New Plays

Expressing Willie. Willie, 40-year-old bachelor, has made so much money out of toothpaste that he has leisure to discover he has a soul which also needs polishing. At his Long Island home radiant male and female butterflies foment his yearnings, having ideals to exchange for free board and lodging. Willie's old- fashioned mother sets them all down as parasites and summons Willie's boyhood sweetheart from the Middle West in the hope of once more striking a responsive chord in him.

At first this young woman (a music teacher) is gauche, inept, stumbling amid polished floors and brilliant conversation. Astonishingly she sprouts wings. One talk with an aesthetic artist, and she decides to liberate her soul with a thump on the keyboard. She tosses off her inhibitions and a Chopin scherzo simultaneously. Result--she walks off with the fascinated Willie from under the very nose of a voluptuous vampire. It is a tribute to the power of ten-finger exercises.

The analysis for the appeal of this comedy might include:

Presenting Willie Hodge's success, The Man from Home, as The Woman from Home.

Handling stage buncombe judiciously, sparingly, without rubbing the satire in.

Offering two women in negligee trying to save the hero in his apartment from each other. This is pink propriety with its hair down, slyly innocent.

Permitting Chrystal Herne to roam at large as the girl from home, handling sentiment with veracity and putting the color of conviction upon the butterfly who bursts from her homespun cocoon. Miss Crothers, moreover, does not allow her to sacrifice a career on the alter of Willie's toothpaste. Louise Closser Hale (oldfashioned mother), Merle Maddern (vampire), Alan Brooks (artist) and Richard Sterling (Willie) are others who are sufficient unto their parts. The producers--Equity Players.

John Corbin: "Perfect conjunction of playwriting, acting and stage management."

Heywood Broun: "We cannot imagine anybody's failing to have a delightful time watching it."

Cheaper to Marry. Samuel Shipman, author, again plays a solo on the sexophone.

Two business partners, steadfast pals, disagree violently on only one point, man's other business--marriage. One (Alan Dinehart) says he is a "born husband, " and paints the advantages of matrimony as glowingly as a marriage broker. The other (Robert Warwick) wants to be free to take his women or leave them.

He establishes a girl (Florence Eldridge) in an apartment which has every luxury but a marriage certificate. Then comes a series of sometimes tortuous incidents and in the end he loses the girl, his business, his partner, whose wife has meanwhile cast a halo over the proceedings by her faithfulness, except for a flare-up to show she is human.

Thus is an ancient institution once more upheld after being tested in the fire of the footlights. On the whole, Author Shipman puts in several good words for marriage. His development is badly warped toward the end, at times stopping short of good burlesque. His dialogue is strained; his labored paradoxes seem to have been ground out by someone just learning English. But an exceptional cast endows the play.

Heywood Broun: ". . . epigrams which fall like anvils. I can remember no play which has seemed so utterly cheap, preposterous and vulgar."

Alexander Woollcott: "A rather flagrant drama intended for the delectation of the cloak and suit trade."

Percy Hammond: "Well-meaning but a little ramshackle as to detail."

New York Evening Post: "Shabbily sentimental play . . , fairly good cast."