New Plays

Catskill Dutch. Revival meetings are being more and more avidly seized upon by playwrights to furnish good stamping grounds for plays. They have so much natural drama in them, with everybody in sight fighting the Devil at the top of his voice, that any act which contains them virtually writes itself.

The new by-product of Prof. George P. Baker's Harvard 47 Workshop is true to the pattern, using a revivalistic meeting to disclose the name of the seducer of a girl who has been betrayed, despite her heavily ingrained religiosity. Aside from this feature, chief interest in Roscoe W. Brink's play is atmospheric, its locale being laid in an out-of-the-way community in the Catskills where piety is the main business and every other interest subsidiary. Here, in 1870, the elders, on finding a girl has been misled, hasten her marriage to the son of the village leader, sure that this will hush up everything.

It is a striking scene wherein the elders display an ostrich morality, convinced that a scandal is buried if only a marriage takes place. But it rears its ugly head in another striking scene, when a fanatic Negro zealot arouses the primitive instincts of the phlegmatic Dutchmen by the simple process of beating a drum and thumping their theological frenzy. Louis Wolheim ("Hairy Ape") as the Negro handled that drum up to the climacteric hysteria like a Sousa of the soul. Ann Davis fills poignantly the repressed role of the girl, and Frank McGlynn ("Abraham Lincoln") and Kenneth MacKenna are two other stalwarts in a community where man is still lord of all he surveys--particularly woman.

The Bride. In a Washington Square Mansion live two wealthy, unwobbling bachelors. A sentimental maiden aunt tried to make them wobble, but they remained, unwobblingly, bachelors.

Out of the heavens and through the roof came the bride--Peggy Wood, all dressed up in wedding clothes (running away at the altar). Like the heroine of the Three Wise Fools, her arrival is the signal for things to happen and happen they do.

The play is of the crook melodrama type in which someone is robbed of something and in which everyone is supposed to believe the worst of the most patently guiltless person in the cast Miss Wood is picked for the latter role, and if anyone could believe the worst of Miss Wood, except a stage detective and those members of the cast who are supposed to direct the finger of suspicion toward her, that man is a very cynical blackguard. So, if you won't believe the worst of Miss Wood, she tries to make you believe the very best. And in this play she inclines toward a coyness that is unnecessary and a bit hurtful.

Peg o' My Dreams. It seems as if Peggy Wood might have done better in this musical comedy version of Peg o' My Heart. She'd fit well the title role. She has a good voice--which Suzanne Keener, the present incumbent, also possesses. But Miss Wood has considerable poise and comedy skill; Miss Keener has yet to be struck by the lightning of histrionic inspiration. After Laurette Taylor's performance in the role, her performance might be described as a gentle phosphorescence.

In fact, the whole production, coming after Miss Taylor's sunny California radiance, seems bathed in a quiet, phosphorescent glow. Miss Keener, in endeavoring to portray the little Irish-American girl who--flung into the center of a snobbish English household--shows up its caddishness and wins a handsome Cholly-boy for herself, handles her part with kid gloves.