New Plays in Manhattan

Give Me Yesterday. Upon entering Producer Charles Hopkins' theatre, one must always tread lightly for fear of shattering some delicate fantasy. Having moved the ephemeral Mrs. Moonlight to another playhouse, last week Producer Hopkins presented Alan Alexander Milne's Give Me Yesterday, produced in London in 1923, by the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1929, called Success until a few days before its New York premiere. It relates the pastel-tinted tale of the Rt. Hon. R. Selby Mannock, M. P. (Louis Calhern), who has decided that the world is too much with him, that it would be better to chuck everything and return to the irresponsible life of childhood.

On a speaking tour he stops at the house of Sally, his oldtime sweetheart. There, in her bedroom, the play ducks into the Christmas Carol motif. First he sees three children -- himself, Sally and a playmate. But when he tries to play with the children, other people interfere, the figures of his mature life intrude, demand speeches, advance fragments of his own mouthings.

Increasing, the interlopers march around him, present him with robes of office, shut Sally away. When the illusion has passed, the politician decides to give up his post, but the Prime Minister replies by making him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Success, the fruit of 20 years of diplomacy, has him tightly bottled and corked.

No one can develop a Milne play like Mr. Hopkins. His deft hand is always there to give a push where the fragile dramatic fabric can stand it, to give gentle support where the stuff is sheer. Actor Calhern, having owed himself a good performance since his appearance in The Tyrant, makes a splendid baffled member of Parliament. If you can stand whimsy in stiff doses, Give Me Yesterday is recommended.

As Husbands Go. Every time one enters Producer John Golden's theatre one can be sure of seeing a show made out of good solid, substantial stuff, with a dash of sympathetic humor. Mr. Golden's latest divertissement, As Husbands Go, is by Rachel Crothers, who has been writing plays for 27 years and has never yet lost a female character's honor. Her present piece is no exception, although for a time it looked as though Lucile Lingard (Lily Cahill), who found romance and a young English poet while visiting Europe, might let Miss Crothers down. But when Lucile, and later the poet, return to the solidarity of the homeland, and when Lucile's husband so patently demonstrates his "great, selfless love," the affair subsides.

The farcical elements in Miss Crothers' play are better than the dramatic and comic. As Husbands Go has one excellent character, Lucile's crackbrained, ridiculously indiscreet friend (Catherine Doucet). When told that Mr. Lingard and the poet have become horribly drunk together, she says complacently: "Well, I know-- but they're just men."

Privilege Car. The scene of this play is laid in the lunch counter of a circus train; the characters are all circus folk. Authors are Willard Keefe (Celebrity) and Edward J. Foran, longtime follower of the tanbark trail. Like any circus, their lively melodramatic comedy contains such a plethora of activity that even the most interested customer is unable to take it all in at once. The Colton & Steel tent show may be going broke, but it is certainly not stagnating.

Jim Colton, the elderly owner, is carrying on with Mayme Taylor,* the high-wire artiste (redheaded Lee Patrick, villainess of June Moon). His niece (Ruth Easton) has fallen for a cornet player (Alan Bunce) who is suspected of being a stool pigeon for a rival circus. The rascally son of the privilege car's rascally proprietor unexpectedly returns from jail to take up counterfeiting. There are also various subplots which flow back and forth across a stage crowded with amusing, if too finely drawn, circus types--"razorbacks" (laborers), cootch dancers, a harmless dope fiend, a harmless kleptomaniac (funny William Foran, brother of the playwright and the man who telephoned "Mrs. Margolies" in The Front Page). High point of the drama comes with the second act curtain, when the circus rallying cry of "Hey, rube!" goes up as the train is attacked by a mob of town-folk.

Privilege Car will interest people who like circuses and people who enjoy their melodrama fairly concentrated.

Greater Love. When Oliver Cornish came home from the War with a mutilated face, his mother and sister were revolted, his sweetheart married another man, his father committed suicide. Only his sister Peter, an earnest, sunny girl, had faith in him, urged him to become a novelist. Ten years later, at Christmas time, Oliver came home with a brand new face. Evidently he was a successful novelist for he wore a fur coat. Had it not been for his faithful sister Peter, who showed them the error of their ways, he would have run away with his oldtime girl friend, for by now she was quite willing. So the play ended with everyone looking courageously toward the future, while outside there gleamed what Fred Allen calls a deep blanket of snow--eternal snow.

The production of Greater Love and its almost simultaneous collapse might have passed without much comment except for the appearance of Comedienne Mary Hay as the brave little sister. She not only made her debut into "the more serious drama" with the play, but, using the name of Bruce Spaulding, helped write it.

Mary Hay's father was Brig.-General Frank Merrill Caldwell, U. S. A. He was stationed at Fort Bliss, Tex. when she was bom 29 years ago. She was 17, spry and "cute" when she stepped into the chorus of Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. In 1920 she married Cinemactor Richard Barthelmess, and the same year her charm and intelligence got her a part in Mr. Ziegfeld's Sally. The Hayday came in 1923, when she starred in her own show, Mary Jane McKane, and when she and spindleshanked Clifton Webb sang and danced to "Two Little Lovebirds" in Sunny (1925).

Since that time there have been troubles. She and Cinemactor Barthelmess divorced, had to have Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn play Solomon, arbitrate the custody of their daughter Mary, now aged 8. Each parent has the child for alternate periods of six months. By her second husband, Reporter David Vyvian Bath of the New York Daily News, she has a daughter Anne, 3.

Hay admirers like to watch her small, lively figure, her wise, short-cropped little head, and listen to her pleasantly soft voice. They were sorry to see her show fail, for Mary Hay once created a type: the intelligent showgirl.

* Favorite drink of Author Sidney Porter ("O. Henry") was a "Mamie Taylor": Scotch & ginger ale.

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