New Plays in Manhattan

Payment Deferred. William Marble did not know how he was going to make ends meet. He had a job in the foreign exchange department of a London bank and a wife and a daughter. Somehow the yawning abyss of inevitable paupery which gaped between his small salary and his household expenses grew wider & wider. Soon one of his creditors would complain to the bank and then nothing would be left for him but the Poor House. Into this unhappy scene, unexpectedly, comes a forgotten nephew from Australia. He is fairly prosperous, alone in the world. When Mr. Marble plunges instantly and shamelessly into discussing money matters with him, the nephew is revolted, tries to flee the house. In desperation Mr. Marble wheedles him into taking a farewell glass of whiskey. Mr. Marble is an amateur photographer and into the whiskey he pours some of the cyanide of potassium which he uses for developing. From that moment doom slowly continues to embrace plump, puffy Mr. Marble.

He speculates with the dead nephew's money, makes a tidy fortune. He can get his scrawny, pitiful wife new clothes. He can school his daughter in Paris. He can buy garish new furniture for his wretched flat. But he can never leave the place. He is shackled to the dread secret that lies buried in the back yard. His money begins to work him ill, embroils in him an unhappy affair with a blackmailing his daughter with a man, sickens his wife. His wife has long guessed and forgiven his crime, but when she finds he has been unfaithful she poisons herself-- with cyanide. The attending physician suspects Mr. Marble, points to his eccentric life, his possession of poison, his books on poison cases. With one great shriek of ironical laughter Mr. Marble discovers that he must go to the gallows for a crime he has not committed.

Grim and sordid though it may be, Payment Deferred is the most interesting, most plausible and perfectly fashioned play yet to appear this season. Producer Gilbert Miller has already lined his pockets with the money Payment Deferred made in London in the early summer. For the play's success he has chiefly to thank Actor Charles Laughton, Mr. Marble.

Actor Laughton is a roly pudding of a man. He also has a very rare genius for acting. Actor Laughton not only speaks his lines, he thinks them. They can be seen in his puffy eyes before they come from his lips.

Born 32 years ago, son of a provincial hotelkeeper at Scarborough, England, Actor Laughton started miming soon after leaving Stonyhurst College. The last five years have seen his rise to prominence on the British stage in Alibi, Beauty and. incongruously, as the Italo-Chicagoan gang leader in Edgar Wallace's On The Spot. He created the role of Mr. Marble.

His pert little red-headed wife, Elsa Lanchester, plays the part of his daughter in Payment Deferred. He likes to garden, goes about in London with such celebrities as the Sitwells and Victoria Sackville-West. He would like to play Hamlet, but being paunchy dreads the line: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!" The House of Connelly. Whenever the Theatre Guild had a play that was too pyrotechnical for the austerity of its mother house, it used to send it over to the Martin Beck Theatre where the Guild's young aspirants disported themselves. For a long time these young people have struggled along, their relation to the Guild never very clearly defined. This summer, however, the Guild acted, formed Group Theatre Inc., the name under which the Martin Beck Theatre will operate henceforth. Members of Group Theatre Inc. have worked all summer without pay to get their repertoire ready. The House of Connelly, by Paul Green who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for his In Abraham's Bosom, is their first piece. It is admirably acted and directed, received a richly deserved 15-min. ovation after the final curtain on the first night.

For a century the broad Connelly acres, located in "a Southern State," have supported a dynasty of stiff-backed, tyrannous "cracker" aristocrats. At last the Connelly blood thins. The scion is frustrated Will (Franchot Tone). In a not always clear study in descending discords, the Connelly clan dissolves, precipitated by Will's determination to marry Patsy Tate (Margaret Barker), a soil-loving tenant's daughter. Will's cavalier uncle commits suicide, his matriarchal mother dies and his decayed sister moves away.

There is not a genuine Southern accent in the cast. Miss Barker is woefully miscast, wearing her peasant's clothes as though they were pour le sport from Peck & Peck. But the essence of the play and its exuberantly sincere production go far to negate its shortcomings.

Admirers of Franchot Tone, who have watched his noteworthy parade of repressed characterizations through Hotel

Universe, Pagan Lady and Green Grow the Lilacs, were annoyed at Manhattan critics who praised him highly but had apparently never seen him work before.

The Good Companions, adapted by Author John Boynton Priestley and Playwright Edward Knoblock from a best-selling novel of two years ago, demonstrates once more that the novel's place is in the study. A rambling tale in the manner called "Dickensy," it tells how Elizabeth Trant, a spinster who has inherited a small legacy, sets out to find adventure, meets a "concert party" troupe of itinerant showpeople. To join the group comes, by chance, Inigo Jollifant, a young schoolmaster with a talent for music, and Jess Oakroyd, an honest Yorkshireman who has grown tired of his shrewish wife and noisy son. Miss Trant finances the troupe, changes its name from "The Dinky Doos" to "The Good Companions." After many an adventure, the party is disbanded.

The Good Companions was turned into a play simply by selecting the best scenes --16 of them--and putting them on the stage with over 100 actors. To people who had not read the book, it seemed episodic, sketchy. But sometimes the play catches a cosy, pleasantly pipe-&-ale sort of English atmosphere. There are two fairish songs. "Going Home" and "Tripping Round the Corner," and a series of musical interludes between the fast-moving scenes. It is probably because the piece is advertised as "Dickensy" that most of the players overact atrociously. George Carney, new to Manhattan, is earthy, rugged, ap- pealing as Jess Oakroyd. Valerie Taylor (Peter Ibbetson, Petticoat Influence) does a good job as gallant, eager Miss Trant. Hugh Sinclair plays Inigo Jollifant languidly in soprano. Sample humor: "Oh, you have a nasty mind; you must be on the Vice Committee." "What? A teetotaler? He's a newspaper man!" "Get up at six-thirty? Why, there's no such hour!" Oldtime note: false posterior worn by an actress who doubles in two roles.

Nikki was first written by resourceful John Monk Saunders (Wings) for Liberty, later made into a cinema (TIME, Aug. 31). Now the well-picked carcass has been scraped once more to produce something which might be called a musical tragedy. It is a bewildering, sometimes embarrassing, occasionally entertaining piece relating the experiences of a pretty girl (Fay Wray, the author's wife, in her first legitimate appearance) and four neurotic aviators she has picked up in Paris after the War. To convey the impression that they are just too world-weary, Author Saunders has arranged that they reply to all efforts at normal human communication with a stock set of irrelevancies: "I'll take vanilla," "It seemed a good idea at the time," and "We're off in a blizzard of horseradish."

In Act II, the Grim Reaper steps up to claim not one but three members of the cast. One is gored by a bull, another is murdered, the third is shot accidentally. The play is temporarily interrupted to permit some more-than-half naked chorus girls to cavort in cafe and carnival scenes and to introduce one song, "Taking Off," which has a very pleasant swing.

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