New Plays in Manhattan

Fast Service. J. C. Nugent and his good boy Elliott used to write amiable, innocuous little comedies like Kempy and The Poor Nut. Then they went out to Hollywood where Will H. Hays is supposed to keep everything clean and where, as Lee Tracy stoutly declared in Louder, Please, "Criterion stars sleep alone!'' Back from the west coast after two years, the Nugents have suddenly kicked over the traces, fashioned for themselves a play in which, for the first time, their leading lady does not sleep alone. Psychologists might say that the Nugents were enjoying a release mechanism.

As the curtain rises on Fast Service a young man is discovered kissing a girl on the terrace of a Washington country club. He is Bing Allen (Nugent fits), Davis Cup tennis; she is Neila Anderson (Muriel Kirkland of Strictly Dishonorable, I Love an Actress). Disengaging, she says to him: "What is your name?" With the ineptitude of a musical comedy without music, the scene shifts quickly to a Manhattan dress shoppe, to a Westchester Country club, to "the Conquistador Hotel in Baja California," which means Lower California. In Paris. Bing becomes a tennistar, in Westchester he and Miss Kirkland are bedded, in Mexico they are again thrown together. For some reason not clearly indicated, each has married someone else, probably from theatrical pique

But be assured, the right teams pair off in time for the finals.

The Devil's Host is a mystery play which will give no one high blood pressure. It has to do with nine guests, strangers to each other, who are introduced and imprisoned in the home of M. Duvall. At the proper moment. M. Duvall parts the portieres and emerges with the announcement that he is His Satanic Majesty, come to purge all present of his or her sins. He knows all about everybody's past, so much, in fact, that at the end of Act II one of the characters shoots him. But gunfire cannot kill the Old Harry Himself. He pops up again in the last act as good as new, sends his guests home sadder, wiser, having made $100,000 out of his party. There are many, many better plays to spend your money on.

Steel-- The high mortality among propaganda plays would seem to occur, not because the theatre is no whetstone on which to grind axes, but because when a playwright sets out to champion something he usually loses all his sense of humor and proportion, together with his head, in excoriating the Other Side. Having acquired well-deserved kudos for his first play, The Last Mile, John Wexley has now broken a lance against the boiler-plated sides of the steel industry. This he does by presenting the sad case of Joe Raldny (Paul Guilfoyle), a young resident of Ironton, U. S. A.

Joe is an excitable character. His juvenile tirades against Steel-chiefly directed toward an off-stage factory whistle which toots often and annoyingly-hurry the death of his hard-working father. Next he impregnates the sister of his brother-in-law. Meantime he has started a strike which ends with his getting cracked on the head by steel police. And when the police follow him into his own house, cornering him like a rat, his sister shoots one of them, is carried off to jail. All this takes place to an accompaniment of futile, maudlin ranting against things-as-they-are. A tract rather than a play, Steel does not interest, move or convince.

The Lady with a Lamp is a theatrical biography of famed Florence Nightingale, by Reginald Berkeley. In eight scenes the piece presents six significant episodes from the good lady's life, about which these are the main facts:

Born to a rich family, Florence found no pleasure in parties, housekeeping, beaux or reading-to-Fath.er, as did most of her early Victorian contemporaries. She wanted to Do Something. Aged 34. she scandalized her family by taking up nursing, a profession which at that time chiefly attracted tipplers and bawds. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she got Sydney Herbert, Secretary for War, to commission her to take a corps of nurses to the Scutari hospital in Turkey. There she conquered official red tape and unspeakable conditions, won the approbation of Victoria and the nation. Back home she threatened to publish her Crimean findings unless the War Office bettered military hospitals. She won. Aged 90, her mind gone, she died a sainted legend.

The Lady with a Lamp is reputedly based on the brief Nightingale biography in cadaverous Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Between the play and the Strachey piece, however, there are noticeable differences in characterization and fact. To Playwright Berkeley, Nurse Nightingale, reverently and somewhat palely acted by Edith Evans, is a sort of Maid of Orleans. He acknowledges "securing aid and authorization of Miss Nightingale's relatives." To Mr. Strachey, however, Florence Nightingale was more like the kind of person Carrie Nation might have turned out to be had she been interested in caring for the sick instead of breaking up bars with umbrella and hatchet. The Strachey, or "real" Nightingale was possessed of a fatigueless demon, was no mystic.

Two best scenes in The Lady with a Lamp-almost the only spots where the play ceases to be a parade of wax works-are at the Scutari hospital, where Actress Evans, oil lamp in hand, ministers to a rejected lover whom history so far has missed, and in London 50 years later. Here the faint recollection of her deeds by officials who have come to decorate her gives the play an ironical and momentary lift. What The Lady with a Lamp need's is more lifts. A Widow in Green-- Sue (Claiborne Foster) meets Tommy Shannon (Ernest Glendenning) in an English tea shop. To him the brief relationship that follows is delightful companionship. To Spinsterish Sue it is a prelude to marriage. When he suddenly rushes away to Africa. Sue tells everyone in town that she has married Tommy, rushes away to America. There she hears of his death on the Nile. Donning a bright green dress, she fixes up an urn of ashes, calls in the neighbors, starts to have a bang-up funeral. At this point Tommy walks in, alive & kicking. Widow at last becomes wife.

Miss Foster and Mr. Glendenning perform this very light comedy with a very light, expert touch. A Widow in Green, however, is not what Critic John Mason Brown would call an adventure in theatre-going.

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