New Plays in Manhattan

Come Easy (by Felicia Metcalfe, produced by Elizabeth Miele). The carefree spontaneity of this home-folks comedy, pat for stock company production, had to overcome Manhattan audiences' familiarity with too many identical predecessors. Situation: a slovenly Baltimore family with one respectable relative are happily starving and avoiding the eye of Work. Plot: a daughter gets an Italian count and the uncle gets $25,000 in the stockmarket. Then they lose the $25,000 in the stockmarket and the count is suspected of being a fake, writing a bad check, stealing the engagement pin he has given his fiancee and running away in a stolen car. In a weak third act he returns to disprove all charges and the family revives its punch-drunk fortunes in the stockmarket. Characters: the raucous, cynical daughter (Claire Carleton), the daughter in love (Nancy Sheridan), the lazy, acquisitive son (David Morris), the shrewd, big-hearted mother incapable of discipline (Helen Lowell), the speculating uncle, the unsuccessful suitor who makes pig faces to register loutishness, the stereotyped count and the rich, disapproving aunt. Weighed down with stock characters, a stale plot and mechanical lines, Come Easy made its mild zoo of feckless people easily believable. Director Miele kept bouncing her characters into spontaneity, accented their brash selfishness, their reluctant and shamefaced fondness for one another. Best performances: David Morris as the sulky and likeable son; Helen Lowell making of the harried mother a singularly gracious and human characterization.

The Blue Widow (by Marianne Brown Waters, produced by Lee and J. J. Shubert) is a repetitive comedy about a strumpet who can narrow and widen her eyes. Situation: into a country-houseful of friendly weekenders is insinuated a deceased playwright's baby-faced mistress, representing herself as a grief-shattered widow (Queenie Smith). Plot: she drills unremittingly into the head of every man visible that he is a big strong man, she a little weak woman. Thus she gets proposals of various kinds from a bachelor, a married man too much in love with his busy literary wife, and a theatrical producer. For two acts she fills their pipes, leans against their knees, tells them her sole object in life is to take care of a big baby who wants to be taken care of, nib- bles at food in public, wolfs it in private, conspicuously weeps, sniffles, gasps, coos, flits and flutters. Having kept three men simultaneously in the air. she nearly breaks up the married man's home before she settles on the producer. In this empty and ungrateful part, her first in straight drama, the gay and knowing smile of Queenie Smith softened the hearts of Manhattan audiences. Famed for her Metropolitan Opera Company dancing, her musicomedy singing. Miss Smith has a sly, twittering charm far too real and well-mannered for the role she had to play.

Crucible (by D. Hubert Connelly, produced by Huban Plays, Inc.), a drama about some denizens of Manhattan's Tombs Detention Prison, opened the night after three young prisoners had escaped from the Tombs, up a secret dumb-waiter shaft, down a rope of prison bedsheets bound with bedspring wire, in the Tombs' first important jailbreak since 1926. Hoist by this factitious timeliness, Crucible turned out to be a hoarse and inexpert melodrama. Plot: a philanthropist and onetime gambler takes an interest in the girl's painting, offers the boy a job. Audi- ences soon become aware of the philanthropist's real objectives: 1) to get his three gunmen out of the Tombs, 2) to woo the girl, 3) to frame the boy for the gunmen's jailbreak, 4) to disguise the fact that he is the sinister "Blight," the power behind the illicit drug traffic. To advance objective No. 1 he forces the young people's friend, a middle-aged keeper in the Tombs, to agree to smuggle guns to the three gunmen for a jailbreak. To advance objective No. 3, the keeper is to throw suspicion on the boy as having brought in the guns when he comes to the Tombs with a Christmas necktie for his jailbird brother. The second act, laid in the Tombs, shows a jailbreak roughly based on the Tombs' 1926 break, the prisoners trying unsuccessfully to shoot their way out. Two characters, the boy's brother and a Mother Darragh, suspect that it was the keeper who framed the boy. The third act requires four lingering, sobbing scenes to expose the philanthropist as the villain and the Blight, make the remorse-ridden keeper agree, "All right, I'll jump" (from the roof), give the brother a gun with which to kill the Blight. Title line: "Life is a crucible and God's in his heaven."

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