New Plays in Manhattan

They Don't Mean Any Harm. Of recent years there has developed a school of British dramatists and fictioneers who undertake to demonstrate how spontaneously charming certain of their characters can be by making those characters engage in endless, silly, self-conscious horseplay. Jack plays Jill is Queen Mary, or Jill plays Jack is trying to sell her a set of dirty picture cards outside the Invalides. Simultaneously there has developed a large U. S. audience whose reaction to this sort of thing is angry boredom. If you happen to be a member of this audience, you had better strike They Don't Mean Any Harm off your theatre list.

Playwright Alan Alexander Milne's latest work, based on a commendable satirical structure, describes a pair of bright young things who, apparently having nothing better to do, attempt to befriend some dear old things downstairs. In the course of their philanthropy they have the daughter of the family packed off to Canada. She departs brokenhearted. They also arrange an operation for the invalid mother. She dies. The father (venerable 0. P. Heggie), mortally stricken by the heartless kindness of his neighbors, is left to face his future empty-handed and alone.

The Inside Story. Two innocent men were snatched from the electric chair on the Manhattan stage last week (see below). Both were the victims of murderous frame-ups. In each case there was a young woman who never lost faith in their ultimate rescue. But they appeared in vastly different shows.

The Inside Story, equipped with 14 scenes and a revolving stage, adds little to the archives of gang fiction. It presents an unscrupulous public enemy named Louis Corotto (Louis Calhern), the man in whose villainous talons lie the police of his city, the District Attorney, the State's political leader and the well-meaning Governor himself. Through his influence over these public agents and agencies Louis Corotto gets a boy out of jail, arranges a diabolical plot to make it appear that the boy has killed a minor vice merchant, and pushes the whole scheme within ten minutes of an electrocution. Mr. Corotto took all this trouble because he found out that his sulky mistress (Marguerite Churchill) was the boy's best girl. It is the mistress who finally punctures the plot and Mr. Corotto, too, with a nickel-plated revolver.

Riddle Me This! The guignolesque first scene of Riddle Me This! is calculated to set an audience on the edge of its seat. A middleaged, distinguished looking man has just murdered his wife. Silently he goes about the room making mysterious preparations for his departure. He has so arranged it that the corpse will be discovered in his absence. And as the police begin to investigate, toward the end of Act I, it is apparent that the murderer has trumped up damaging evidence against an innocent man. Toward the end of Act I, also, appear two of the most amusing comedians on the U. S. stage. Thomas

Mitchell and Frank Craven. Actors Mitchell and Craven have hair which habitually looks as if they had just gotten out of bed, and each possesses an authentic whiskey baritone. Actor Mitchell is Chief of Detectives McKinley. Actor Craven is his crony, a local police court reporter. There follow 90 min. of peerless melodrama and comedy.

Apparently Mr. Craven has only to open his mouth to make an audience laugh. Loudest whoops of first-week spectators arose from a gag that enjoyed wide circulation in 1924. Mr. Craven, complaining about his friend's liquor, remarks: "Prewar, eh?

What war, Chinese?" And once, when he temporarily falls out with his crony, more cackles go up for another chestnut: "They shot the wrong McKinley." It is Mr. Craven's interest in a pretty face that saves the innocent victim from electrocution. He becomes enamored of the unfortunate young man's sister (Erin O'Brien-Moore), although he does not share her unflagging belief in her brother's innocence. Neither do McKinley nor the Governor until Mr. Craven stumbles on the one flaw in the murderer's plot. If you are smart you might find the clue in this refreshingly upside-down mystery during the crap game in Act II.

The Moon in the Yellow River. The fifth production of the Theatre Guild's fourteenth season is concerned with revolution in post-Revolutionary Ireland and with Life. A power plant is wrecked, an idealist is shot and therefore a man somehow becomes reconciled to his daughter. The connection between these dramatic entities lies solely in the fact that they occur on the same stage, and weary first-nighters could heartily concur in the German engineer's observation that "this isn't a country, it's a debating society." The uniform worn by a commandant of Free State constabulary is very impressive.

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