New Plays in Manhattan

Strange Interlude. Culture climbers, scattered seafaring men, drama devotees, Germans, George Jean Nathan, common people eyed narrowly the first performance of the season's prodigy. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's nine-acter was solemnized by the Theatre Guild. The play began at 5:15, ran until 7:30, took recess for hungry actor and audience, resumed at 9, discharged at 11:10.

The First Act. Nina, normal New England girl, loves Gordon, college hero, honest, compelling, gladiatorial. Her father, jealous of her love, persuades her to postpone marriage. Gordon goes to war, dies in a flaming airplane.

The Second Act. Nina, not now so normal, has tried to dodge her grief with martyrdom. Believing she must help war cripples to happiness she lives with them. Dr. Ned Darrell, unconsciously in love with her, arranges to have her marry Sam Evans, genial weakling, to afford her anchorage. Not loving Sam she consents, thinking (still the martyr) she can beautify his life and ease her own sorrow with babies.

The Third Act. Sam's mother, after the wedding, tells her that congenital insanity in the Evans family forbids her having babies. Already pregnant, loving her coming child and her husband through him, Nina is nearly destroyed. She consents to an abortion.

The Fourth Act. Husband Sam, ignorant of the family taint or Nina's operation, haunted with the fear that he is sterile, is losing his grip on life.

Partly to restore his faith, partly for love of Dr. Ned Darrell, Nina plans to have a child by another father.

The Fifth Act. Again Nina is pregnant. Though terribly in love with each other Nina and new-father Darrell are afraid to tell Sam because the divorce would smash him utterly; particularly if he learns of his family insanity. Sam is told he is to be a father. Darrell departs.

The Sixth Act. Incredibly encouraged husband, and seeming father, Sam is making huge business strides. Darrell, still sharply in love, returns. Nina, still at heart his mistress, welcomes him but they still dare not tell Sam.

The Seventh Act. Nina gathers round her three men: her husband, her lover, and her faithful friend and adviser Charles Marsden, a ladylike novelist who yearns after her throughout the play. Evans is rich, Darrell a failure. The small son finds Darrell kissing Nina. She sends Darrell to the West Indies.

The Eighth Act. The son, grown potent, rows on his college eight. Watching from the expensive Evans yacht are Nina, her three men, and a flapper in love with her son. She hates the flapper about to take her son; jealously tries as did her own father to smash the match. Son wins the race. Stoutly successful, Sam dies of apoplexy.

The Ninth Act. Son and flapper disappear to start life together. Darrell is finally sent away forever. Grey-haired Nina, grey-haired Marsden subside into the painless decay of dreams through which so many live when useful life is done.

The Acting. Earle Larimore, Glenn Anders and Tom Powers played husband, lover, friend, all acceptably. To Mr. Powers went the most irregular characterization and he played it with a curiously electric irregularity. Lynn Fontanne drew the desperately difficult duty of portraying Nina. Her performance, like the whole of the event, lacked perfection but came close to majesty in many a passage.

The Significance. The play was strange, not only by reason of its length. Playwright O'Neill re-introduced the aside, mainstay of earlier dramatists, long discarded by scornful realists. His people's words and actions he completed with their thoughts. Every few moments the action stopped completely while an immobile performer spoke what was rattling through his mind. The spoken word was often a direct denial of its companion thought. Suspicion, mastered grief, cynicism, inferiority--the raw matter of truth--were permitted and expressed. The author tried devotedly to give his hearers a third theatrical dimension. The strange convention, difficult at first to grasp, soon blended into the engrossing total.

Skeptics sniffed that O'Neill had simply pasted two or three plays together; sniffed harder that his elaborately recurrent asides would have been unnecessary had his dialogue and stage directions provided complete characterization.

Nearly everyone agreed on faults. The play dragged toward the end. As age smothered the characters their dramatic interest dwindled slightly. The asides were not always accurately and shrewdly handled; the new technique was necessarily a trifle coarse. Rose the inevitable foolish chorus that Nina was a vile female and should never have been written up at all. Some strove to discredit it with the growl that O'Neill had simply taken many findings of the psychoanalysts and copied them into his characters.

Beyond and above all these disturbances rose the conviction of many an acute observer that a great play had been delivered to the world. Writhing and not always sharply articulate in the labor of his composition, Playwright O'Neill has done no tidy job. Raw life does not arrive that way. Uncompromising, tiny and horribly large, mystic and yet inestimably exact, Strange Interlude sweats blood.

The Playwright. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is the son of actor James O'Neill, famed across the U. S. in earlier days as Monte Cristo. With his trouping father and a devoted mother, not an actress, he spent staccato years in larger cities where James O'Neill was acting. After that, school days under Catholic and later conventional preparatory schoolmasters. Then a year at Princeton, whence he was fired for a "prank." Then an inordinate mixture of oddities. He worked in a mail order firm in Manhattan; went gold prospecting to Honduras; shipped as a common sailor to South American ports; was destitute, "on the beach," for a considerable period in Buenos Aires; played in vaudeville; became a reporter in New London, Conn. These years hacked his health to pieces and it was in a Connecticut sanitarium, defeating a faint touch of tuberculosis, that he stopped to think. Soon he wrote his first play and proceeded to George Pierce Baker's famed playwright's class at Harvard to achieve technique. In 1916 at the tiny Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Mass., his first production came to life, a one-acter, Bound East for Cardiff. Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan, then editors of the rascally Smart Set, accepted three plays for publication. Critic Nathan, notorious, noisy, can always say, truthfully, he recognized the good wine of genius before the grape was ripe. He still ballyhoos O'Neill frantically.

