New Plays in Manhattan

Town Boy tells of country girl who took her city sweetheart back to the barnyards, where he seemed pale indeed. When a bucolic beef eater smashed him on the chin, she realized however that she still loved him. Critic Robert Littell of the New York World: "I can think of no good reason for its existence." Critic Gilbert W. Gabriel of the New York American: "It has a certain pleading innocence about the badness of its writing." The New York Times: ". . . definitely a minor occurrence in the theatre."

A Hundred Years Old. The happy simplicity of this play, which concerns a Spanish patriarch who arranges and enjoys his 100th birthday party, is like a benison softly spoken in the clangor and fret of Broadway. Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero, playwright-brothers of Madrid, might easily have drenched it in tears of sentimentality, but the best proof that their play avoids pathos is the fact that the old man does not die in the last act. Having convinced his fastidious, fortunate descendants that all the family, including Antonon, who is a truck-gardener and Gabriella, who has borne an illegitimate child, should attend his party, having seen his own joy permeate and weld the lot, his last wish is gratified by the budding passion of his great-grandchildren Trino and Currita, which allows him to hope that he will live to fondle his first great-great-grandchild.

The centenarian is played by Otis Skinner, who is himself now 71. Through five decades of trouping he has acquired a mellow patina which enhances his interpretation of one not unlike himself in wisdom and sweetness of age. Sitting in his royally red chair, he pokes with his cane and his innuendos, rumbles and whispers, enchants his family with the great white droop of his head, the flash of his cavernous eyes. In an adept supporting cast, Fred Tiden is outstanding as the finical son-in-law who cannot bear to have small children tumbling about him. The children are never seen except as his nervous fingers betray their insuperability.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., son of a Universalist pastor, Otis Skinner soon moved with his parents to Hartford, Conn. There he sketched passers-by on the streets, charged two pins for seats at plays in his cellar, made $3.75 by playing the harmonica in a public hall at prices of 15 and 25 cents. With a recommendation from Phineas Taylor Barnum, a family friend, he secured his first regular part, that of an aged Negro, in a melodrama at the old Philadelphia Museum (1877). He has since appeared in 325 plays, directing 33 of them. He was leading man for Mme. Modjeska (see p. 44), once supported Edwin Booth. His daughter, Cornelia Otis Skinner, is a famed monologist. One of Actor Skinner's chief rivals in the impersonation of old men is his friend George Arliss (see p. 69). Famed Skinner roles: Richelieu, The Harvester, The Honor of the Family, Kismet.

Among the Married. Playwright Vincent Lawrence has the sophisticated gift of disclosing serious situations in such a way that they provoke ironic amusement. A suburbanite husband (Frank Morgan) determines to purge his home of a golf champion who has been paying unwelcome attentions to his wife (Katherine Wilson). She conceals herself behind the parlor drapes to overhear his stern dismissal. All goes very well until the golfer pointedly reminds the husband that those who cherish their wives do not consort with Spanish dancers on the side. When he has gone, the curtains enfolding the wife never tremble. Their motionlessness is the essence of drama, and though a domestic tragedy has been laid bare, it is stated in such detached and plastic terms that the audience laughs.

Later the wife discovers her husband at close quarters with a lady from next door. Surfeited with his infidelity and his philosophy--"You have all my love, but not all my passion"--she lures the golf champion to her bedroom to expunge her love for her husband from her heart. This rash maneuver is not very convincing, but it does give pith to the advertisement which appeared last week in all Manhattan theatre programs: "What you think of this play may start an interesting discussion. Talk it out over a big plate of HORTON'S ICE CREAM."

The Criminal Code. Martin Flavin is both lawyer and playwright. (Children of the Moon). Perhaps by intention he has shaped his new drama in 13 scenes, for it is the tale of a luckless boy who obeyed the moral laws but was manacled, body and spirit, by the statutes of man. A lonely newcomer in the city, he took a street-girl to a dance hall, where she was insulted and he accidentally killed the offender. The blunt ritual of the courts sent him to prison for ten years. There, in the cancerous association of evil men, he learned the criminal code. Six years later, when he happened to witness a murder within the prison walls, he refused to "squeal'' and was hurled to the dungeons for the third degree. Harassed, broken, he slew his inquisitor and himself. He did not know that the warden had signed an order for his pardon.

