New Plays

Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Playwright Luigi Pirandello, like the Devil, seduces the idle. After years of temptation, the Theatre Guild succumbed last week to spending some unengaged time and talent on special matinees of a cerebral shadow dance wherein "the Italian Shakespeare" divides a flighty family against itself and lets in village gossips to decide who is crazy. There is no one crazy but someone's else thinking makes him so. The truth? What is truth? etc. etc. Two-thirds of it are lively entertainment, unless you think otherwise. Helen Westley does another of her cadaverous crones. Beryl Mercer, Edward G. Robinson and Laura Hope Crews are apt metaphors.

What Ann Brought Home. Ann was sent to a neighboring town in Indiana for crepe de chine. She brought back a husband, as girls will. The trouble starts when the new bridegroom dreams fish farms when he should be thinking sawmill. However, it ends without a pang. Earl Carroll, known over the country for his daring revues, "bathtub" scandal, is producing the play. For him it is in the nature of a bitter gesture. He said, in as many words, that, since the public was so insistent upon cleanliness and purity in the theatre, he would give them a chance to support a clean, wholesome, pure, enjoyable play, or prove that his "girl shows" are the right idea. As a matter of fact, his play is all he says it is, though little more.

Crime. The thug-belabored Manhattan, Playwrights Samuel Shipman and John Hymer brought comfort. Your real criminal, they divulged, never shoots in the head or abdomen for death, but merely in the arm or leg for legitimate profit. Eugene Fenmore (James Rennie), head of a high-principled gang plans his "jobs" in evening clothes, with the nicety of the inspired artist. While police are decoyed to the scene of a set-up brawl next door, his men rifle Goldberg's jewelry store in full sight of a pop-eyed audience. All would have been decent, had not Rocky Morse (Chester Morris), first assistant safecracker, proved disobedient and plugged the doubly unfortunate Goldberg in the forbidden parts. For this treacherous, unwarranted homicide, Director-General Fenmore plugs Rocky. Two young innocents become entangled in the brutal but inept police proceedings. To save them, Fenmore tells all, proving he has a heart of gold and a sense for tabloid headlines. It is the sort of play that sends small boys and big boys out of the theatre hoping some day to work up to the nobility of banditry. It is, unhappily, uncensorable.

Set A Thief. Another mysterious horror-monger keeps the audience guessing and for no good reason of plot. Yet its crazy eccentricity pops, flares and gyrates the idle curiosity, and gluts the modish thirst for murder in every act. Among those possibly guilty are a set of ex-convicts bearing brands upon their foreheads. This is the first play of Edward E. Paramore Jr., clever writer. It is distinguished by better characterization than is usual or necessary in this dramatic form, is exceptionally well acted (Margaret Wycherly, in particular), and chills as well as any of these things can. It is housed in the old Empire Theatre, recently home of the legally banned Captive, and decently symbolizes the sort of improvement encouraged by the Criminal Court of Artistic Appreciation.

Window Panes. Nothing is so utterly glum as misery in Russia or so inscrutable. An intimate glimpse into a peasant household reveals a husband who slashes a great deal with his whip, a wife who suffers commensurately, a son stricken dumb. Comes an escaped convict with Love in his heart. He tarries awhile in this hovel of Muscovite anguish to bring light into the souls of the people, and by token of a dusted window, into the room, the main scene of sorrow. Apparently, this constitutes a symbol. It is in the same vein as the Servant in the House* and, no doubt, carries a great message, which fails to compensate for dramatic poverty.

A Lady in Love. In the Restoration Period, an Englishman went to gaol if he got inextricably into debt--unless, of course, he had a daughter to marry off to a miserly spindle-legged monster. Peggy Wood, a maid passing fair, plays the daughter sold to a miser. But she has her consolation--a ruddy ragged redcoat, Captain Bragdon (Gavin Gordon). Who shall cast the first stone when he, disguised as a corpse and wheeled into the boudoir by the order of the fear-stricken husband himself, comes to life and love? Certainly not hearty, round-bellied, wenching Sir Jeremy (Sydney Greenstreet) who engineered the titillating situation and kept the audience chuckling while he explained the young wife's earnest efforts, in the next room, to quicken the corpse. His double-meanings, the play's liveliest, are neatly turned. Playwright Dorranee Davis has woven an ancient habiliment for his modern comedy. Because it is not fish of the Restoration, fowl of the Jazz Age, or flesh of sound drama, it fritters off into neglibility.

Polly of Hollywood is determined to be a musical novelty. It burlesques the cinema in several moderately boisterous skits. It insists upon novelty by presenting a horse that Charlestons, by leading onto the stage a bull with a ring in his soft nose, by allowing trapeze acrobats to fly about overhead (as in the film, Variety). It does all these things forthrightly, evincing honest desire to give the public a Super-Feature Musical Comedy Satire, as advertised. The funniest thing of all is when the hero, protesting his constant affection for the heroine who is about to leave him and home for Hollywood, suddenly ceases his disconsolate farewell sobbing to administer unto the wayward lass a terrific kick in the pants. An adagio dancing pair, Deenova and Berinoff, amazed and pleased. A more perfectly trained chorus does not kick along Broadway.

*A drama of religious symbolism by Charles Rann Kennedy, in which a servant does and says the things which, in the author's opinion, Jesus Christ would say and do were he in the same situation. John Galsworthy wrote a similar play, Windows, without the Christian emphasis.