New Plays

Cape Smoke. Since White Cargo has run over 500 performances and has been sued for plagiarism, the necessity of an imitation was obvious. This new African adventure is a good deal louder than White Cargo and a lot funnier. Most of the laughter is at it.

It starts off stoutly enough with a fearful kaffir curse by which three Englishmen and an American are to die. The British mortality is high by the ending act, but the American, naturally, survives. If they do it in London-- which they will not--the three-in-one nationalities must be shuffled.

Before all three acts are over, there is probably more off and on stage clamor than is contained in any given dozen of theatres. Storms and shots and beaten drums fill in the open spaces when an Englishman's soul is not departing with appropriate agonies. James Rennie and Ruth Shepley draw salaries for interpreting these noisy doings. Probably the best performance is that of the witch doctor, Francis Corbie, a Negro actor.

Percy Hammond--"A good, gaudy hair-raiser for two acts-- the rest is Glostora or it may be Stacomb."*

Houses of Sand borrowed all it could from Madame Butterfly, including soft off-stage harmonies, and failed to repay the loan. It added certain novelties from which the edge was worn by unreality. The twist awards the Japanese heroine to the American hero (unknown to him, his mother was a Jap girl). Before this sweet solution can release the audience, there are six scenes in and about Manhattan, beginning with the meeting of the chief participants at a Far East bazaar in Forest Hills. The performers were generally apt but the play is apt to end presently in the storehouse.

Percy Hammond--"More suitable to the little ones than to grown-ups."

Ariadne. There is a distinct suspicion among the cynics that, had this piece been produced by anyone else but the Theatre Guild, it would have stumbled and swiftly disappeared. Yet that extraordinary organization has managed to polish it up smartly, cast it astutely and render it, in general, entertaining.

To these ends, they engaged Laura Hope Crews, who gives way to few of our light comediennes. They showed her married to a British business man whose thoughts were ever far away among his ledgers. They showed her annoyance at their resultant domestic doldrums. They showed her escape to a London luncheon with a less worthy but more perceptive character. They showed that this was all a ruse which, divulged discreetly to the husband, proved to him that his wife must, after all, be included in his interests.

The composer of this singularly unoriginal fable was the facile A. A. Milne. His slender and seductive touch for dialog was never needed more. Generally, it was equal to the crisis. Pondering over the entire problem, one can conclude that A. A. Milne, the Theatre Guild and Laura Hope Crews are a trio that has done so many things thoroughly well that anything they do must be of genial consequence.

Stark Young--"Miss Crews . . . makes laughter vindicate good sense and makes us believe that Mr. Milne knows more than he does."

Percy Hammond--"Just another frolic by the Theatre Guild in one of its more anemic moods."

Natja. The public appetite for operetta is further favored with a show based on the indiscretions of Catherine II of Russia and the melodies of Tschaikowsky. To appease that appetite, they must--those that attend--eat a thick slab of tasteless bread thinly spread with honeyed harmonies.

The singing, indeed, was sufficient. The producers had borrowed Mary Mellish and Madeline Collins from grand opera to assure that. Where they borrowed their comedy can be disclosed only by those who study ancient operettas as a habit. Few of the borrowings resulted in laughter.

The Sun--"Natja is musically a great success."

Tangletoes. There was not much of interest in the drama of this diversion, but an actress broke away from small parts and will be from now on a leading lady. She is Mildred McLeod, the little girl who performed so perfectly her brief scene in Tarnish and, earlier this season, helped materially as The Little Angel (TIME, Oct. 6). At the moment, she depicts a chorus girl who marries a serious-minded suburban soul and revolts after six months. Her technical equipment is not yet complete but her appeal and the curious fragility of her personality mark her clearly as the leading prospect of the season.

Morgan Farley, the youth of Fata Morgana, is rather deeply mired in a soggy, one-way part as the young-husband. There was a lady named Agnes Sanford who wore clothes where they were least needed and cracked to good effect the vivid wisdom of the chorus-girl friend. Also one Lee Kohlmar who made the ideal Butter and Egg man. And several other satisfactory performances. And they all had a difficult time with the play.

Alexander Woolcott--"Sparse moments of humorous and sympathetic observation scattered through a play that is, for the most part, as workmanlike and as profound as an impromptu charade."

White Collars is a play that tries desperately to inject the fresh serum of sincerity into a middle-class household. But the dog teams do not arrive in time and the play languishes from worn-out chemicals. The characters are distilled from penny phials and powders instead of the expensive elixirs of originality. Accordingly, a good idea sizzles silently away.

The idea is to place a millionaire in a middle-class household and watch the opposing factions scratch each other. He is married to the daughter; the daughter is married to the middle class. She believes that he must live for a spell with her folks to find out how life looks on $25 a week. She has a cousin in the household, an offensive, semi-intelligent fellow with a lot of vaguely Marxian conceptions. Toward the climax of the play it evolved that this eager individual has persuaded the new husband to give away his $15,000,000 and start his family history over again.

A generally competent cast, in which there are no special notables, tosses these proceedings energetically around the auditorium. The play has been running in Los Angeles about a year. Showmen predict popularity here. After all, Abie's Irish Rose is still going. And there are more middle-class people than there are Hebrews and Irish.

Two By Two. Some ten months ago, this entertainment was unveiled in Greenwich Village under the title of The Leap. Recast and rewritten, it is now uptown. The opening audience could not determine why. On the whole, it seemed one of the most aimless and inept productions of the year. The plot tells of a man who involved himself with a daughter when he thought he was addressing her mother.

Exiles. James Joyce is the extraordinary Irishman who wrote Ulysses and gained a position unique in English literature. Exiles is his only play, an uncommercial product which the Neighborhood Players made more uncommercial by a considerable supply of inept acting. The play itself is a rigorous psychological study of four Irish people. The wife loves the husband's friend; the husband has his own affinity. Yet they love each other and sit down to have the whole thing out. Most humans would have grabbed each other and tired of the affair before Joyce's characters stop talking about it. They deal with passion in paragraphs and prefaces. No doubt a lot that they say might be said, unheard, inside of any of us under similar circumstances. But it does not form a very fiery evening in the Theatre.

Stark Young -- "The events . . . cerebral . . . the excitement lies in subtle and torturing responses . . . rather than in actions and objective situations."

*Stacomb and Glostora are tonsorial preparations. They keep the hair flat.