New Play in Manhattan

THE THEATRE

End of Summer (by Samuel Nathaniel Behrman; Theatre Guild, producer). Like George Bernard Shaw, another regular contributor of wit & wisdom to the Theatre Guild, Playwright Behrman is no longer called upon to concoct a full-fledged drama every time he has assembled enough conversation for a three-act play. Therefore an informed playgoer seldom expects to find great vital issues being wrestled around a Behrman drawing room. What he does expect is a series of sage, civilized and exhaustive discussions on Problems of the Day. This he gets in full measure in End of Summer.

Unmentioned in the playbill is the play's most important factor: the Wylers' 19th Century oil fortune. It is the property of old Mrs. Wyler, her flighty daughter Leonie (Ina Claire) and her granddaughter Paula. Since old Mrs. Wyler belongs to the timocratic generation, and was once a friend of the elder Rockefellers, the money causes her no psychological distress. But it comes close to preventing Paula from winning a conscientious young radical from Amherst. And it nearly gets Leonie involved in a degrading alliance with an unscrupulous psychiatrist who professes to be of the same breed as the "marauders" who amassed the Wyler fortune and hence the proper custodian for it. The only character in End of Summer untouched by the money is a toplofty old scientist who characterizes the rest of the cast as "the great mass of the uninformed and the inexact." It makes no difference to him, he declares, "whether they prattle on full bellies or prattle on empty bellies."

As the sinister but fascinating mental healer, Osgood Perkins has never had better lines to wrap his tongue about. He begins with the observation that "Maine is a masculine Riviera." He progresses to Bismarck's solution of the Irish question, to wit: send the Irish to Holland, the Dutch to Ireland. The Dutch would soon make Ireland a garden. The Irish would soon forget to mend the dikes. Finally he reaches the heart of his cynically expedient philosophy by recalling that he started out as an eye-ear-nose-&-throat man, but soon shifted to psychiatry because "the poor have tonsils, but only the rich have souls."

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