New Plays

The Mad Honeymoon. Most of the dialogue is divided between baby talk and the rasping argot of the underworld. Most of the interest is divided between a pair of pajamas and a package of stolen bonds. What comedy there is rests with a "dern it" constable and the illness of the hero on smoking his first cigar. Of the group, the pajamas are the most satisfactory.

Concealed in a pair of pajamas and a fur coat, the heroine (Boots Wooster), elopes with the hero (Kenneth MacKenna). Concealed in the coat lining are the stolen bonds; concealed in the heroine's past is a presumably dead husband. The husband comes out of the past, the bonds out of the lining, and the heroine out of the coat. The faithful chauffeur appears with a revolver and forces the supposed husband to confess to looking exactly like his dead brother and to stealing the bonds. Then comes the punch of the play. It turns out--you'll hardly believe this--it turns out that the revolver wasn't loaded!

John Corbin: "It might have been written in the 19th Century."

Alan Dale: "What one expects in warm-weather plays."

The Newcomers. It is probable that when these lines appear The Newcomers will be among the re-recently departed. In theatrical production the very bad die young.

Tweedles. Author Tarkington sets the scene in an antiquity shop on the Maine coast. Julian Castlebury, summer colonist, falls in love with Winsora Tweedle, native daughter of the curious antiques who make their living from the antique curiosities. His parents object because nobody in Philadelphia has ever heard of the Tweedles; and her parents object, even more strongly, because no one in Maine has ever heard of the Castleburys. The solution of this dilemma seems tenuous to the point of ineptitude--yet still surprisingly diverting.

In order to miss no opportunity of playing on the pecularities of adolescence Mr. Tarkington has created a hero with his brain just a trifle off center. Thus the youth, physically and financially at the highly marriageable state of 21, is able to engage in a serious love affair which has all the comic possibilities of Willie Baxter. For those whose passion is eugenics such a creation, with the implied probability of its recreation in a young generation of Tweedle-Castleburys, may seem a trifle inconsidered. Among the first night audience none thus disturbed could be discerned.

In this type of nonsense a serviceable cast is essential, and with a single exception the players were skillfully selected. The exception was Wallis Clark who worried the role of the elder Castlebury much as a stout puppy worries an enormous bone.

Gregory Kelly (Willie Baxter in Seventeen) does remarkable things with the love-sick lad. His halting, almost plaintive, delivery; his queru lous monotone; his unaffected charm make the part almost as much his as Mr. Tarkington's.

Even so Ruth Gordon's portrayal of Winsora Tweedle, the native object of his attentions, easily secures the honors. Her acting is the most eloquently inarticulate of all. It isn't nearly so much what she does as the infinite suggestion of what she might do away from the province of condensed Tweedlism that makes her performance a milestone in the season.

A final token of the play's effectiveness may be noted in the part of Philemon. He is a drunken, country, comic constable--an ancient among low comedians. Yet as written by Booth Tarkington and played by Donald Meek he is a minor masterpiece.