New Plays

Rapid Transit. From Lajos N. Egri, Hungarian, ten years resident in the U. S., Horace Liveright bought a play. Since many a Hungarian writes at least one play, this is not remarkable. Since the Provincetown Playhouse, where Rapid Transit is presented, is a tiny place, it is remarkable that the production actually came off. For it employs a cast of almost 70 persons, all racing about in the throes of excitement and confusion incidental to this iron age. The furor is the result of bungling man's efforts to adjust his life, political organization, education, to the whizzing circle of accelerating machine civilization. The satire seeks to prove 1) That man is too busy being stimulated by split-second meals, red-hot tabloids and undressed dramatics to enjoy the simple compensations of life; 2) that in trying to regulate the political structure so as to alleviate economic distress, man swings from autocracy to democracy with perfect futility. The settings convey an impression of cogwheels, greasy steel pistons, chains, derricks, clanking, rumbling, thumping. The tempo is furious, yet the action is not without clarity. Probably Rapid Transit, when it was first written several years ago, was startlingly radical. Today, it is a better one of many.

Fog-Bound. Nance O'Neil was last week seen sobbing her way through gloomy Fog-Bound, a piece of Long Island coast drama by Hugh Stange. The plot is: 1) Hester tells mother that she wants to marry Lem Ross instead of Capt. Ezra Tuttle because she loves Lem but not Ezra. Mother faints. 2) Hester marries Ezra. He is cruel. 3) Eighteen years later Lem returns, wants Hester to run away and live in sin. She refuses on account of daughter born between scenes. Lugubrious Fog-Bound is lightened by Miss O'Neil's portrayal of Hester.

Hearts Are Trumps. It develops that Arlette, delectable French mademoiselle (Vivian Martin), has married a count who proves to be an impostor. Since she married him for his title, this is inconvenient. She thereupon seeks out the genuine count and informs him that through some strange quirk of French law she is in reality married to him. He accommodatingly marries her and clears up the situation. The French are a funny nation, but lately such businesses as assignations between unmarried ladies and gentlemen in romantic chateaux, peculiarities of love, and the like, find so many counterparts in the Bronx and even Harlem that they no longer intrigue the U. S. playgoer.

Spread Eagle. A wave of melodrama has swept Manhattan this year. On the crest of it, Jed Harris, youthful impresario, rides to glory. Recently a reporter on the theatrical weekly, Variety, he took to producing comedies with scant success, turned later to melodrama, offered Broadway, now lolls in plush. His second venture this season, Spread Eagle, another melodrama, cannot fail to make the audience wilt with excitement, the box office swell with receipts.

Martin Henderson (Fritz Williams), eagle of finance, from his steel cleft high above Wall Street's sidewalk, connives cold-blooded revolution in Mexico. His motive: to irritate the U. S. into intervention, thus establish law, order, prosperity for his Spread Eagle oil fields. By financing a professional revolutionary, Henderson buys a political crisis. But to make the U. S. public see red, something more personal than oil is needed. Luck has it that Henderson's daughter, Lois (Brenda Bond) introduces to her potent father one Charles Parkman, boy in search of a job, also son of a onetime president of the U. S. Casually remarks cryptic-tongued Joe Cobb (Osgood Perkins), "brains" of the Martin Henderson office: "If they ever shot President Parkman's son, it wouldn't take long to get the Army into Mexico." Villainous Henderson assigns young Parkman to a "suicide" station in the oily path of his privately endowed revolution.

A shack in the oil field area houses the fruition of the financier's plot, the murder of the innocent by rebel-general De Castro (Felix Krembs). "President Parkman's son killed," shriek press headlines, cinema reels, radio announcers. The cinema is interpolated into the second act, revealing the wheels of propaganda at work, affording respite to taut nerves in the audience. Martin Henderson is filmed "Enlisting with Uncle Sam at a dollar a year." In the end, young Parkman turns up, only wounded. The band plays "The Star-Spangled Banner" to a happy curtain.

Conclusions: 1) The plav may postpone the next war with Mexico for several weeks. 2) For a line relative to making war on Mexico for the sake of oil interests-- "Hearst tried in 1911, but he didn't get away with it"--Oilman William Randolph Hearst may institute libel suit against Producer Jed Harris. 3) Theatregoers have a perfect example of the modern drama of "debunk" -- melodramatic, cruelly ironical, peppered with smart cracks, staged with a faithfulness to reality that belies its flashy, imaginative cunning.