New Plays in Manhattan

Tomorrow and Tomorrow. A new

play by Philip Barry is always an event. His latest is a solemn, psychoanalytical excursion into a midwest university town, demonstrating that Main Street has as many civilized perplexities as Park Avenue. It has to do with the appearance of a distinguished Canadian doctor (Herbert Marshall) at the university as a summer lecturer. He resides at the home of a childless, exquisite, subtly dissatisfied young matron (Zita Johann). He perceives that she is "an artist without an art," and, more particularly, a woman without a child. He recommends that she adopt one. But they become lovers and, when the doctor leaves for a pilgrimage to Europe, his hostess is pregnant.

Several years later the child surfers a psychological disturbance, vague and terrifying, traceable to the misguided influence of the lady's husband (Harvey Stephens), who has always imagined himself to be the father. She then recalls her savant-lover, now more eminent than ever, who is able to dispel the child's psychosis. The problem arises as to whether the lovers shall enlighten the cuckold and depart with their son. But much is manifestly owing to this man, who worships the child as his own. Therefore the doctor departs again on his lonely, scientific wanderings.

Another attempt to probe the imponderable, the play is more satisfying than Mr. Barry's Hotel Universe of last year. This time he has successfully endowed his characters with enough character to make them convincing individuals and their dilemmas real and anguished. He has done it tenderly and surely, more surely than Eugene O'Neill in the similar explorations of Strange Interlude. The play is excellently acted. Osgood Perkins, late of The Front Page and Uncle Vanya, gives a memorable bit as the hardboiled but far from insensitive secretary of the doctor. Critics who have seen all of Mr. Barry's plays tend to pronounce Tomorrow and Tomorrow his best.

Philip Goes Forth from his father's $5,000,000 business to New York to write a play and eventually finds out that he could not write a good play even if he wanted to. That is what this play proves with much dull harangue. It was written by George Kelly (Craig's Wife, The Torch Bearers, The Show-Off ). Here he presents a lodging-house collection of sad artistes mothered by a landlady who was once a great actress. They are mildly droll, mildly tragic, but Playwright Kelly could be accused of conceit in supposing that he has made them worth the price of admission.

Anatol. written in 1893, was Dr. Arthur Schnitzler's first play, an ironic, sentimental chronicle of love in Vienna. Though it breathes of pre-War matinee-idolatry (John Barrymore played Granville-Barker's able translation of it in 1912), it has yet some durable qualities-- wit, grace, ebullience. Viennese Joseph Schildkraut plays Anatol unevenly, not always bringing him to life. Offstage waltzes by Johann Strauss gave the play authentic Alt Wien atmosphere, which, is almost all it needs. The "plot" is merely, a half-dozen amorous episodes. unconnected except by the busy hero. Best performance is that of Patricia Collinge, subtle and wistful as a lady who might have loved Anatol but never dared. Blonde Miriam Hopkins is raucously amusing as a guzzling showgirl.

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