New Plays in Manhattan

Her Unborn Child came to Manhattan last week after 15 years on the road. Thus, in one respect, it is a grandmother to Abie's Irish Rose. Critics were not allowed to see it until after a special performance for the Eastern Star society and a matinee for ladies only. It depicts a wholesome Irish family, whose oldest child, Doris, has been seduced by aristocratic Jack Conover. Jack's aunt, an advocate of birth control and kindred arts, persuades Doris to consult a physician. Doris insists on seeing her good family physician, who eloquently refuses to perform an abortion, rebukes Aunt Conover, suggests that Doris and Jack get married. It is meanwhile discovered that Jack is really the son of Aunt Conover by an Irish father. So, after inordinate weeping, there is a jolly Irish ending with marriage in the offing and with the moral that, after all. "motherhood is God's greatest gift to humanity." Her Unborn Child may run another ten days or ten months, depending on how well Manhattan women like to leave the theatre with wet handkerchiefs. Elisha Cooke Jr., in the comedy role, was better than his lines.

The Furies. Murder, for playwrights' profit, is usually a sordid affair, committed in the first act and for no better reason than to provide a culprit for the conjuring author to produce in the last. Not so for Zoe Akins, who wrote The Furies. The news arrives, it is true, in the first act, that somebody has shot John Sands. The second act is given over almost entirely to heartless catechism conducted by a district attorney. The third finds Fifi Sands imprisoned in a skyscraper apartment with the lunatic who, because he had loved Fift and was afraid to let her divorce his friend and marry another man, had killed her husband. But the thread of evidence is only one of the strands drawn through the astonishing tapestry of this play. It tries to reproduce the effect that such a murder might really have upon a small group of assorted polite persons. The play opens with a fifteen minute soliloquy from Harvey Bell Smith who is annoyed because his dinner guests are late; when Fifi Sands arrives, last of them all, she is hysterical with happiness because she will at last be able to divorce her rich husband and marry Owen Macdonald. When her son comes in to say that John Sands has been shot, the play breaks into a wild, inharmonious and exciting rhythm; its draughty madness is terrifying, not by virtue of black paws or of guns offstage but because it conveys somehow the impression that God has gone away, that the world is being run now by the cheerful, sardonic, hideous Furies.

Less superlatively staged, the play might have seemed no more than sound and furies signifying nothing. But James Reynold's elaborately perfect settings surrounded a practically flawless cast which in turn surrounded the magnificent performance of Laurette Taylor as Fifi Sands. Laurette Taylor was born on April Fools Day some time ago; she is married to Playwright J. Hartley Manners, in whose most famed opus, Peg o' My Heart, she entranced more than 600 Manhattan audiences. That was 15 years ago. Now Laurette Taylor is a better actress than ever.

The Great Necker. A citizen of Manhattan, wearing a $35 suit of "tweed" clothing, bought tickets to The Great Necker. He noted with pleasure that it was "a new comedy of modern life." For him, this statement was not contradicted as its ageless plot unfolded. He laughed to see the blatantly promiscuous bachelor of forty-five summers getting engaged to a sixteen-year-old in the innocent delusion that she was unsophisticated as well as sweet. He chuckled with delight to see her mother, a movie censor, drinking strong fruit punch in the assurance that it was denatured grape-juice. When the sixteen-year-old met the bachelor's nephew, danced with him and kissed him, the man watched it and was happy. When she ran off to "park her girdle" he was made flabby with enjoyment. When a perfume was described as "one of the six best smellers," when a person was described as "the knife of the party," when nephew salutes uncle with, "Hello Epsom, old salt!" the man's guffaws annoyed his grouchy neighbors. He was panting at the finish, with joy, for the nephew was going to marry the girl, the absurd female cinema censor was going to marry a Jewish cinemaker, the old bachelor was going to marry a woman whose age approached his own. When she had accepted his proposal with these words: "God made women beautiful and dumb; beautiful so you would love us and dumb so we could love you," the man smoothed his "tweeds" and went home. His evening had been well spent.

Napoleon. Biographers are at their worst when they write about men whose deeds are too gigantic and too inherently theatrical to fit the neat and flashing patterns of the stage. Napoleon's hundred days were too dramatic for the drama. Forgetting this, B. Harrison Orkow, who previously wrote something called Milgrim's Progress, has made them into a tidy and pompous play, in which Lionel Atwill struts for what seems sometimes to be an interminable two and three quarter hours. At last, great days done, he expires in St. Helena. Pretty Selena Royle, in long becoming dresses, plays nicely as Madame Walewska.

The Cherry Orchard. This, by all accounts, is the best play ever written by famed Anton Chekhov; which, for many intelligent persons, makes it the best modern play written by anyone at all. It was previously offered to Manhattan audiences, in highly pantomimic Russian, by the Moscow Art Theatre, thereby allowing its witnesses to detect, beneath a bucket of gibberish, the light of an inextinguishable beauty. Presented now in carpentered English, for a series of special matinees, the glory of the play is more than ever dimmed. Its simple story, of a helter-skelter family of aristocrats who have squandered their money and who are forced to say farewell to the house they have lived in and the orchard they have loved, is merely an illustration of what a great dramatist can do with the theme of miser, mortgage, and out you go. There is no reason why it should be intoned, as if the stage were the rostrum in the U. S. Senate, with foolish, solemn wheezings. Only Edward Rigby, as the old butler who lies down at the last to die, locked in the shuttered house his masters have deserted, gives a really satisfactory performance in a production which many discriminating playgoers might rightly feel themselves compelled to attend.

Within the Law, as everyone remembers, is the play that tells about little Mary Turner, how she was sent to jail for another's misdeeds, and how, when she got out, she was determined to be crooked but within the law. It told about her in 1912, when, after a slow start, Bayard Veiller's drama swept the country, played two years in Manhattan, made a reputation for Jane Cowl, a big pot of money for its producers and a smaller one for its author. People found it, then, a perhaps too daring play but exciting nonetheless and heart-scratching. Re-exhibited by Chamberlain Brown in his series of revival melodramas, it seems less flaccid and outmoded than might have been expected. Demure in comparison with modern shudder and yegg drama, it is still mildly exciting; Violet Heming, whose first success antedates the play's, performs in it well, as does Claudette Colbert.