New Plays

Square Crooks. This rude old-fashioned drama comes of a dying race. Time was when a string of pearls and a couple of gunshots made a play, and people liked it. Perhaps the cinema has crowded out the species. Square Crooks is one of them and, of its type, rigorously exciting. The acting is exceedingly sketchy and the lines lacking in literature or truth, but a good many people who have been writhing before great casts and majestically unfathomable plays this season were pleased.

The plot, or rather the puzzle, starts with a string of stolen pearls. Two reformed cracksmen are unjustly accused of the theft and are severely put to it to prove their innocence when the very pearls turn up in their apartments.

The Masque of Venice. A brittle English comedy cracked into small and singularly uninteresting pieces under the impact of a maladroit company and production. So lethargic was the entertainment as thus presented that it is difficult to comment on the play. Probably, however, it was nothing much.

The central figure is an elderly English novelist off for a holiday in Venice. In the surrounding group are his recently acquired mistress; an effusive lady novelist; a direct descendant of Casanova; a lean clergyman and his equally bewildered wife--plus one or two minor folk. These chatter aimlessly about love and its various imitations. The lady novelist falls into the canal.

Still Waters. Sixty-nine-year old Augustus Thomas has had produced 63 plays. Long ago he wrote notably successful melodramas. Now he has turned to controversy, and prohibition is his point. He is trying to say that it is wrong.

Whether or not Mr. Thomas' point is true must be left to the courage and the conscience of the individual. His argument, as presented in a play, is formidably tedious. His central character is a Senator, of liberal tendencies, against whom the drys are massing fat rolls of slush money. There is a clergyman in the play whose college son is pictured as a sleuth for the drys, gumshoeing around the college resorts and reporting secretly to his father's party. All this makes earnest but stuffy drama. Actor Thurston Hall plays the leading part, well enough. At the opening in Washington D. C. (TIME, Sept. 21, PROHIBITION)

Nirvana. John Howard Lawson was the author of Processional, perhaps the most violently discussed production of the Theatre Guild last season. His new one was therefore the more anticipated and the more discredited when it failed to measure up. It holds to the puzzling pattern of expressionism, and does not boast a plot. The general woes of this current world are chaotically included, with a little suicide and much sex. Mr. Lawson is evidently troubled with the way things are going. Perhaps he is disturbed because it has not been given to him (or anyone) to understand. Spectators of his play will be similarly disturbed.