New Play in Manhattan

Getting Even is a play by Nathaniel Wilson who explained before its premiere that he was making an attempt to adapt to the stage the staccato methods and quick scene changes of cinema. How hopelessly he failed could be gathered from the rude hysteria of his first audience or the comment of Critic Percy Hammond (New York Herald Tribune) who predicted that the cast would be "celebrated in the future for having appeared in the world's worst play."

Mr. Wilson's "episodic cyclorama" attempts to paint in 34 scenes the tumultuous love-life of Veronica Mathilda McConnell, a poor Irish serving girl. At the age of eleven in the streets of the slums. she gathered stray lumps of coal to keep her drunken father warm. "Youse wuzz good to me," she breathed to the portrait of her mother (recently deceased). She appeared in rags, in bathing suits, in bed; as the innocent, the maiden betrayed, finally as the tempered lady who babbled of green fields as she died in New Rochelle at the tender age of 22. Her devoted master and mistress, mystic and delicate respectively, were ever clad in lounging robes. When the curtain rolled down for the 34th time the audience wondered what Veronica had been "getting even" with-- it may have been the audience.