Monday, Mar. 14, 1927
New Plays in Manhattan
Lcud Speaker. The New Play-wrights--John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, Francis Faragoh., Michael Gold, Em Jo Basshe--impatient with the restraint of conventional theatre, have set up one of their own, bolstered up by the generous purse of Otto Hermann Kahn. Here, at old Bim's, now the 52nd Street Theatre, they propose to experiment with those radical dramatic forms of whose marketability the commercial producers are suspicious.
Their first production, Loud Speaker, was written by John Howard Lawson, author of Processional (TIME, Jan. 26, 1925). As expected, it is staged against a "constructivist" background and presents the subjective state of the principal characters as well as their objective actions. The virtue of such staging is that, by affording the playwright several planes of action on one stage, it allows greater flexibility than is permitted by the rigid three-walled limitations of ordinary theatre. Thus, in Loud Speaker, the candidate for governor of the State may be discovered mulling over his radio speech in one corner of the stage, while his memory of an Atlantic City bathing beauty may be enacted in another corner. His daughter may black-bottom on an upper level and his wife receive a weird, bearded, hypnotic lover on still another. By proper punctuation and emphasis, such a production may be made colorful, clear, rapid, nervous, like jazz music. But, though the new playwrights deserve credit for the enterprise, Mr. Lawson's "farce" fails to enthrall the observer, because: 1) The lines are not pointed artfully enough to evoke laughs in the right places. 2) His characters are not sufficiently personalized. No one cares whether the candidate for Governor does get drunk and say the wrong things over the radio, thus confounding the tabloids and winning the election by unorthodox strategy.
Money From Home. On the road it was known as Coal Oil Jenny. Though occasionally it spurts a hopeful wisecrack, the full gusher of real drama is not forthcoming, wherefore it will probably not strike money from Broadway. The hero, played by the author, Frank Craven, masters gullible wealthy women for profit. One victim is a Pennsylvania factory girl, come to Manhattan to spend her $6,000 for a furtive smack of city life. The exploiter of women, duped by her reckless display, rushes into matrimony only to find he has caught a liability instead of an asset. And here is the end of the second act, with the playwright-actor of his own U. S. comedy still unworthy in the sight of the audience. How to reveal a heart of gold in the bad man? A powder mill explodes. Heroic qualities erupt. With nobility thus suddenly emergent, the ending triumphs happily for all, including the audience.
We All Do. There is a form of drama related to the comedy of manners, probably a lineal antecedent of the modish comedy of wisecracks, in which intrigue is "planted" in a sophisticated household, in order that the playwright may discover to his audience a jewel box full of dazzling dialogue. Oscar Wilde loved to write such plays; Frederick Lonsdale is a foremost exponent today. Characterization, motivation, even situation, are incidental, in this form, to the witty line. Such a play Knud Wiberg and Marcel Strauss tried to write. They stir up an ingenious enough situation: two young people who fall in love, despite the fact that the father of one is the lover of the mother of the other. Conflict between a wife and mistress for a dull husband, virtue superimposed by the triumph of the wife--the authors submit these ingredients to the heat of their sense of humor, and out comes the result--half-baked.