horizons is not likely to be a satisfactory successor to The Green Pastures in Laurence Rivers' (Rowland Stebbins) series of supernatural moralities, it will not be any fault of its leading lady. Jane Wyatt contrives to spill none of its spiritual qualities while adding considerably to its physical appeal.

If she succeeds as an actress. Jane Waddington Wyatt will do so at the expense of the hollow tradition that cheap theatrical boarding houses, one-night stands, hardships in stock companies and the pangs of poverty are indispensable incubators of talent. She was born 21 years ago near smart Tuxedo. N. Y. Her upbringing in horsy Dutchess County was well calculated to make her think of the theatre as a place into which nice people do not venture until the middle of the first act. Her first experience in drama was playing Shylock at fashionable Miss Chapin's School in Manhattan.

After a decorous debut party in 1929 and two years at Barnard, Jane Wyatt did her best to conform to the routine for stage beginners by making the round of theatrical offices. The round lasted only until she reached the office of Charles Hopkins who promptly engaged her for an ingenue role in Give Me Yesterday. One season in stock, at the commodious summer theatre in Stockbridge, Mass., a few more appearances in Manhattan, prepared her for Hollywood. In her first picture (One More River), Jane Wyatt performed so well that she got the lead in her second, Great Expectations (see p. 58).

She prefers cinema to the stage, belongs to Colonial Dames of America, likes riding and roller-skating in Central Park, never misses Sunday mass.

Personal Appearance (by Lawrence Riley: Brock Pemberton, producer). The fun which Broadway can get out of Hollywood is well illustrated by the fun which Actress Gladys George gets out of the role of a hard-bitten waitress who has become a famed cinemactress. Shapely Miss George has no trouble pretending to be the blonde and luscious Carole Arden.

After struggles in which she lived from hand to mouth ("from man to man." someone amends) Carole is now the wife of Benjamin-Z.-Fineberg-President-of-Superfine-Pictures-Incorporated, pronounced all as one word. She can cope with everything but the English language. When she says. "I won't brandish words with you." or "I must retire now and commute with myself for a moment," the hoarse voice of Actress George leaves nothing to be desired.

On the "personal appearance" tour at which this play takes a look, Carole is accompanied by a cynical "press relations counsel" (Otto Hulette) who has been hired by President Fineberg to keep her out of man trouble. Her imported automobile breaks down near Wilkes-Barre at the home of a rustic family.

When Carole sights the daughter's husky and handsome fiance (Philip Ober) she loses all interest in her next appearance date. Informed that he likes to tinker with motors and invent things, she breathes, "Ah, just like Einstein." And: "Science is golden!"

They go out to the barn to inspect a sound-recording gadget he has invented while the pressagent-chaperon anxiously asks: "Is there any hay out there?" Carole comes back declaiming: "This is the greatest thing for pictures since the Warner Brothers stretched forth their hands and said, 'Let there be Sound.' " Deciding to stay all night, Carole appears for dinner in a blinding dress apparently made of tinfoil, determines to take the young man to Hollywood.

In the end she is dissuaded when the pressagent, pretending that the affianced couple are expecting a child, exhibits a tiny sweater. The actress shudders eloquently. Hipper's Holiday (by John Crump; Marian T. Carter, producer) is an amateur effort to make a farce of an amateur kidnapping. A cowardly young hobo named Jim Hipper (Burgess Meredith) perpetrates the crime, but his victim is a tougher and slicker criminal than he. In the process of trying to get ransom without calling in the police, the kidnappee gets half a dozen characters and a hopelessly complicated situation on the stage by the end of Act II. When the hobo begins shooting, he hits a goldfish bowl. The innocent owner of the kidnap apartment, who happens to be the toughest and slickest criminal of them all, walks in and settles everything so well that the police arrest him, shoo the others away.

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