New Plays in Manhattan

The Letter. When the curtain rises the sound of a shot is heard and a cry from Hammond. Leslie fires again.

Hammond: "Oh, my God!"

He falls in a heap on the ground. Leslie follows him, firing and then standing over him, fires two or three more shots in rapid succession into his prostrate body.

Thus begins the Somerset Maugham play in which Katherine Cornell makes anything but merry as Leslie Crosbie, murderess.

Leslie: "No, that won't be my retribution [to live with the devoted husband she had wronged]. I can do that and do it gladly. He's so kind and good. My retribution is greater. With all my heart I still love the man I killed."

Thus ends the play. In the intervening hour or so is spun the bitter story of a planter's lonely wife on the Malay Peninsula. There is no moral pointed, except perhaps that love sometimes dies young and for no reason. Leslie Crosbie was not a wholly vicious woman. Throughout the story, which ends in her confession that she shot her lover Hammond because he was living with a Chinese woman, she strangles truth lest her husband find out her guilt and the discovery break his heart. After the first few moments her every move is to spare from sorrow this faithful husband, whom she does not love. Truth breaks her strangle hold in the tearstains of a tense last act. The earlier acts were smaller drama.

But for the acting of the star, the evening would have been unimpressive. Miss Cornell again plays the part of an untraditional heroine; a faithless woman; harder, colder this time than her Iris March of The Green Hat. She is one of the few great players in the land who will risk what is known as the sympathy of the spectators by playing women they wouldn't want around the house. Again she shows her genius in a character they dislike, yet makes them like it.

The title is taken from a letter written by Mrs. Crosbie to her lover which summoned him to her bungalow the night of the murder. This letter, in the hands of the Chinese woman, leads to the discovery of her guilt after acquittal by a jury trial. The Trial of Mary Dugan. As the ever laggard audience strolled into the National Theatre they found the curtain up. It was an uninteresting, drab courtroom scene they saw and it, too, filled up gradually with actors--lawyers, policemen, scrub women, gum-chewing onlookers--who meandered onto the stage as haphazardly as the audience to their seats. Then the Judge rapped for order. Ann Harding, as Mary Dugan, accused of murdering her paramour, was ushered into court. The trial was on. The dull courtroom walls fairly trembled as attorney for the defense and district attorney tore out confessions of shame, innocence, guilt. Gradually the weight of evidence shifts in favor of the defense and when the final curtain falls, the audience, appealed to through the three acts as a Jury, not only knows what verdict to render but also understands what made Mary Dugan take to a life of shame. Act divisions are brought about by court adjournments. Rex Cherryman, who is swiftly rising to preeminence among young actors, acts as brother and defending attorney for accused. The play (by Bayard Veiller, who wrote other tense melodramas, Within the Law, The Thirteenth Chair) moves more swiftly than the law but with all its ruthless directness. Its plot has the fascinating features of a front-page murder story. The Command to Love. The balance of power in international politics is not maintained by heartless artillery alone. Every French diplomat to the Spanish court, for instance, avails himself of the services of a seductive military attache. Since all state treaties are in the hands of men who are in turn in the hands of their wives, it is the attache's business to handle the wives. Such, at least, is the idea that forms this comedy which probably would seem all right in French, though it was originally written in German (by Rudolph Lothar and Fritz Gottwald), but sounds too broad in English. The tool of France is in this instance played by that notable actor of elegant gentlemen, Basil Rathbone. In an international crisis, he undermines the wife (Mary Nash) of the Spanish minister of war, who, by ardent persuasion, is coaxed into donning red pajamas during the second act. Everybody knows what that means. The treaty is signed. Yards of gold braid will probably fool the police into letting it go as polite comedy. Four Walls, believes the hero (who is a product of East Side puddles), do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. He is a unique gangster, in that even a prison term cannot shake him from his smoky torch of philosophy. When it comes to a showdown and a persistent woman declares in so many words, "marry me or go back to gaol for murder," he stoically awaits her vengeance and marches off with the detective, scornful of a freedom that might have been bought at the expense of his soul. Projecting such mental conflicts is a difficult matter. Muni Wisen-frend does it brilliantly. Last year he played his first English-speaking role as an old man in We Americans. He nearly always plays old men, though he himself is only 26. The Yiddish Theatre will probably have to get along without its old man for some time now. It is odd that John Golden, who is famous for the cleanliness of his productions, should have taken to this dark play by Dana Burnet and George Abbott (coauthor of Broadway). But it is fortunate, too, for the drama is effectively given.

Creoles is a well-dressed romance of New Orleans in 1850. There is a convent maid who tries to seduce a handsome pirate. By this stratagem she plans to evade a villianous, worm-eaten roue who, in the manner of those times, is on the point of buying her outright from a bankrupt parent. Every now and then, Alan Dinehart, acting the buskined pirate, stamps, frowns and mutters guttural imprecations, showing that the little girl from the convent is tampering with a wicked fellow. The difficulty of her position is that the buccaneer has scruples about innocent girls. But she overcomes these. Enchanted Isle. While a willowy debutante strives to elude an effete Italian Count, the robust forest ranger comes on from the West. He is a tenor; she a soprano. Passion's progress is recorded rather musically in "Close in Your Arms," "Voice of the High Sierras," "Enchanted Isle" and other duets. Ida Hoyt Chamberlain, concert singer, wrote it all--book, lyrics, music--and her friends produced it under an incognito of towering pretension, to wit, American Allied Arts, Inc. It has its moments.