Soloist

If conventional stagecraft is chiefly the art of illusion, the technique by which an accomplished monologist makes real a panel of wholly imaginative characters is sheer sorcery. At performing the hardest of the theatre's tricks, Monologist Cornelia Otis Skinner is a topnotch sorceress.

A fine figure of a woman, she has inherited profound theatrical abilities from her father, venerable and gifted Otis Skinner, and her mother, onetime Shakespearean Actress Maud Durbin. Last week Miss Skinner presented in Manhattan her first full-length (1 hr.; six scenes) production with a U. S. scene.

In Mansion on the Hudson, Miss Skinner is first a bustled lady of 1880, the mistress of "Tall Trees," rejecting an old flame's advances even though her worthless husband is busy dissipating his property over the gaming tables at Saratoga. By 1898 "Tall Trees" has fallen into the hands of the Howlands, represented by a scatter-brained Gibson Girl whose husband has gone off to die in the Spanish War. The year 1920 sees crabbed old Carrie Howland, spinster sister-in-law of the Gibson Girl, trying to hold on to the place while her reckless brother dabbles in painting and ill-advised speculation. Then Mrs. Joseph Kelly gets "Tall Trees" out of profits from chewing gum, settles there with a corrupt political boss. The Crash gives the estate to the Howlands' onetime gardener, who has bettered himself financially by bootlegging. The last women seen at "Tall Trees," now a roadhouse, are the gardener's earthy wife and a tipsy society woman who shows up on the opening night.

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