New Plays

Down Stream. Roberta Arnold is an extraordinarily gifted actress who has been utterly unable to find a play to match her talent since The First Year. She is guttural, incisive and even explosive on requirement. Her reappearance is a matter of moment and a matter of disappointment in this case. Down Stream started out vigorously, then broadened, slowed up, petered out.

The play is set on a tugboat with Miss Arnold playing the cook's worthy wife. One of the deck hands is a shy, sensitive youth who falls in love with her. She educates him a bit and packs him off to the safety of dry land and a small town. Similarity to the plot of Candida was noted. The young man was played adroitly by Rex Cherryman, newcomer.

Hello, Lola. Booth Tarkington's novelized report of puppy love and its perils reached the stage agreeably enough and amused many people. It has now wandered farther afield to become a musical comedy, rather less happily. Reference is made of course to Seventeen.

Anguished outcry has been raised particularly by disciples of Mr. Tarkington. His extraordinary story has been treated with even more disrespect than librettists normally show to their inspiration. This however need not have cut an irretrievable nick in the show's appeal. There are perhaps some thousands of people who enjoy musical shows and do not know their Tarkington. Even the addicts were only mildly diverted by Hello, Lola.

The House of Ussher. H. V. Esmond, an English actor, wrote and performed this piece for London and died in the part. This was some time ago, and the play as currently revealed suffers slightly from the passage of time. It is about inter-racial marriage, a subject on which views have changed so radically of late. The old Jewish father in the play is intent on dissuading his daughter from her intended marriage to a wholly eligible gentile. He finds, however, that she has been visiting the young man of nights and ferociously changes his opinion.

A cast of moderately interesting performers made of this moderately interesting play a fair evening's entertainment. It did not seem to be quite good enough.