New Plays in Manhattan

Doctor Monica (adapted by Laura Walker from the Polish of Marja M. Szczepkowska; Robert Martin, producer). The oval, heavy-eyed face of Alia Nazimova is now lined and pouched with old hysterias. Her mouth pulls naturally down at the corners. Her pictures make her look either like the bedraggled murderess at the scene of the crime or like Mary, Queen of Scots. Yet the baroque stumblings, wrist-wavings, jaw-droppings, head-wagglings with which Miss Nazimova documents Doctor Monica seriously involved Manhattan audiences in a play that should have been a dull and outdated feminist tract.

The play has one set and three characters, all women. Besides Miss Nazimova, they include Dr. Monica's lady architect roommate (Gale Sondergaard) and a pregnant servant girl (Beatrice de Neergaard) whom Miss Nazimova takes in. Nazimova has been giving her husband a dose of solitude to "strengthen" him, meanwhile undergoing an operation to enable her to have a child by him. Demoralized by the operation, she is further demoralized to learn that the father of the servant girl's unborn child is her philandering husband. Good study of lower middle-class psychology is the scene in which the architect tries to get the servant out of the room before Nazimova wakes up, while the girl insists on staying to explain that she had not known her lover was Nazimova's husband. The knowledge nearly kills the sick woman but the girl goes away satisfied with herself. All this is finally geared to prove that all men are cads when cast as girls' dream heroes.

Is LIfe Worth Living (by Lennox Robinson; Harry Moses, producer) is a gibe, not at Life, but at those who ask the question. It stimulated Manhattan onlookers with a comparatively fresh idea and the story of the strange effect on an ordinary town of a repertory of grisly plays by Gorki, Chekhov and Strindberg. Thus Author Robinson has for his butts both the childish townspeople, who believe what they see on the stage, and the second-rate actors who lay open the dark places of the soul. In addition to these standard comic themes, he has tried to cash in on the superstition that anything said in Irish dialect is funny or fey, by making his scene the Irish town of Inish. But most of the cast have remarkably unfunny Irish accents, though their names are Irish. And Celt Robinson's lines have little Irish salt in them.

Just arrived in the hotel sitting room for a repertory season, the actors rehearse a tear-jerking scene setting forth the fact that the illegitimate child of one by the other is dead. A servant girl, unnerved by such talk, blats out the information that she has in fact had an illegitimate child that died. The rehearsal is forgotten but the lively news cannonades through the town. After several weeks of watching the stock company's delightfully gloomy goings-on at the local theatre, the townspeople with one mind begin to fancy themselves as great tragic figures with a story. They begin to fumble artlessly with suicide, murder and passion in the tradition of the great dramatists. The actors' innocent prattle of art and souls off-stage and on becomes a ghoulish poison running through the unconscious town. The butcher inexpertly throws an axe at his wife. Jim Clancy jumps off the pier at low tide. It rains and rains. Finally the local member of the Dail Eireann, an odd character who looks part penguin, part shellfish (Ralph Cullinan), is moved by his recollection of a performance of Playwright Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People to vote against the Government and force a new election. That is enough for the town's hotelkeeper and political boss, played by the best Irishman in the cast, Whitford Kane. He throws the actors out of their theatre and ends morbidity's record-breaking run in Inish. The sun promptly breaks out.

Thoroughbred (by Doty Hobart; Theodore Hammerstein and Denis Du For, producers) presents Florence Reed, far from her Mother Goddam of the Shanghai Gesture, as the hard-riding, bawling matriarch of an aristocratic family which owns a racehorse. It develops that her children were fathered by the butler and that the horse has a bar sinister too. But through a rain of horsey talk it seems that purity of race is not everything. The son fends off a designing chorus girl. The daughter finds here true love. The horse winds the Futurity at Belmont Park (offstage), saves the family fortunes. And Florence Reed, permitted mellow, quizzical and domineering has a high time. A neighborly matron remarks in suprise at her daughter's knowledge of the turf: "We haven't had a horse in the place since her father died."

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