New Plays in Manhattan

Young Love. She was the little girl who got wet in Orphans of the Storm and wore an arresting white dress in Nell Gwynne. That has nothing to do with a play called Young Love which opened in Manhattan last week, except that Dorothy Gish, 30, is back on the stage playing opposite her husband, James Rennie, and Lillian Gish is still in the movies and still unmarried (see p. 44).

Dorothy Gish is cast in Young Love as a tempestuous and idealistic latter-day maiden striving to assure marital congeniality by pre-nuptial experiment. In the first few lines, she and her fiance express satisfaction with last night's trial. To make it doubly sure, they exchange partners with their unconsulted host and hostess. Miss Gish completes an affair with host, but fiance quails before hostess. Then follow two acts of confessions, recriminations, door-slammings, to end with four-way felicity the way it should be (according to the movies). Despite such items as "I love him!" "Then that's a very good reason not to marry him," despite Miss Gish's grotesque make-up and quaintly haphazard clothes, Young Love is adequate entertainment.

Americana. The U. S. has many peculiarities, some of them absurd. Among the latter, it would appear, are business conventions, talkies, the beds in railroad cars, Chicago schools, the faces of taxi-drivers, women temperance addicts, Will Hays, subways, Roxy's cinemansion, and Gene Tunney. All of these, J. P. McEvoy, who wrote Show Girl, snubs with villainous though somewhat protracted gaiety in this speedy second edition of his famed revue.

Revues also have many peculiarities, some of them absurd. Among the latter are somewhat naked chorus girls, most burlesques of Strange Interlude, Frankie and Johnny contortionists, and the later works of Roger Wolfe Kahn. These J. P. McEvoy does not snub.

The Unknown Warrior. Paul Raynal, who fought in French trenches, wrote the play and it was presented four years ago at the Comedie Franc,ais amid the indignant growls of old men. Since then it has been played all over Europe, to great cheers in Germany, and the approval of Bernard Shaw in London. Last week Charles Hopkins, who now has a small theatre of his own in which to produce the plays he likes, unveiled it for Manhattan.

The universal respect for the play abroad contrasted with the reactions which it induced in Manhattan theatre-goers. Something was the matter with the performance; partly, it seemed, the acting, partly the direction. A French soldier returns home on leave; his fiancee, who has been living at his father's home, no longer loves the soldier but she conceals this fact until after she has spent the night with him. In the morning, the soldier's father berates his son for a seduction; whereat the soldier berates in his father selfish and truculent senescence which so blatantly permits the young to die.

The three characters are intended as symbols and the play is a fiercely lyrical analysis of horror. But, last week, it sounded vapid and declamatory, and after a few performances closed.

Crashing Through. This is one of those plays which tell how the other half lives, the other half in this case being the Pooles, a Nieuw Amsterdam-bound old family who are proud of family portraits, prouder still of family history or so much of it as has not been written in the past decade. Consuelo Poole (Rose Hobart) has a suppressed desire for a riveter who pumps bolts into the skeleton of a growing building near the Pooles' Manhattan home. One day, out of a steel-beamed sky, the riveter crashes through the Pooles' conservatory roof. Stunned by the fall, his astonishment is increased by the proximity of Consuelo. His way of expressing his daze is to say "Geez" many times (in throaty Theatre Guild English). There is, of course, an affair and there is a little accident. When Consuelo tells her twice-divorced mother and once-divorced father of her interesting condition, Father cries "Harlot!", Mother cries "Why didn't you tell me?" Only the dowager Mrs. Poole will accept erring granddaughter, riveting grandson-to-be, but Mrs. Poole's acceptance, one presumes, is sufficient for Manhattan. The veteran Henrietta Crosman does the fussbudgetty dowager and is featured in the play, but another saved the night. She is Rose Hobart.

Revolt. Author Harry Wagstaff Gribble (who wrote also that near masterpiece. March Hares) announces his theme as though he had himself discovered it. That the children of a fundamentalist preacher should become annoyed at their father's limitations is neither surprising nor interesting. Eventually the clergyman blows his brains out in an improbable manner.

One thing about the play is good. It has the solemnity of youth and its actors, notably Hugh Buckler, Anita Fugazy and Elizabeth Allen, play it with deep, serious sincerity.

Hello Yourself, patterned after Good News, is described as a "rah rah musical comedy," to distinguish it, presumably, from those which are merely raw. Its plot concerns a collegiate playwright whose play wins the play contest after he has been threatened with expulsion from college for helping a "pal" pay a gambling debt. There are many agreeable details in Hello Yourself; among them the hushed rhythms with which Jimmy Ray moves his feet in soft shoes; the wild noises of Waring's Pennsylvanians; and the antics of disjointed Dorothy Lee who might have been drawn by John Held Jr. and whose right stocking is deployed in wrinkles on her leg.

These Few Ashes. Kenneth Vail (Hugh Sinclair) lived idly in St. Moritz, Switzerland, had philanderer's blood of Alpine frigidity. There were four bothersome women, many bothersome creditors. He faked a death, eluded the creditors, could not elude one blonde (Natalie Schafer). But by that time his Wood was rather Italian. Playwright Leonard Ide uses the episodic development with flashbacks lately popularized by Novelists Wilder & Bromfield. The second episode, with Ralph J. Locke as a French husband whose adjustment to his wife's infidelity shows skilled amorous economics, is the funniest. Otherwise the froth refuses to bubble.

Tin Pan Alley is another melodrama on the Broadway formula. It forgets to flounder because 1) Claudette Colbert is a very fine actress, 2) John Wray is a very fine actor. Miss Colbert is the heroine who conquers the evils of light life. Mr. Wray is the Napoleon of high gangdom, who says: "Ah, jeeze," and "Ah, whot duh hell."

The Final Balance. In Greenwich Village, Manhattan, ideas are withdrawn from the mind's fire when only half cooked and then impudently offered to theatre-goers. David Pinski began wondering about the exaggerated importance of money; he fancied a world gone mad and a merchant profiting from its madness. At this point in its development the play was presented, profitlessly, with E. J. Ballantine as the merchant.