New Plays in Manhattan

Torch Song. Few playwrights excel Kenyon Nicholson (The Barker, Eva the Fifth) in exploiting honkytonk, backstage or carnival scenes. Few producers can put on a better show of this sort than Arthur Hopkins, who directed and helped write Burlesque. A Hopkins-Nicholson collaboration has now resulted in an extraordinarily valid and impressive play called Torch Song.

A "torch" song is one in which the theme and lyric express the deep affection, often unappreciated, which the crooner bears for the object of his or her devotion. Such a song Ivy Stevens (Mayo Methot) sang for Howard Palmer (Reed Brown Jr.), women's wear drummer, one July night at a flashy roadhouse on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Howard was sitting behind a bower of chemically pink paper roses so Ivy did not see when he left, but she got the note he scribbled on the back of a menu saying that although they had been very happy together he was going to marry his boss's daughter.

The next time Howard and Ivy met was the following year at Pomeroy, Ohio, in the lobby of the Riverside House. Howard was still peddling ladies' ready-to-wear, but Ivy was now giving the Salvation Army the benefit of her vocal talents. She was able to persuade Howard not to go out on a party in the company of two other traveling salesmen--a canned goods agent and the portly representative of a mortuary supply ("underground novelties") in Chicago. With every good intention the neighborly desk clerk put Ivy in the room next to Howard's. When Ivy came into his room later to bring Howard salvation, the love of God and the love of Howard became hysterically confused, and Ivy was lost once more. Playwright Nicholson uses the person of Carl, strapping young Salvationist, to make his drama go the Thais plot one better.

Dialog and action of Torch Song, refreshingly real, are reminiscent of the more serious works of Ring Lardner. The remarks of Actor Guy Kibbee, in the character of the dyspeptic undertaker supply salesman, should be long remembered. Sample: "All I've sold this week is two gallons of fluid and a grave lining. They bury them in their shirts around here."

Although Miss Methot has played in The Song & Dance Man, Half Gods and the musicomedy Great Day, this is her first big part. Spectators found her technique simple, straightforward, sincere.

Cafe was a pretentious little play which had but one scene--the terrace of a Paris restaurant--45 somewhat mute walk-on characters for atmosphere and a handful of unsatisfactory mummers who took the part of futile artists, U. S. expatriates. The piece was the first from the pen of Mary a Mannes Mielziner, niece of Walter Damrosch, wife of Jo Mielziner, famed stage-setting designer. At no time did the dialog, action or story of Cafe rise above the general quality level of the littlest little theatre. Nub of the plot: Maurice Larned (Rollo Peters) fled from a U.S. wife, met and lived with Sally Burch of Akron, was pursued by Jane Geddes, also from Akron who sought to redeem him. Maurice's wife came to get him, Jane's brother came to get Jane. She, however, had become hopelessly attached to life in the Latin Quarter discovering that indiscretion was the better part of squalor.

Few U. S. college boys return from Paris without the notion of writing a play like Mrs. Mielziner's. Her husband did not design the scene for her show.

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