New Plays in Manhattan

Night of January 16 (by Ayn Rand; A. H. Woods & Lee Shubert, producers) repeats the theatrical trick which, in The Trial of Mary Dugan, made Producer Woods a tidy fortune in 1927-28. A crime has been committed before the audience arrives, is thereafter unraveled in a long-drawn courtroom scene. The crime which took place on the night of Jan. 16 concerns a fictional Swede named Bjorn Faulkner, who bears a close resemblance to a real Swede named Ivar Kreuger. Faulkner had built a financial empire largely through finagling on a grand scale. He and a secretary-mistress named Karen Andre (Doris Nolan) arrive in Manhattan where he sets her up in a penthouse. After the Crash he finds that he has only one asset left, his personable self, which he is willing to trade in marriage to the daughter of a big U. S. moneyman if her father will lend him $25,000,000. Not long after this alliance, a man's body with a bullet through it comes hurtling down from the Faulkner penthouse and Karen Andre is put on trial for Faulkner's murder. Was it murder? Was it suicide? Was the body Faulkner's?

These questions and a number of others are answered by a novelty which goes The Trial of Mary Dugan one better. As each male spectator buys his ticket for Night of January 16, he is offered the chance of serving on the play's jury, receiving a fee of $3.* The jurors selected are marched up on the stage soon after the curtain rises, there sit in a box throughout the performance, return their verdict after retiring to the wings for a vote.

On opening night the jury seemed to have been packed by an astute pressagent. A verdict of "Not Guilty" was returned by twelve good men & true including Jack Dempsey, Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick of Madison Square Garden and Edward J. Reilly, the Brooklyn lawyer who failed to get Richard Bruno Hauptmann acquitted. In the play's first week, less celebrated jurors convicted beauteous Actress Nolan only once. Author Rand is prepared for either decision. If the defendant is acquitted, the judge berates the jury for a bad decision. If she is convicted, defense asks for a new trial, the judge grants it.

At Home Abroad (words & music by Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz; Shuberts, producers). Informally threaded around a couple who become so bored with the ubiquitousness of such U. S. personages as John D. Rockefeller and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt that they flee on a world tour, this "musical holiday" has no less than 25 numbers. Beatrice Lillie appears in about one out of every three. If the measure of a comic is the extent to which she is superior to her material, Comedienne Lillie rates second to none. Whether she is impersonating a British gentlewoman, an Alpinist, a geisha, a barmaid or a star-crossed lover in a railway station, she never fails to convey by a twinkle in her eye, a snicker, a gesture, that she is enjoying quite as much as the audience the fool she is making of herself.

Called upon to carry more than her just share of At Home Abroad, Comedienne Lillie demonstrates the full extent of her resource and range by thrice repeating, with unimportant changes of scene and material, her most famed characterization: the ludicrous femme fatale. First a Parisian music hall favorite ("l'amour, the merrier"), then a temperamental ballerina with painful recollections of her flight from Russia ("You can't teach an old dog new treks"), she tops the lot as a light lady of Vienna with this lyrical self-analysis:

I'm the toast of Vienna

And most of Vienna

Can boast

It's been host

To the toast of Vienna.

Except for Beatrice Lillie, there is not a great deal for anyone else in the company to do. A spectator who gets in after the third scene hears droll Herb Williams (The Farmer Takes a Wife) open his mouth exactly three times. For Eddie Foy Jr., who can at least imitate a seal better than anyone else in the U. S. theatre, there is no profitable employment whatever. Most of the skit work is taken over by a British newcomer named Reginald Gardiner who imitates trains, dirigibles, steamships. Other features of an evening of fair fun: the dancing feet of Eleanor Powell, back from Hollywood where they clipped off her bangs, frizzed her hair, enameled her face and made her look like all the other Hollywood girls; the singing laugh of Ethel Waters in a series of tunes strongly reminiscent of her As Thousands Cheer melodies; the slightly unsteady gyrations of Dancer Paul Haakon. Among the good tunes, some of which thrifty Messrs. Schwartz & Dietz have salvaged from their Ivory Soap radio program: Love Is a Dancing Thing, Got a Bran' New Suit, O Leo.

Life's Too Short (by John Whedon & Arthur Caplan; Jed Harris, producer) tells the tale of a man named Fowler (John B. Litel) and his wife Helen (Doris Dalton) in "the great days of the New Deal." Fowler loses his job and Helen goes back to her old boss (Leslie Adams) who also happens to be her old lover. By successfully fooling himself as to his, his wife's and his boss's motives, Fowler does not find it hard to take up his old job again when it is offered. Anyhow, life is too short to worry about those things. In his own little tragic triumph, Fowler, the White Collar Man, is satisfied.

Informal and at times irrelevant, the play's dialog is of that bitter, witty sort that bubbles up behind the footlights, falls flat on paper. Sample:

"Let's drink to the New Deal."

"Nuts to the New Deal. Let's drink to Calvin Coolidge."

Thoughtful drama observers, who believe that to be healthy the Theatre should be sensitive to the times, predicted that Life's Too Short was the beginning of a long series of plays alert to problems of social justice but more fitted for popular consumption than last season's rash of "agitprop" (TIME, June 17).

Few Are Chosen (written & produced by Nora Lawlor) mainly concerns five novice nuns. During the course of three acts, one succumbs to ill health, one goes out of her mind, one gets killed in a storm and two decide that the cloistered life is not for them. Except in the U. S. S. R., a play about a religious institution which does not stultify its material with sanctimoniousness stands a good chance of being suppressed. Few Are Chosen will never be suppressed.

*Women are ineligible for jury duty in New York State.

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