New Plays in Manhattan

False Dreams Farewell (by Hugh Stange; Frank Merlin, producer) deals, in the manner of Grand Hotel, with a group of passengers on board the S. S. Atlantia. They include: a dipsomaniac novelist (Millard Mitchell) on his way to Sweden for a prize; an unhappy young doctor (Glenn Anders) with a cancer cure, a neurotic wife (Lora Baxter) and a movie star mistress (Claudia Morgan); a Catholic Bishop headed for Rome with an atheist crony; a Broadway columnist with a Park Avenue vocabulary and an infatuated wife (Frieda Inescort). Also aboard .the Atlantia is its rapacious owner who compels his captain to break the transatlantic record although they both know the vessel has dilapidated plates. This leads to an exciting last act in which the troubles of the Atlantia's passenger list are resolved by maritime disaster. Written with one eye on Hollywood and the other on old newspaper clippings--incidents in the play suggest Sinclair Lewis, the Vestris sinking, Walter Winchell, and other topical importances--False Dreams, Farewell is a lively and engrossing one-roof melodrama, well acted, fast and full of obvious but persuasive tricks. Its most entertaining personage is Novelist Christopher Jarret whose wife is hideous and mercenary. When she accuses him of overenthusiasm in their conjugal relation, Jarret is amazed. "Look in the mirror," he says, "and tell me it is anything but a disagreeable habit.'' The Piccoli (produced by Vittorio Podrecca). In a window on a miniature stage a four-foot wooden man dressed in the black velvet costume of Don Juan sings a glib, impatient seduction at a peasant girl. He shakes with emotion and lack of breath, turns from girl to audience on the high notes, putting out his hands, palms up, for applause. He is more convincing and formidable than any living operatic Don Juan. Every motion he makes is a shrewd and funny parody of the way human beings move. His chief difference from a man is that he moves, not upward from his feet but downward from his shoulders, barely touching the floor.

Invisible to the audience is a "bridge" above the little stage on which a row of leather-aproned Italians bend over a rail. One operator holds in his fingers the dozen fish-line strings attached to Don Juan's flexible joints. Another dangles the little peasant girl. When Don Juan crosses the stage, the steady-handed operators exchange their rack of strings with incredible dexterity. Husband & wife, father & son, these operators have been bred in the art of Italian marionet work.

Technical high spot of this show is Bil Bal Bul, the Little Acrobat, worked by four operators on 20 strings. He hunches himself to gather momentum as he swings in air, never fumbles when he clutches at the crossbar. Comic high spot is a mad pianist in "The Concert Party." A lacquer-haired caricature of Negro Singer Josephine Baker, star of a "Little Tropical Revue," wiggles and shakes menacingly. In "The Bullfight," a wilder burlesque than the others, a hollow-eyed toreador fliply kills the bull with super-human mag nificence. Plump, beaming Impresario Vittorio Podrecca adapted his Piccoli ("The little ones") from traditional Italian marionets, hates to have them called marionets or puppets. Charles Dillingham first brought him and his little ones to Manhattan in 1923 when they failed dismally. Last year Podrecca came again, succeeded hugely, toured the country, ending this week in Manhattan. Sometime lawyer, author, art critic, children's magazine publisher and War hero, Podrecca began his Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome in 1913. In 1923 he married Cissie Vaughan, an Irishwoman, who sings the parts of Josephine Baker and Don Juan's peasant girl. Says her husband: "As an Irishwoman she is the most Italian of the English-speaking peoples. As an Italian, I am the most Irish of the Latins. . . . The one element in the theatre which serves to kill illusion is the presence of human beings." Come of Age (by Clemence Dane; music by Richard Addinsell; Delos Chappell, producer). Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was the most remarkable child prodigy in the history of literature. Hungry and humiliated, he took arsenic in his bleak London garret, died before he was 18. Many a later poet lamented that Chatterton lived no longer for letters. Come of Age would have it a sadder thing still that he lived no longer for himself. Clemence Dane has clothed this fragile, moving phantasy in verse sometimes remindful of the brassy couplets of Joseph Moncure March's The Wild Party, sometimes of Noel Coward's flip lyrics, never of the stately pentameters of her own Will Shakespeare. The Boy (Stephen Haggard) is lying dead on his pallet when Death comes to take him. The Boy screams defiance, pleads for a chance to come of age among the living. Before Death agrees, centuries pass. The Boy is returned to the London of 1934 and the charms of a worldly woman (Judith Anderson). He is torn between joy in his love and despair at her breezy cynicism. At a cocktail party, the Woman, weaving drunkenly among her guests, discovers that the Boy has signed a contract to write for Hollywood. That everyone knows this except herself sends her into a fit of rage. When the Boy comes demurely in she is auctioning him off to her covetous lady friends: Here's property for sale, A little worn and frail, But definitely male. Full of shame, the Boy rushes away. Poignantly aware at last of her own love and overcome with remorse, the Woman seeks him out, begs forgiveness. He is stony with hate: That is rather a waste of your time, And I've an appointment at nine. . . . One can't have a brawl In the hall-- When she mentions suicide, the Boy senses dimly who he is, perceives that by joy and despair he has lived, accepts the second coming of Death contentedly.

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