The grim, accumulative ferocity of these events is marred by the introduction of a romance between the prisoner and the warden's daughter. But it would take much more than this to emasculate Mr. Flavin's play. Largely through the gruff eloquence of the high-principled warden, magnificently acted by Arthur Byron, Mr. Flavin damns the tragic system that man has developed to police the race, makes the so-called science of penology seem as hideously false as some black, antiquated alchemy. Russell Hardie conveys every horrific tremor, mental and physical, of the unfortunate youth.

Candle-Light. The chronicles of taste in the modern theatre contain the names of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard on every page. And since taste succeeds even where substance is lacking, this English triune is able to make even such vacuous foolery as Candle-Light a matter for winks and nudges. Mr. Wodehouse translated it from the German of Siegfried Geyer, embellished it with his own impish slang and metaphor. Miss Lawrence plays the part of a cuddlesome lady with a crinkly nose who accepts a blind date over the telephone and presently finds herself received by a debonair, ingenuous Prince--Mr. Howard. Asked if he has many mistresses, he observes: "They do pile up." She is even more enchanted by the Prince's frolicsome valet, who kisses her when his master is out of the room and is admirably behaved in every respect. What the audience knows, and Miss Lawrence does not, is that the Prince is really the valet and the valet the Prince. They have exchanged rank for the evening. What Miss Lawrence knows, and the audience only later discovers, is that she is really a parlor maid. This she is forced to admit when the real Prince playfully introduces her mistress. Baroness von Rischenheim, in the guise of a serving maid. But with masks discarded, and the curtain about to descend, these Viennese sports have only begun.

Reginald Owen makes an ingratiating Prince, and Betty Schuster's Baroness is among Broadway's handsomer sights. One would like to know whether Author Geyer or Translator Wodehouse is responsible for Mr. Howard's mot in the second act. When the Prince inquires what sort of women are customarily available to valets. he replies: "A cook, a lady's maid, and possibly a governess--at Christmas."

Divided Honors. You know that Kenneth Stewart is an author because his publisher keeps ringing him on the telephone. Otherwise you might be doubtful, for he spends his mornings fighting hangovers with antidotes of tomato juice, and his evenings trying to clear his chambers of pesky women. One of these vampires marries him while they are both in an alcoholic stupor. A second slinks dangerously in and out until murdered by a third. The wife nobly assumes the guilt, is exonerated under the unwritten law, and leaves her husband with the sobbing little murderess. Conceived by a vaudeville actress, Winnie Baldwin, this pastiche of variety show emotions and humors succeeds in being very elaborate balderdash.

Scotland Yard. Dakin Barrolles is an arch-thief who has his war-torn face plastically repaired in the image of the missing board chairman of the Bank of England. His resulting duplicity, which naturally extends into the bedroom of the banker's wife, prompts Sir Clive Heathcote of Scotland Yard to remark: "This is the greatest case the Yard has ever known!" The acting is bad. There are, however, some splendid sets--in a convent, a castle, London's Embassy Club--by a person named Yellenti, and an equally decorative heroine named Phoebe Foster.

Ladies Leave. Sophie Treadwell. who last season contributed Machinal to Broadway's annals of despair, returns this year with a glancing comedy of love in the psychoanalysis belt. A Viennese practitioner of that science prescribes adultery for the wife of a boorish editor. His nostrum proves rather unpalatable, for the lover she chooses is too torrid for a woman acclimated to a temperate zone. Then too, her husband is rather unpleasant about the liaison, so she finally dashes off to Austria with the doctor. Walter Connolly is excellent as the smug, foolish husband, but Henry Hull's persistently fortissimo rendition of the other man frays the nerves and should detract from his reputation.