New Plays in Manhattan

Out of the Sea. The Old Soak was a play about an old soak, full of ribald reflection, shrewd sentiment, people who laughed and wrangled, humble people, people alive. Out of the Sea is a play about the sea, full of fumbling poetry, gold filled legend, mystic people, inanimates. Don Marquis, newspaperman, poet, columnist, wrote both of them and dismayed disciples with the discrepancy. Disappointed, they reminded each other that he has another play, presently to be produced, comfortably entitled Everything's Jake.

Off the coast of Cornwall Mr. Marquis dredged up an ancient land, one- time cradle of the legend of King Mark, Tristan and Iseult. He rebuilt this triangle around a rugged native, his unhappy wife, an impressionable U. S. poet. The wife kills the avenging husband; drowns herself. Much symbolism; off-stage sea winds; rich speechmaking. Lyn Harding, as the husband, was excellently implacable from behind a heavy beard.

Jedermann. Max Reinhardt has brought to the stage the Valley of the Shadow of Death all glittering with gloomy lights and dancing dead marchers. Into an ancient morality play he has packed the magic of modern stagecraft, shrewdly selecting from the treasures of the painter, electrician, the ballet master. He peoples his pagent with great actors from the German stage; and summons Manhattan to come and wonder. Manhattan came; and some wondered if Herr Reinhardt could not have done better by occasionally omitting to be opulent.

Jedermann, of course, is done in German; and necessarily includes long stretches of confusion for those who lack the language. The rest is majestic picture after majestic picture; so majestic and so perfectly contrived that the mind's eye is saturated. It grows, in short, a trifle tiresome.

Into a rich man's house come debtors whom he scorns; revellers whom he has bidden to a banquet; and Death, unbidden. The revellers desert; only Good Deeds and Faith stand by to soothe him at the tomb. The play springs from the earliest roots of pre-Elizabethan drama. When played in English, it is called Everyman.

Happy. Musical comedy for the week was represented, none too valiantly, by another college carnival. It agrees with the best minds of our time that there is an overemphasis on athletics in college musical comedies. The hero is a poet, not a pole-vaulter. As such he yearns to write jazz lyrics; yearns also to wed. These variations do not eliminate the usual eccentricities which pass for campus atmosphere in musical comedies. Amiable performers and reasonably rippling songs scarcely compensate for the blank periods reserved for cracking jokes.

Trigger. Character studies of blissfully ignorant, jubilantly impulsive, hopelessly charming young women are not infrequent in the theatre. Trigger Hicks is a Carolina backwoods girl; bewilderingly naughty in a hygienic way. She steals a baby; acquires the honorable devotion of a carefully educated engineer. Claiborne Foster frisks genially through the part in a manner mildly to engross many people.

Brass Buttons. Beneath the broad blue bosom of a Manhattan cop an honest heart goes thumping through this play. He rescues Rosie Moore from suicide. Thump, thump. She becomes a mother, poor unmarried lass. Thump. The cop finds her betrayer. Thump, he smites him on the jaw. He marries Rosie. Thump, thump, thump. The acting seldom has a chance. Experienced playgoers waiting to be stirred went through the evening, thumpless.