A scattering of potent one-act plays flowed from the playwright's pen to the resolutely experimental Provincetown Theatre, in the shadows of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. In 1920 his long play Beyond the Horizon flung him to the front rank of U. S. dramatists. Since then there have been The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, etc. O'Neill is, incomparably, the first playwright of our theatre.

Few know O'Neill. He is the shyest sailor that ever flung his pay across a dirty waterfront bar to escape the curse of life in liquor. In early days he was a potent drinker. It is said of him that he was no intruder in the underworld of which many of his plays treat, but part of it. Now, in easy circumstances he lives seclusively, seldom even eating in a restaurant if he can help it. He works unceasingly; exercises sternly to preserve his body; has never thought of writing when not strictly temperate. In company he sits restlessly silent, uninterested in trivialities, embarrassed by his fellow man. When matters close to life are in discussion his interest jumps, he expresses his opinion fiercely. Strange Interlude is life and his opinions on it.

The Title. Says Nina, thinking ". . . the only living life is in the past and future . . . the present is an interlude . . . strange interlude, in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living."

La Gringa. The tale of the female volcano transplanted to cold climates is aged. She talks diluted dialect and emits four-letter words, much to the grief of inhibited local females. This girl was Mexican. Through marriage to a whaler she arrived in Massachusetts. As played by the dashing Claudette Colbert she was appealing. Really nice women weren't appealing, in Massachusetts in 1885. Some question whether the really nicest women in Massachusetts are supposed to be appealing even now. Or if Mexicans are received when they come home married to whaling captains. Or if four-letter words are gaining ground in female vocabularies. These are all distressing problems, flimsily solved in La Gringa.

The Optimists. Times weren't so easy in London. Melville J. Gideon and a group of nice, agreeably witty folk gathered together to produce a musical show. They put on such a good one that times weren't so hard for several seasons. Perhaps times have changed again in London. Mr. Gideon has arrived in the U. S., recruited a troupe, and attempted to give Manhattan the best of a series London loved. It wasn't a bad troupe, either. There was Luella Gear who can put over a song with the best. It wasn't a bad show, either. It was chatty, disarming, inexpensive, fragrant. It wasn't exactly a good show, either.

Salvation. Aimee Kennedy Semple McPherson remains the only convincing female evangelist on U. S. stages. Pauline Lord tried diligently to counterfeit her glory but hit a half-hearted play. Perhaps God is not on the side of playwrights who thumb their noses at evangelism.

The supply of souls being ever equal to the demands of handsome young women with the fire of God in their voices, the business will probably go on. Salvation discovers reasons why it shouldn't go on and the chief reason is covetousness. Surrounding this female and her winsome out- cries are a quartet of harpies. Her mother, her manager, her press agent, and her husband, all in the game for the gold. Only she is stainless. She is so stainless that on discovery of their business in- stincts she leaves them, goes penniless to live and preach away from the noise of crowds and business managers. These proceedings, touched up with a cool, clean love story, are tremendously tiresome. Variable acting was no help save in the case of able, sardonic Osgood Perkins. Miss Lord in an ill-fitting part was about the same as usual, trying with all the magic, deadened music of her voice to tune cold lines to the sounds of her Lord's service.

The Madcap. When a lady of mature years plans to marry a British lord, does she tell him that she has a 21-year-old daughter whose name is, quite simply, Chibi? Or does she tell him that her little daughter is just twelve, with a fondness for balloons and sticky candy? And when Chibi waddles unexpectedly on the stage, sucking not a lollipop but a cigaret, does the mature lady offer her a drink or does she persuade Chibi to dress up like a cute little twelve-year-old girl? And does Chibi then go skipping all over the place, playing with dollies but not forgetting to let out good round oaths? And does Chibi fall in love with the juvenile lead and suffer one pang after another because she cannot tell him that she has reached the age of indiscretions? And when the juvenile lead is on the point of marrying another girl, does he kiss Chibi goodnight with more ardor than, under normal circumstances, such a caress would merit? And when he comes to say how sorry he is, does he find little Chibi all dressed up like a million dollars and on the point of going to Paris with a moving picture company? And what happens then?

There is very little suspense mixed up in the plot of The Madcap; instead, as is proper in a "comedy with music," there are a few good songs, many good lines and an almost unbroken opportunity to admire the once celebrated child actress Mitzi Hajos, now known, quite simply, as Mitzi.

She said almost nothing in the course of The Madcap which did not arouse chuckles of some sort. Squat, tough, golden-haired and good-natured, she made The Madcap often exceedingly funny.